gamedesign.dev: Realism

When a story tells you about something using the details of the real world ("I plugged my headphones into my iPod"), that's realism, in the simplest sense. If they tell you this in a way that stretches your sense of disbelief ("I plugged my headphones into my iPod, and then kicked the velociraptor in the face"), that breaks the realism. A lot of serious games nowadays take great pains to ensure that realism is preserved throughout, and I find myself wondering if that's really a good idea.

The first issue is that you pay the most attention to realism when trying to make the atmosphere more serious. If you incorporate current events into your game (although maybe not American politics), these events should be treated with the same respect you'd afford to them in reality. Of course, games tend to tell a fictional story, using realism as the roots for their setting, which is all well and good if the story is appropriately serious. Since we're talking about games, which are very rarely serious (and almost never for the course of the whole game), this can sometimes cause clashes even in the most well-written stories.

The second issue is twofold. Real life is not a game. In games, your abilities are all expected to be put to roughly equal use, and you're eventually expected to win. I'm reminded of games like Counterstrike and Metal Gear Solid 4, which load themselves with all manner of real-world weapons, but only a handful of them are feasible choices in-game. If you choose a real-world weapon because you like it, and the developers didn't balance it against the twenty eight other choices, oh well, you screwed yourself over!

As for the second half of this issue, if you go into a game, be it single or multi player, you can be expected to eventually win. Maybe not right off the bat, but if you learn and apply the rules the game provides you, you can eventually succeed. In real life? Not so much. Sometimes you simply don't get your job, or that friendly boy doesn't want to have a relationship, or you get into a car crash and become paralyzed from the neck down. Incorporating realism into a game, where you could very easily do stuff like tackle a massive bear armed with nothing but a small knife and your determination, tends to clash in these situations, especially considering the issue of healing as I have before.

Lastly, an ideal game is fun all the time. You're provided with challenges and a story meant to please and provoke thought and the means to get through, and if you ever get bored with it, you can turn it off and go find something else to do. Real life is very frequently not fun. There's very little that's fun about working twelve-hour shifts, finding out your paycheck's been cut to give upper management a new foosball table, and heading home to find your wife's having an affair while you're away. Blending realism with gaming is, in other words, generally a poor idea.

But lots of people like their games to feel realistic, of course. It's more easy to relate to a setting if the things done in it are at least somewhat believable. There's a word that I think fits gaming as a whole much better, and that word is "verisimilitude". For those of you unfamiliar with the term, take it as meaning "realism within acceptable bounds for the setting". Dracula is a story about the living dead, so while it may not be realistic, it keeps with the feeling of verisimilitude when one of the characters seemingly rises from the dead. Hell, even the webcomic Dr. McNinja manages to keep the sense of verisimilitude going, despite being far from realistic. Dr. McNinja is both a doctor and a ninja, but you never see him, say, summoning a demon. Other characters might do that, because they're ghost wizards or whatever, but it would make sense for them in the bounds of the setting.

There's no sense in complaining about games being unrealistic. Of course they are. They're games. But you can easily complain about the game breaking the verisimilitude. For example with Tales of Symphonia. The group finds themselves jailed up, and none of the characters can break free. Just then, Regal, who keeps his hands manacled and fights with his feet for somewhat silly reasons, moves forward and shoots a massive burst of energy from his hands, breaking through the cell. Regal has never displayed any abilities that would be even close to that power throughout the game, and it's only brought up so that the plot can continue. That is a huge breach of verisimilitude.

So the solution is simple. Just make sure your characters obey the laws of their setting. These don't have to be the same laws as the ones our world goes by, because our world is not nearly as fun as that of a game, but they should stick by them.