The Real Deal

"Reality isn't all it's cracked up to be, remember that. If reality was that much fun people wouldn't play games."

Scott Orr, Ea Sports (attr.)

Apart from a shameless, shameless product placement deal with Airwaves chewing gum I would say that Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is a pretty good game. I like being a ghost, with my array of increasingly unlikely gadgets and weapons, and though SC:CT can be seen by many to be simply more of the same I don't think that that's entirely fair. The AI has been revamped, the interactions rethought and the graphics overhauled. But above all, it feels a little more realistic.

The light meter shows you how visible you are, the sound meter compares how much noise you're making to the ambient noise. Fabric tears, ripples, rustles. Darkness is your friend. Realism has been used to make the game more challenging. But still, when standing in a darkened corridor frozen to the spot as a guard walks right up next to me, I'm not seen. Ridiculous? Maybe. Smart design? Of course. Realism in games is quite a complicated thing...

Gamers have had a fetish with realism in games ever since 3D games really came to the fore. Before then, we'd always appreciated advanced in technology but we'd never fantasised over them. The jump in detail from, say, the NES to the SNES was something. But the jump from the SNES to the N64 was quite something else. Once gamers had got to terms with the thought that photorealism wouldn't always be the realm of science fiction they started to become very, very interested in the prospect of The Next Generation.

Realism soon infested all aspects of game design. Take a look at most press releases for games and the classic selling points are realistic graphics, realistic physics, realistic facial animation - the list goes on, not to mention becoming more absurd. Which is fine, for as long as they contribute to gameplay. The gravity gun in Half-Life 2 is a clever little thing, combining a love of physics with a love of smacking stuff around, but as realism gets further and further into the psyche of the average gamer we notice some dangerous trends appearing. At what point does realism stop being fun?

Let's take The XBox 360 for example. Next generation on the horizon, and already people are talking numbers. But that's all they're talking. One teraflop? It might sound impressive, but if all it is is chugging the graphics on a Pong remake, no-one's going to notice. Despite this, though, a recent survey on Gamesradar showed that over 30% of gamers are most interested in the hardware capabilities of a console, even over games.

But the realism isn't just graphics and horsepower, it's game-based too. Though we strive after realism its worth pausing and asking how far we want to take that. Halo 2, the sequel to Bungie's landmark FPS that, arguably, put XBox on the map. The physics engine was completely overhauled from the original, meaning Master Chief had weight and depth, the Warthogs had fully-functional rollcages and, most importantly, obscenely large explosions caused obscene amounts of carnage. Which is always nice.

So for Halo 3, are we looking for more physics, more shaders, more realism? It would seem that way. But realism has to stop before we have Warthogs stalling, guns jamming and 'shrapnel wounds' stopping people from running properly. Realism in games is fun when it means making the game real. Start making the world real and it starts to lost its sheen.

A final thought - Spore, the latest gem from genius designer Will Wright, looks set to be one of the most inventive and audacious games - ever. Start in Eden, end up as God. A sweet pitch and no mistake. But Mr. Wright knows that a game this clever needs to keep the fun things in life - killing, for instance, and space travel - and cut out the boring things - like keys. No-one likes keys. Realism is used to take the player on a phenomenal journey through the very essence of existence... but it's never used as an obstacle.

We can only hope that the mighty teraflop does the same.