Images like words.

This may seem like an odd thought and may lead nowhere. My lack of concern with pictorial realism is not simply aesthetic, or just practical. I really don’t feel that our games should look real. I have no interest in tricking the player into thinking that they are looking at a film. The synthetic quality of the image is very important to me.

The way in which our games should feel real is more like the way in which descriptions in novels generate a feeling of reality in our imagination, than the straight up showing of a photographic representation. The visual elements may have some resemblance to real things, but ultimately they are symbolic stand-ins, much like words. The purpose of a 3D object is not to pretend that it is a real object, but to stimulate the player to imagine such an object.

The continuous back and forth between -symbolic- presentation on the screen, in a book and my imagination is a source of great aesthetic pleasure to me. It is not the amazement caused by the fidelity of the depiction that brings me the most joy, but the realization that it doesn’t look real at all, when viewed a bit more intently.

It is in the discrepancies between the real and the picture that much of the expression happens. And I don’t intend to refer by this to the crude aesthetics of modernism in which far too little remains of the reality that I know. It is a much more subtle game. It’s a game of role-playing and deception. But it’s a lovers’ game, so it’s important that the deception is unveiled promptly after it happens.

A novel leaves a lot of room for the imagination. And there is great pleasure in such creative mental activity. I think videogames are similar. Whatever you see on the screen is only a trigger for your imagination, often connected to a memory. And when we’ve entered the personal domain of memories, we are not far from the feeling of connectedness that art often provokes. The warm glow that we feel when we realize that we have something deeply personal in common with the creator of the work, and by extension possibly with many people. That we are not alone, that there is still life in our species, and room for hope.