I feel like we're in a renaissance (or maybe modernism) of fun in video games.
In the early days of the medium, there were a lot of hard constraints with regard to computing power, so game designers had to work with what they had to produce fun in efficient and creative ways. In other words, space invaders or super mario had no chance of achieving anything approaching realism given the hardware available at the time, so they had to focus on maximizing fun instead.
Later, beginning with Doom and expanding with the rise of 3D acceleration, we were wowed by the prospect of exploring 3D worlds in a way that felt familiar to navigating the real world, which gave rise to this implicit idea that achieving realism should be the goal of video games.
I remember discussing video games like this as a teenager: when FPS games introduced reloading as a mechanic, or when Half-Life got rid of floating weapons and health kits in favor of objects which lay there on the ground diagetically like they would in real life, or when Halo only let us hold two weapons at the same time, we talked about these developments in the terms that they were obviously steps forward, because they were more realistic. Often the "best graphics" are also conflated with those which are the most photo-realistic.
But more recently, we've started to round a corner where people have started to look back, and realize that realism isn't necessarily the goal of games, and is often orthogonal to fun or other redeeming qualities. After all there are a lot of parts of real life which are not actually fun, and if we simulate the violent setting of many video games with perfect realism, it probably would not be very fun to experience bleeding out from a bullet wound in an accurate way. More recently, games have gotten a bit more fantasy back in, and are more unapologetic about revealing their medium.
I think it's similar in some ways to what we saw in European art movements. For hundreds of years, people tried to paint reality with ever increasing fidelity. But sometime in the classical period, the problem of how to represent light, shadow and geometry in accurate perspective in paint became a solved problem, and thus it was no longer interesting. Later movements, like impressionism and later modernism and post-modernism threw realism aside and focused on pushing the medium itself forward in whatever way ended up being the most compelling.
Someways games have become so streamlined as to remove all fun from it, Witcher 3 for example has a detailed world, but the game is essentially that of going from one marker to another in the mini-map, in other words while playing one is essentially ignoring the beautiful world and instead fulfilling tedious chores. Many recent Ubisoft titles have been similarly critized for being essentially descending into a rote task of clearing markers on the map.
In the early days of the medium, there were a lot of hard constraints with regard to computing power, so game designers had to work with what they had to produce fun in efficient and creative ways. In other words, space invaders or super mario had no chance of achieving anything approaching realism given the hardware available at the time, so they had to focus on maximizing fun instead.
Later, beginning with Doom and expanding with the rise of 3D acceleration, we were wowed by the prospect of exploring 3D worlds in a way that felt familiar to navigating the real world, which gave rise to this implicit idea that achieving realism should be the goal of video games.
I remember discussing video games like this as a teenager: when FPS games introduced reloading as a mechanic, or when Half-Life got rid of floating weapons and health kits in favor of objects which lay there on the ground diagetically like they would in real life, or when Halo only let us hold two weapons at the same time, we talked about these developments in the terms that they were obviously steps forward, because they were more realistic. Often the "best graphics" are also conflated with those which are the most photo-realistic.
But more recently, we've started to round a corner where people have started to look back, and realize that realism isn't necessarily the goal of games, and is often orthogonal to fun or other redeeming qualities. After all there are a lot of parts of real life which are not actually fun, and if we simulate the violent setting of many video games with perfect realism, it probably would not be very fun to experience bleeding out from a bullet wound in an accurate way. More recently, games have gotten a bit more fantasy back in, and are more unapologetic about revealing their medium.
I think it's similar in some ways to what we saw in European art movements. For hundreds of years, people tried to paint reality with ever increasing fidelity. But sometime in the classical period, the problem of how to represent light, shadow and geometry in accurate perspective in paint became a solved problem, and thus it was no longer interesting. Later movements, like impressionism and later modernism and post-modernism threw realism aside and focused on pushing the medium itself forward in whatever way ended up being the most compelling.