Sorry, like I said above, I can’t really engage with the hypo because it’s a deep kinesthetic experience. The glib [] are because you said “exactly.”
I do not want software I’m controlling to introduce any more lapses in my “sync” with it than exists by technical necessity. I can barely stand using windows server through remote desktop. I will turn a game off if I get a frame drop. I literally leap in my seat. Have you ever experienced a desync in VR tracking? It’s like that, I think. (I think this is a spectrum thing.)
The other examples - discordant sound or visual design - are great and I can call to mind examples I appreciate.
Maybe we can come together to agree on hitpause which I’m guessing is near and dear to your heart. That’s a great tool because it slows the game down in a very consistent and predictable way to give you time to process information.
hitpause is fantastic, of course! i think it’s all there. controlling the rates to different degrees is unexplored as an intended thing, so yeah i mean - it’s hard to talk about.
i keep going back to N64 and PS1 games because they were very cognizant of this, and then i felt like later consoles with their more consistent multiplatform releases and homogenization of formula, really just assumed the best in terms of framerate and entirely dropped matching any kind of mechanical elements to the rate. and since then any time you see intentionally low framerates it’s really only like a v-sync type thing, or that singular mode in TLOUR which apparently actually has bad framepacing and is therefore a horrible representative for my cause :’(
i love this line of thinking, though - sandpaper on my brain. have you ever listened to noise music, or atonal post-classical electronic or whatever, idk? music can feel like that too. some people swear by it. when i’m in the right mood, i swear by it too.
THERE IS MORE
⊂_ヽ TO THE EXPERIENCE OF GAMES
＼＼ Λ＿Λ
＼( ˇωˇ)
/ ⌒
/ へ＼
/ / ＼＼ THAN AUTHORIAL INTENT
ﾚ ノ ヽ_つ
/ /
( (ヽ
| |、 \
| 丿 ＼
| | ) / so much more so than
ノ ) Lﾉ any other medium
Dropping in for a sec to say meauxdal is right. Objectively correct in my extremely subjective brain.
If it makes you feel better you expressed my opinion on this subject much better than I ever could so I’m grateful. You have the gratitude of an internet stranger!
For me Treasure is the extant example of artistic use of slowdown. I know that what works in 2d is different than 3d, but I’m also in the “shadow of the colossus is a bit better when the game seems like it’s going to collapse under its own weight” camp.
EDIT: in the time it took me to write out this post on my phone – nice glitchy keyboard, Swiftkey; hang your head in shame – a bunch of people posted a bunch of good points.
Oh, yeah, I love noise music. I just like, listen to Shepard tones while working sometimes.
I didn’t mean to cross from rollicking argument into invective - bottom line frame drops border on making something inaccessible to me. I will gladly tune every other setting down to eliminate them!
Fucking with my inputs - OK. Fucking with my I/O? Batsu as fuck my friends.
the first anodyne has bizarre seemingly intentional frame throttling (on switch at least) and honestly it’s a huge part of why I think the game is so good
I think the thing that is bothering people itt is the idea of “All Things Must Be 60FPS, all media must conform to my standards” which uhh no one wants! But it is the tone we hear echoed across the internet. It’s a really bad one.
To use a different example if you found out a game didn’t have Dolby Digital so you decided it was trash garbage and need to yell about it on the internet versus uhh…just not playing it for meeting your weird technical standards.
I mean outside of my own inability to read 69FPS I have always been grossed out that is this yelling mob of 60FPS or nothing. Art and Experience should not be engaged like that! Then you get recolored films in 16:9 with motion smoothing. SNES games in 16:9 and SuperEagle. But also some weirdos like their SNES games in 16:9 and SuperEagle. They can go live their lives and I’ll be over here praying the Cave game I am playing has the accurate level of slowdown.
It’s not about seeing, it’s about feeling. The DD example doesn’t map for me because it’s a different mode. An analogous audio example for me would be like playing Guitar Hero with little enough latency that you can hit the notes but enough that it feels “off”
I want to send you the PC version of OutRun 2006 capped at 30 to see because I think you’d immediately get it
Speaking of the SuperEagle filter, I remember how back in the day (like, when I was 11) I used to loooove those kinds of filters. I couldn’t stand square, unfiltered pixels. They were so sharp and kind of painful to look at. However, after a few years my opinion (or rather, my visceral response) on the matter basically flipped. I’m not sure why or what to make of it.
Same! Of course, then (as it is now) I also futzed a lot with these, turning them on and off depending on the situation and my mood, never really deciding which I liked better. It turns out that what I didn’t know I was looking for (and what I am still looking for) was a good CRT filter.
In the Wu Tang book, the RZA writes about how he always wanted longer samples, so he’d always use the lowest quality/longest settings on his relatively primitive sampler. He didn’t necessarily want a grimy quality to the sound, but accepted it as a tradeoff and built his style around that limitation. To me that’s sort of analogous to accepting frame stutter to get your 200 missiles onscreen at once, and then leaning into it. But I can understand how to many people, low FPS would be more like the CD skipping and it would be maddening.
I just brought this up to suggest everyone read the Wu Tang book. Worth the price of admission for the synopsis of the crazy Bobby Digital feature film he wanted to make. The basic premise is Bobby Digital shoots people in the spine with magic bullets to give them internet in their bodies, to democratize access to information.
the original starfox is incredibly playable and feels great to control despite running at like 12fps or something lol
that said I would love to play 60fps starfox running at original speed. it would probably rule!
there are plenty of genres where framerate does matter in terms of the basic quality of the experience, but I’d still argue it boils down to an aesthetic preferences 90% of the time. unless you need to be executing frame perfect inputs anything higher than 60fps is completely unnecessary and many lower framerates are perfectly suitable and in some cases superior.
like no one is arguing that outrun is better at a low framerate but the feeling of smooth speed is a key part of the appeal of the entire experience~! it is a good aesthetic choice for that game.
shadow of the colossus is just fine chugging along at whatever godawful stuttering framerate it had on PS2! and there’s this constant sense of “being blinded by staring into the face of God” in sotc and the framerate issues honestly contribute to that. it just isn’t as forboding when it has a more “polished” presentation, and the input windows are more than forgiving enough for it to work fine mechanically at low frame rates.
I don’t think the Majora’s Mask comparisons works because the blur and lighting effects are so different. Also they could have put more stops in the higher frame rate animation to get a similar effect. I think when we are talking about canned animation vs rendered stuff like camera moves or direction changes we are talking about different considerations as well.
I suspect for smoothness of response the regularity (timing) is more important than rate. But also blanking interval is important to how we precive action. I believe arcade monitors with their slower horizontal refresh giver me a certain feeling. Sideways TVs feel “better” fr shmups. I dont know how to AB test a lot of this. I recall seeing a program talking about audiences shown footage from a train at various filmed frame rates and finding that people rated the higher frame rate footage as more “thrilling” consistently. I can’t find this study now ofc :^( but it would suggest that if you want to induce dread a lower frame rate might be appropriate.
Also games can have physics that are calculated at rates independent of the render rate of the graphics or the refresh of the monitor meaning you can have control feel separated from presentation.
I dug into some 60fps N64 footage of capped games (wave race, OOT) and they looks smoother with a 60 fps presentation even when I can prove in a video software than I’m only seeing an update every 3 frames.
Another interesting effect emerged that might be relevant. When viewing a 20fps game off a 30 fps capture I found that anything not in the center of my vision was harder to rack. Am I simulating bad frame timing? Maybe but its CONSISTENTLY bad in the dame way, so not really but it is interesting,
So I prepared an example.
If you are on pc you can use the < and > keys to do frame advance on youtube.
so for example we have a 30fps video of a 20fps game, step through it and see how it moves.
1,2,nothing,1,2,nothing.
Now try with a 60fps video. 1, nothing, nothing, 4, nothing, nothing. Im tracking things better in my peripheral vision but not much better, the over all presentation is worse but not substantially.
60fps looks better only because it’s lower resolution imo. that’s another considering with framerates, at low res it’s less noticeable because there are less pixels to create gaps in movement.
I went back to stunt race FX years later out of nostalgia and couldn’t even start to play it it was so bad.
Then I just forced myself to look at it for awhile until it made sense again. My brain fills in the gaps once I know how to read it.
I suspect the level to which our brains fill these gaps is differently developed from one individual to another meaning that frame rates will always be an opinion. It also suggest that being able to frame-fill engages your imagination which might be why film has “the heightend look”.
