Are We Being Conned? (4)
   A reply to Peter Clark's question from SynTax issue 60

                     From Nick Edmunds

In reference to the increasing importance of graphics in games, I
would have to respond "Yes, but it's probably by ourselves".  The
natural state of humanity isn't chaos, but rather lethargy and as
using our imaginations requires effort most of us rarely bother.
The same sorts of questions have been raised with regard to
reading books over watching films.  Obviously there should be more
to a game than pretty graphics (anyone play "RING"? Beautiful, but
pants) and the word, which probably best sums up the X-factor for
a game, is playability. By their very nature text advs tend to
concentrate on plot, but no pictures doesn't necessarily make for
a guaranteed good game.  We've all seen films dominated by fx,
carried by fx and even as an excuse for fx, but in a game this is
unforgivable.  The ideal is, of course, "Everything in
moderation".

With regard to the specification we are forced to adhere to by
game manufacturers, the more cynical among us may wonder if any of
the software houses have interests in hardware concerns.  Some
games still have options to turn off features (such as shadows and
rendering) in order to optimise performance over a wider range of
machine specification.  Although this sort of feature is becoming
less common, in the days of 'Blake Stone' and 'Wolfenstein',
machines and components were expensive enough to make this feature
a necessity in order to reach a wider audience.  Now, with price
of machines and components falling and minimum specification
rising, one can easily become caught up in a perpetual state of
upgrade just to stay within acceptable levels.

Or perhaps it is clumsy coding which creates the need for higher
spec?  It has previously been the case that software on any
platform improved drastically as the given machine embedded itself
into the market place and programmers learnt better how to
optimise their code around the architecture. This phenomenon has
been more apparent on games consoles, but was equally noticeable
on the early PCs, although not so much on today's machines as
nothing seems to be mainstream long enough for this sort of
evolution to occur.

The dilemma thus becomes whether to buy cutting edge knowing it's
the very latest thing, but probably over priced and not quite
perfected, or wait and find that something new replaces it soon
after your purchase. As an example of increasing hardware
senility: The entire production run of the PII processor has been
Intel's shortest lived yet (approx. two years as opposed to over
seven years for the 486). There is, however, a theory that we will
soon be approaching a technology plateau, where circuits cannot
physically be economically made any smaller.  If this situation
does occur we may see a level playing field for programmers to
work upon.

I may be painting a bit of a grim picture here, but PCs and games
have never been so accessible and ultimately if a machine does
what you want, then it is a good machine.  Similarly any game you
enjoy is a good game.
                              - o -