this is also important. it’s all important! i wonder how many people still do most of their gaming on a CRT. i would estimate probably 95% of the games i play, i’m playing on CRT. i think the way it works, it’s much less jarring to experience low frame rates in that way, similar to how interlaced content looks horrible on an LCD
that “brain filling in the gaps” sensation is one of the absolute most fascinating things i’ve experienced in video games. it’s partly my love of how that works at a high level in WR64 and other low framerate games that are played competitively that caused me to weigh in in this thread so passionately
i love a lot of games with extreme/sandpapery experiential aesthetics, including low and variable framerates. the relatively straightforward medium-specificity of psx-era hardware limitations meant that it was easier to design for those conditions and give them coherent forms. fromsoft were masters of this for about 15 years, well beyond that period.
i don’t think this situation (in areas other than framerate) has entirely disappeared either, though fewer designers seem to be working with it, the solutions are more challenging, and most importantly the industry no longer hinges on it. for instance (from janet h. murray, “virtual/reality: how to tell the difference”):
i wonder how to think of a productively iterable third term produced by the experience in vr that “the graphics are not aligned, and the world does not respond as you expect it to” (vs. the assumption that eventually they will reach indifferent immersion through compensatory iteration). this seems like more than a wishful or academic question since at the moment vr designers are so preoccupied with how to reduce motion sickness while retaining a basic paradigm of first person immersion, restricted enough to avoid scenarios that create perception-dissonant nausea. one of the useful things about videogames and related media is the unselfconscious transparency about assumptions and norms, which makes it easier to identify and think through alternatives. but at this point the business is sufficiently streamlined and optimized that they no longer have to care about the alternatives.
on the other hand, to return to the thread topic, with subjects like purposefully manipulated variable framerate in non-vr games there isn’t necessarily an immanent medium-specific limitation to discover and exploit anymore; it needs to develop through tightly intentional, fine-grained artistic control (which means that the proponents of silky smooth, hyper-performant 60 fps with no drops are in some sense correct), and it needs to do so without a preexisting consensus functional/aesthetic standard. in order to give shape to alternative forms in a way that exceeds the moment of capitalist “industrial genius” which is firmly behind us at this point, the process needs to be reversed. this seems incredibly difficult given the overwhelming allocation of resources to the hegemonic idiots whose job is to say the quiet parts out loud about how games should work.
I was looking at that Cuphead video and thought “I don’t remember it looking like that” and I ran to reconfirm and was reminded that it’s a Unity game and just runs at vsync and hey, turns out running it at 144 fps makes it look normal (the logic of the game actually scales, you can cap it at 24hz and it just works). a better example/Unity 2D thing is River City Girls, which is all pixel art with copious amounts of hitstop and traditional animation methods for games and it also scales and runs fine
but also I’m the guy who’s bugged by Haggar’s intensely well animated legs in his walk cycle in Final Fight (this is mostly because his upper body doesn’t move at all)
I’m onboard with your general assessment of the need for explicitly artistic direction in this space. Are you able to clarify the bit I’ve quoted? I’m trying to understand if you’re talking about a lack of terminology for the problem and if it relates to VR specifically or just games in general.
i’m making a comparison for vr to something like montage in film. in montage, the algebra of shot 1 + shot 2 = shot 3, which is imaginary on the part of the viewer, and the director organizes the cut between 1 and 2 to “solve for” shot 3. for vr, it would be something like “the disjunction between expected alignment/response and actual alignment/response = imaginary third experience”
With VR, though, I think it gets across what I feel with performance issues in action games to everyone. Losing tracking of your head’s position in VR isn’t (just) aesthetically unpleasant. It’s painful to your vestibular system and almost immediately induces nausea and headaches. I’ve played VR projects that have abstract or “sandpaper aesthetic” visuals and audio but I think the practice of a strict framerate and latency floor is as near to objectively correct as a prescription for media can be.
right, but the response in vr development is to work around that by establishing generic restricted ways to maintain first-person immersion, like keeping your character static, etc. my problem isn’t with the solutions to the problem, but with the assumption that first-person immersion is necessarily the natural goal (even as it causes all of those problems like motion sickness, and even as the effect is so fragile). i think the sandpaper thing is a bit misleading because what i’m describing less about the quality of the result and more about the framework, which doesn’t have any kind of inherent experiential character necessarily.
If I understand it right, I guess the ‘gap to be filled’ between actual and expected could be creatively filled (as it is in other media) by a sort of Kuleshov effect for the purpose of surprise/novel experience. This is perhaps why VR has (unknowingly?) gravitated towards comedy and horror experiments. The comedy games in particular do a sort of ‘grab this’ and then the thing to be grabbed explodes or collapses or whatever.
I imagine dissonances brought about by fictional inconsistencies would have a lot of traction here since the experience is comparable between expected and actual and could be creatively exploited to affect the audience. The Coconut effect is an example as are diegetic panel layouts in comics. They involve a medium’s particular qualities meeting an expectation by the audience which is then melded in imagination to create whatever artistic effect or phenomenon naturally results.
Kendall Walton’s make-believe theory might be useful here since he sees representations (of almost any kind) as props for imagining various things. Expectations and appropriations of these props completely change how they’re imagined and I don’t see why it’d be different with a VR space.
It doesn’t matter if it’s first-person immersion, though - if your viewpoint is a 6dof tracked point any visuals with a fixed point of reference will have the same issues.
for reference i agree that if there is head tracking in vr the tracking should maintain a consistent and high framerate, which i should have clarified since i was making an aside in the framerate thread about something other than framerate lol. my vr point was closer to @captainlove’s last post.
I think I get where you are coming from, and I’ve also been really interested in an aesthetic of anti-immersion. The way Murray talks about it in the section you offered, that magical language about being transported by technology into game space is something I’ve found both disingenuous and kind of repulsive. I am really curious to study VR games to see how they eschew realism and immersion, without risking making people physically ill. It’s such an exciting new area of games, like 3D, and I can’t wait to see what people do with it.
But about an aesthetic of anti-immersion, I feel like it’s way more interesting, and braver, to sit with a game and recognize it as a material artifact which you don’t assume the agency of, but rather enter into a relationship in which you are both interfacing with each other. I wrote a thing recently on why I think ANATOMY is exemplar at refusing the ideal of immersion in this way, and I think that game does some really cool things. But I also think about a game called Paratopic and what it does with jump cuts, plays with film logic in ways I rarely see games even gesture to. And I like to make an argument that SOMA is an anti-immersion game that is very flagrant about disrupting the continuity of perceived experience in ways that frustrate the process of identification that lots of first-person narrative games have banked on, and which many players have been educated by, for years and years.
Something else I always wonder about but haven’t done a deep dive into is what evidence there is to say that first-person games with full-body representation help establish greater proprioception than games without. Personally, I’ve always thought full-body awareness was a cool visual thing, but it was never more convincing or something. I thought a lot about this when Half-Life Alyx was coming out and people were ranting about the lack of arms in that game, remembering all the games I’ve played before where you’re nothing more than a floating point in the world holding a gun.
This is getting totally away from the framerate discussion but I’ve always found the mainstream use of the word “immersion” to describe games highly disingenuous. My own experience is that games are naturally and extremely anti-immersive, because they require constant awareness on the part of the player that she is not the game, because she’s sitting there controlling it with a little piece of plastic the whole time.
Hmm I think we have very different experiences! After the first couple hours with a game, I rarely think about the controller or input device. I absolutely forget about what inputs I’m pressing or that I’m even pressing inputs at all, and instead think about what the character should do on screen and my fingers and hands do the work subconsciously.
Fighting or arcade games are very immersive to me, because I forget about my surroundings and how I’m interacting with the game and the game itself consumes all my conscious thoughts.
Although I guess the “mainstream” idea of immersion is more like fidelity of semi-realistic environments or stories or something, and yeah I totally don’t get that.
Immersion is a slippery term and overlaps too many discrete experiences in general usage. Are we talking about fictional immersion - the world is believable and I’m there? Immersion in a task - ‘being in the zone’? Bodily immersion - gap between body and medium dissolved? Immersive realism through representational fidelity? Framerate could affect any one of these but it pays to be specific with the term.
Conversely I often have difficulty explaining game controls to other people because I don’t consciously think about my button in-puts most of the time. Games just kind of become my perception if they’re good.
i’ve always used the term “immersion” incredibly loosely to describe any time a media object has been able to absorb me into state of blinkered hyper-focus. i can get immersed in a god damn winamp skin
