Originally Posted by Xantar (Post 269320)

I've seen anime which deal with all these subjects, and they aren't the most accurate looking representations of life.

I'm not trying to knock your point which I actually agree with. I'm just trying to get you to be more careful in your terms. And I don't mean to pick on you because I don't think anybody in this thread has been very good about defining what they mean. The subject of this thread is "graphical fidelity vs visual style." Graphical fidelity is not the same thing as realism although they overlap. Something can be realistic while not looking anything like the real world. The Lord of the Rings movies look realistic most of the time, but they also break several laws of physics.

To me, realism does not imply fidelity to the actual world. It simply means that whatever is depicted is something I can recognize and can imagine it relating to my personal experience. A character does not have to have fully rendered beard stubble to be realistic to me. He just has to be depicted with the kind of traits and details that place him within my experience so that I think of him as a "real" person instead of as a cartoon character. On the other hand, you could render him so well that he looks completely indistinguishable from an actual human being, but I could imagine doing it in such a way that he comes off as unrealistic (if we can say that some characters depicted by human actors seem unrealistic, we can certainly say that about CGI too). What we then have is graphical fidelity.

So with that said and leaving aside realism, however we define that word, how important is graphical fidelity versus visual style? I come down on the visual style side of the debate, but that's because I fundamentally don't care if videogames resemble real life anyhow. As far as I am concerned, Mass Effect could have been rendered to look like a flat shaded anime and I would have been fine with it (as long as there were no schoolgirls shooting stars out of wands at people). That's just my personal preference and I'm not saying anybody else should think the same way. Besides, it's not an either/or proposition. It's just that if I had to make the choice, I would prefer that developers spend their time on something other than making their game look as much like what I've seen with my own eyes in real life.

Originally Posted by Professor S (Post 269269)

A story of political intrigue, genocide, sex and hard moral choices with life and death consequences doesn't need realism?

To me the setting is irrelevant. The themes are what dictated the style.

Originally Posted by manasecret (Post 269334)

Even with your definition of "graphical fidelity", however, I still think the question as stated is moot. A game with graphical fidelity will always have a visual style, because the developers must always choose their color palette and what actual items and environments they render and so on. Take the example of Mass Effect 2, apparently considered to have high graphical fidelity with beard stubble and such, yet also has high visual style with glowing scars and so on. The two are just inseparable.

Originally Posted by Xantar (Post 269337)

Well here's a thought experiment: I'm sure that if Infinity Ward had the technical ability to do so, they would have made Modern Warfare 2 completely photorealistic in every way so that the game looks just like it would appear to you if you were a soldier running around shooting people. Would that game have visual style?

Originally Posted by manasecret (Post 269338)

My answer is yes, because in reality, there is a choice of what goes into that scene, and what the weather is like at that moment which changes the color palette, and so on.

Put another way, would such a scene not created in a video game, but filmed _not_ have a visual style? There are plenty of movies to choose from like this, I guess one example being Hurt Locker, though I haven't seen it.