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The sonic one is also on the meme/marketing side.

Design = graphics.

Or maybe Design(graphics).

Graphics ARE design. Barring very few exceptions, games communicate themselves visually. What the graphics look like, how they are laid out and how they convey the rules are absolutely fundamental parts of the experience-as-designed on every game, regardless of how technically complex the visuals turn out to be.

These arguments always bum me out a little, because they start from the premise that, say the people at, say, Yacht Club care less about or put less effort into what their games look like than larger devs using photorreal visuals, which should not survive looking at a single frame of their work.

I think Gouraud shading was pretty cheap back then.

I gotta say, I don't think we complained enough that gen about having every game look like a bad attempt at origami running at 15 fps.

Anybody complaining that modern games are too focused on visuals for not enough return needs to deeply rethink how we all collectively went from perfect 60fps Mega Man to whatever Mega Man Legends was.

I mean, people are still out there defending GoldenEye, and I must remind you that Doom had existed for years at that point.

Love Vampire Survivors. Would be better without the Castlevania asset flippiness, but still love it.

But here's the thing, people mistake being able to make a good basic-looking game with not being able to make a good visuals-focused game.

I also love Cyberpunk, Indiana Jones, Expedition 33 and a bunch of other games that care about their visuals a LOT.

The real point where this argument falls apart is that modern AAA games almost exclusively use TAA, which ruins graphics. I’m so sick of shadows blurring and everything looking terrible and people saying it’s next level.

I've stopped acknowledging the term AAA because I'm increasingly convinced nobody knows what they mean when they use it beyond "games that look expensive and I don't like".

I also don't think there's that many developers that don't give "story, mechanics and game difficulty balance" an equal amount of consideration, mostly because those things are typically handled by entirely different people in any production that is bigger than a skeleton crew. It's not like designers in big studios are just twiddling their thumbs waiting for the rendering engineers to finish the peach fuzz on people's cheeks.

The way people perceive opportunity cost in collaborative media is always weird to me.

I'm going to be annoying for a second, but I promise to try and make it worth it: It isn't about purism or even "fun", because not all art is meant to amuse. Art is allowed to be anything, and we should treat critique of art (including games) an an exploration of what the creator was trying to do, to what extent they succeeded and how, what it makes you think of, and possible meanings. Play is merely one aspect of a game's artistic content.

The entire subject of fun in terms of game design is, artistically speaking so nascent that there is hardly any history to that field of study. We've been making up for lost time in recent decades, but the entire concept of game theory is not even a century old.

So, that was probably annoying of me. But the point I'm here to make is that "fun vs graphics" isn't really the conversation we're trying to have.

One conversation we should have is the problem that exists with how games are funded and how those financial incentives can shape the creative side in a way that might hinder what's being done with the medium. Games aren't just art, they're big business, and the conversation is taking place within the context of the tech industry, geopolitical trends, and even monetary policy. Now that the industry is so large, it often feels like creators working with big budgets are becoming risk-averse and often greedy. When traditional artists seem overly risk-averse and driven by financial incentives, the art world turns on them in a big way. Look at Anish Kapoor and vantablack.

Another conversation to have is graphics in gaming within the larger computing industry. We're at the tail end of Moore's law and the GPU market seems like it's starting to turn away from gaming towards other perceived cash cows like LLMs and generative AI. So we should not expect graphics cards to continually get better forever, or even cheaper honestly. It's been the case for decades, but the situation is dynamic.

For a long time, it seems like there has been a bad combination of forces at play in gaming: the promise of endlessly increasing computing power, and lurching shifts in monetary policy that lead initially to massive tech speculation and then periods of focusing intensely on profitability.

I think it's reasonable to predict that we're going to see smaller development budgets in gaming, increased focus on well-optimized code, a shift away from the emphasis on realism in games, or a general collapse in the "big budget" gaming industry as some or all of these fail to materialize.

Meanwhile, indie gaming has been on a hit streak. That food chain has been thriving at lower trophic levels, and no wonder. They're taking more risks, being more generous, and reaching less highly than their larger peers. It's a winning formula under tight monetary policy and the overall larger context.

I've said far too much, sorry to drop this on you.

You can still play the ascii-version :P