You Just Don’t See It
We just watched a snippet from a Discovery series on the human body, about sight and the ways in which the mind filters out noise and extraneous detail to present you an extremely narrow packet of information about the world in front of your face. It included a scene in which the host demonstrates a patently stupid card trick: he spreads out the deck and his assistant picks one. He spreads the deck again, face-up this time, and inserts the card back in. Then he turns the deck to show that the backs have all changed color except for the card she picked. The selective camera movement was more than enough to mask the deck change, hence the stupidity of the trick. But then they pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat: it turns out that while you were watching the cards move… the tablecloth, the backdrop, and the shirts the host and assistant were wearing all changed color as well. When polled, exactly two people in the class noticed any change at all, and only the backdrop because it went from blue to red. I noticed nothing, and was genuinely flabbergasted.
The point made was that we just don’t see much of anything of what passes in front of our eyes, no matter how obvious it appears to those who do notice it. I commented to my professor that I missed 90% of the art in Gears of War — the uber-detailed normal maps and spiffy UT3 next-gen graphics that they spent so much time on. I was wowed for about two minutes, and then my mind just chunked the whole thing, washed it out, and fed me a Duplo version for the rest of the game. Oh, it perked up a bit when a cool particle effect or a new character showed up, but mostly I was content to assume that, once I’ve seen one rotting paneling texture or cement bunker wall, I’ve seen them all. So really, Epic… was it worth all that effort? By contrast, I have yet to become bored with the art in Okami. Because a word made out of brush paintings does not remotely approach visual patterns I am already familiar with, my brain is consistently interested. I “see” that game much more clearly. Which do you think is the better strategy?
Additionally, from the perspective of a designer, it’s humbling to realize that the brain works in this super-efficient filtering way, and that this applies to mechanics and dynamics as well. Think you’ve got an incredibly deep, beautifully complex system that is just gonna blow people away? Think again. For all you know, players are just washing that out the same way I washed out the art in Gears. Once again, I assert: simplicity is best. I remember little of how I played Baldur’s Gate, and nothing at all about how the underlying systems were put together, but I have a highly developed, deep understanding of the minute dynamics of Risk. Maybe that’s comparing apples and oranges, but I challenge you: take another look at the games you love, and see if you can find that 90% you’re missing. If you can, take caution: it means your brain missed it the first time around because it didn’t find it to be important.
Interesting thoughts. It’s true that we often miss a lot of what’s going on because we either choose to focus or are led to focus (classic tactic of magicians) on something. Another example around sports is that the typical fan focuses on the action around the ball whether it’s baseball, football, soccer, tennis, etc. But there’s a lot of interesting action where the ball isn’t but most people miss that. Of course, it doesn’t help that if you watch sports on TV the camera focuses the shot around the ball.
It’s understandable that the typical player will focus on the same things when a game is played. I suspect that as a designer, you can appreciate the other dynamics that the typical player wll miss.
The only problem is that it doesn’t for marketing. The big guys want pretty pictures to use for advertising and marketing. So if your game looks beautiful down to the last pixel, people will walk away with a screenshot in their head that this will probably be a good game. I mean, yes, all seasoned gamers and game developers go past all of that, but we’re not the only ones buying games.
Very true, and somewhat ironic. I would argue that those people have a heightened attention to visual detail due to the nature of their profession, and that what they see in the game does not always carry over to the player. Players demand the best graphics because they can indeed deepen the experience considerably, however: I believe there is a point of diminishing returns after which added graphical spectacle is simply wasted. Furthermore, I believe that games that take innovative or unusual approaches to their visual style are better equipped to catch our attention than those that strive for photorealism.