The future of gaming graphics looks sad.

Gaming is in its most exploratory era right now; the possibilities that video games have are higher than they've ever been, and much of that is thanks to technological improvements. And with those improvements in our gaming systems, many games get the idea to have "the best graphics of any game ever". Unfortunately, this leads to many games thinking that photo-realism is what we want.

Now, don't get me wrong, when games can pull off photorealistic graphics, it's cool! The fact that digital art is at the level that it is is a feat of humanity, and I will never dispute that. However, when every single game has the same goal of looking so life-like, how is it possible to get excited over it anymore?

When a game is at the level of photorealism of many games today, the game tends to be very heavy on resources. Not only for the data that a game would need to take up, but playing the game involves having NASA-level supercomputers to run comfortably. For gaming accessibility, this is such a bad idea.

Take a game like Undertale. While it's very simple graphically, it doesn't need to be anything more than it is. It's appealing, stylised, and doesn't require a heavy duty computer to play it. It's accessible for everyone, whether or not you have a few terabytes of disk space to spare for a single god-damn video game. This game (probably) started a trend in more stylised games, but we're still in the era where we overly praise photorealism.

If we want the most amount of people to be able to enjoy our creations, then we should make it so that our creations are the most accessible they can be. Yet when we restrict games behind a paywall of a thousand-dollar gaming system, this doesn't happen.

Stylised graphics also show a unique kind of artistic creativity. Instead of conforming to the real world, we're able to play with it and make something completely new. I love that! We need more of this! Yet games today fall into the attitude that we need to copy real life to a tee.

Imagine if this is the mindset that we had for, for example, paintings. If we only focused on how much paintings reflect our reality, then painting would become boring. It would only show the physical creativity of our minds. Yet we have abstract creativity; creativity that doesn't reflect our real world, but anything that the mind can conjure.

I think that, as intellectual brings, it's our responsibility to use the gifts that we are given. In our case, we are able to conceive the abstract. Therefore, our art should be able to reflect this, and we should be able to distance our art pieces from their material associations, and embrace the more abstract.

We need more stylised graphics in video games. I'm not downloading a 4TB game, because that's fucking absurd.