"Realism" and Video Games

 I believe it was my first year at university that I found myself, for the first time, rethinking the word “realistic.” It was during an introductory art history course, and the teacher (a graduate student) was presenting some of the artwork from the Renaissance. When compared to the medieval art we were previously shown, the most obvious point of comparison would be its “realism”; this was an opinion shared by most of the class.

 

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1490-1510

Raphael, School of Athens, 1509-1511

Clearly, Rafael’s fresco bears more resemblance to the “reality” we experience, especially when juxtaposed with the flat, surreal figures that populate Bosch’s painting. Or at least, this was what I thought before the teacher pushed back against it. Does Rafael’s painting, the teacher asked, truly capture the actual experience of reality?

 

Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol, 1875

J. M. W. Turner, The Slave Ship, 1840

Being a visual medium, paintings will struggle to convey any other sense other than sight, already making it facsimile of reality rather than a faithful reproduction. And as many artists such as Turner or Monet show, seeing “reality” isn’t as simple as it sounds. As it is mediated through our sentient and rather unruly minds, the world is distorted, twisted, and manipulated in ways that we often take for granted. These artists, romantic and impressionist, depict the human, and intensively subjective and experiential, through their artworks. We may not immediately call them “realistic,” but does Turner’s artwork not evoke a truer experience of a shipwreck – and of nature’s (moral and physical) authority?

 

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire (The Arcadian or Pastoral State), 1833-1836

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire (Destruction), 1833-1836

 

More often, this “realism” is used to project an image of what we idealize reality to be. Thomas Cole’s painting cycle, The Course of Empire, utilizes this artistic style to express an ideology – a rejection of centralization and so-called decadence in favor of pastoralism. His images of the rise and fall of this fictional city (and thus his political claims) are legitimized through this stylistic device.

When discussing video games, the same care must be taken – especially since video games certainly are a medium of art  – when utilizing the word “realistic.” There is, of course, the photo-realism or graphical fidelity of the graphical components (already, in fidelity, we already see the assumption that it is true to life). Graphics quality is usually short-hand for “realism,” and is a surefire way of getting the audience to believe in the fictional world you have created. Yet some people are so taken in by this graphical achievement that they would extrapolate graphical fidelity to narrative and gameplay fidelity – much like how Cole’s admiring audience may use his fictional paintings as a framework to understand history.

 

DICE, Battlefield 1, 2016

The Battlefield series has been plagued by scandals, many of which concern the rushed and broken nature of their multiplayer modes (especially right after release). I have no issue with these criticisms. Things become far more problematic when players attack the developers for making the game “unrealistic.” According to these people, the game is made ridiculous when black people or women are added as playable characters, populating battlefields with “people who weren’t there.” Developers are accused of being “woke,” of trying to rewrite history – guilty of the sin of bringing politics into games. Setting aside the age-long argument about whether or not everything is politics, let us truly dissect their claims of “realism.” 

As we have previously mentioned, belief in the “realism” of a piece of media or art can bleed from just its style into the contents. I believe that the irate player base, having consumed decades of media about white men fighting other white men in wars, imagine that this was actually what happened in history. Of course, this is clearly not true; the first mission in Battlefield I’s campaign, which has you playing as a Black American soldier, is drawn from the historical role of the Harlem Hellfighters in the first World War. Indian soldiers conscripted by the British numbered over a million strong, fighting against the German forces in Europe. Many other examples exist, including female soldiers and pilots in the second World War.

Of course, some would then counter that with claims that these forces were a minority compared to the number of Caucasian soldiers. To that, I’d say that ability to use ridiculous prototype guns that were developed far too late in the war or never saw battle at all would be far more unrealistic. Furthermore, wouldn’t seeing a German battalion equipped with a mishmash of American, British, and even Ottoman weaponry also be unrealistic?

These questions are moot. The realism that these people are slavishly referring to does not exist. Their reality is the one in which they have colored with their beliefs, influenced by media, education, and the various sources of information that have seeped into their minds through osmosis. Just as Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic masterpiece Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog depicts the “sublime” filtered through a human mind that cannot truly envision or encapsulate it, games (and all art) twist, distort, and reshape reality according to our subjective minds. 

 

Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818

Video games are art, and it’s about time people treated them like it – critically.