Let’s start out by acknowledging the sheer overwhelming beauty of some computer game graphical environments. Myst not only laid down the once and future adventure ethos in the gaming world; it also immersed the player in a world that was convincing because it was solid looking as well as colorfully rendered. These qualities were enhanced in the 3D realtime re-release of Myst (realMYST) and have continued in the three games (Riven, Myst III: Exile and Uru: Ages Beyond Myst) which have continued the Myst gaming saga. That sense of solidity, of realistic representation in what is, after all, a 2D screen world, is what many of us mean when we say that a particular game is “beautiful”. A set of swirling hallucinogenic color wheels can be beautiful – but never realistic, and therefore it engages us, if at all, on a superficial level (apologies to all those dudes who wandered up to me in high school and gabbled about “the colors, man”, while happily under the influence of something or other).

The first and greatest hunger of humans confronting the refigured reality which art throws back at them is hunger for realism. It is no accident that the first glimmerings of a freer style of European painting did not appear until the 19^th century Impressionist movement in France; the Old World needed 400 or so years to glory in the very realistic painting styles which appeared in the early 15^th century and which served as the Renaissance, Early Modern and Enlightenment equivalents of photography. It is interesting to note that only with the advent and widespread use of Monsieur Daguerre’s great invention, which allowed what was formerly an impermanent image in camera obscura to be recorded for posterity regardless of the drafting or painting skill of the daguerreotype technician, were European artists impelled to begin the abandonment of strict painterly realism, an abandonment that began with French Impressionism and reached its logical conclusion in the free-form inventions of American Abstract Expressionism.

Early computer games, with their blocky and unsubtly colored environments, were the perfect goads to developers to strive, as the 15^th century painters did, to produce more realistic reproductions of the 3D world in which we live. Computer game makers have seemingly needed to rediscover the rules of perspective and drafting technique; in reality, of course, this has been merely a matter of better codes and more powerful processors. Power, of the computing sort, was the major obstacle standing in the way of transferring from the canvas to the PC monitor what any competent and trained artist or draftsperson could accomplish with two hands and a bit of pigment-in-oil or pencil lead.

So now we have arrived at the stage, in computer game terms, which the Europeans were at circa 1450 A.D. We can, in the person of the programmer, recreate just about any sort of environment we wish to, from the total urban environment of Omikron: The Nomad Soul to the Antarctic wastes, complete with blowing snow, of The Thing. While some environments may be more realistic, in the strictest of senses, than others, what seems to matter more than mere verisimilitude is the use made of the particular environment. Omikron, for example, is not quite as deliciously realistic in its rendered world as, say, Max Payne (in which even the lowly bricks of a New York City alleyway wall can inspire something akin to a religious experience in a stunned and delighted gamer with  their hyper-realistic effect), but Omikron is introducing us to a completely new and imagined metropolis; if its rendering is slightly less perfectly real than some other game’s, we don’t notice, since the urban matrix in which we are wandering around (and, occasionally, fighting for our lives) is original and engaging. What might, under other circumstances, seem more like a comic book world than a real one does quite nicely because it is part of a total, immersive package that includes elements of plot, character development and plain good old adventure.

We are intensely visual creatures, attracted to and guided by what our eyes, the purported “windows of the soul”, allow into our heads. It is no accident that Rene Descartes, the father of the first great Western philosophical revolution since the Greeks of early antiquity, was fascinated by how light was received and processed in the human eye. In our daily engagement with perceived reality, it is the sense of sight which predominates. Although visible light, for humans, occupies a narrow portion of the total wavelength spectrum, evolutionary selection has made it our paramount survival mechanism (please, no outraged letters from audiologists – I’m not dissing the sense of hearing, but which sense would you rather lose, given the choice?) (Oh, hell, I don’t want to open up a can of worms – forget I said it).

Much of the fascination we have shown for gaming over the last several years has to do, I believe, with the novelty of being able, only recently, to enter, at night, with the lights out and a computer monitor way too close to our poor, irradiated brains, a series of historically famous (Traitors Gate – the Tower of London), eerie (Alone In The Dark: The New Nightmare – a haunted island complete with creepy mansion), remotely ancient or archaeologically puzzling (Riddle Of The Sphinx – the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid at Giza; The Omega Stone – Stonehenge, Chichen Itza and Easter Island), exotic (Legend Of The Prophet And The Assassin – the Levantine desert in the 13^th century), all-too-familiar-but-engaging-just-the-same (Grand Theft Auto III – a metropolitan complex with functioning bridges, airport, subway and elevated systems – yeeeessssss, I slipped this one in, and it will be the subject of a future column – perhaps more than one) and just plain strange (Schizm: Mysterious Journey – a planet somewhere in the vast reaches of outer space) locales, each with its own set of arresting and wonderfully detailed images. Stone block tunnels and centuries-old floorboards, antique rooms stuffed with books and objects, Egyptian, British, Mayan and South Pacific architectural and megalithic legacies, medieval cities with narrow, winding streets, the modern urban rathole, exobiological terrain, all these and more offer a sort of interactive travelogue of the mind to those of us with our patoots firmly rooted to our chairs, in no particular hurry to go anywhere in the “real world”  but able to visit and walk, run or ride through these places just the same. The most beautifully realized of these game environments have been christened with the epithet “eye candy”, which description we can readily see emerges from the well known phrase, “a feast for the eyes”; that candy is usually thought to be the province of children is no insult to those of us adults who sit rapt as toddlers before our computer screens. What better treat for the child in all of us than the delightful environments in which we move during the Harry Potter games (especially the second one, Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, in which the Hogwarts School maps are extended and rendered even more beautifully than in the first game). The maps in Max Payne 2: The Fall Of Max Payne are so stunning that I am sure I am not the only gamer pausing at various points during play to simply gawp and stare at Max’s surroundings. These last two examples are perfectly representative of the strengths of an integrated approach to eye candy: while Harry and Max have very different environmental looks, they each possess enormous integrity and beauty in their respective approaches to the problem of believable environmental rendering. We are  not talking about talented artwork alone here; the total graphical conception of these games, from a cinematic art direction standpoint, is obviously well-thought out. The reward, for us gamers, is a heightened in-game experience in which the suspension of disbelief is assisted by the sheer wonder in which we wander. Credible, interesting stories and characters only enrich the visual experience – and here we reach a byuump, as Inspector Clouseau would say, in the ryuud.

If it is true that we delight in the eye candy we come upon in our gaming travels, it is also true that eye candy alone doth not a successful game maketh. Two recent games, which I eagerly awaited and which proved to be profoundly disappointing, reminded me once and for all that I play computer games for something more than the scenery.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: The Final Cut, a 3^rd person realtime game from Arxel, boasts what may be the most beautiful, in terms of painterly technique, graphical environment of any current game. As in such games as Mystery Of The Druids, our hero moves through a set of detailed, realistic sets which succeed in transporting us into his world. The objects and structures possess depth and 3D presence and are rendered with enough clarity to visually thrill and enough generality to convince us of their “reality”. All this superb environmental detail exists in the service of one hell of a disaster of a game, however, a game so dismal and unconvincing that it becomes painful to travel through the wonderful places we are presented with, as we grow more and more bored, despairing and downright suicidal at the thought of actually staying in the game to its conclusion. After all that beauty, after all that painstaking detail, after all that Flemish Master painterly accomplishment, we find that we don’t give a good hoot and holler about the hero, the dead, the still living, or the next oh-so-clever but illogical plot twist that leaves us even more disengaged than the one before it. That this mess came from Arxel is shocking enough; that someone in charge over there actually gave the go-ahead to release it to the public is a far greater outrage.

The second disappointment was Jazz And Faust, from an outfit called Saturn-Plus. This came in a box festooned with the sorts of encomia (“will dazzle the most demanding adventure game fan”, “a truly unique experience even for seasoned adventure fans which [?] have been waiting for a quest worthy of their time”, “Jazz and Faust is a return to the glory days of adventure gaming”) that promised a legend in the making. Once again, the graphical representation of the world in which Jazz, Faust and assorted other characters moved was indeed,  stunning, magnificent even, but in service of a story which became, for all its trumpeted “two-stories-for-the-price-of-one” publicity, about as boring and tiresome an experience as one could find (to experience a two-character game which demonstrates what can be done with that concept when the big boys get it right, see Alone In The Dark: The New Nightmare). This is too bad, since I had high hopes for a game whose developers had taken the time to print an elaborate backstory in the game manual in order to provide the player with some advance knowledge of the two protagonists. They needn’t have bothered, as it turned out; characters, story (a real dog, filled with silly or just plain juvenile elements that would appeal to no one over the age of six – BULLETIN TO GAME DEVELOPERS: like the difference between genuine sentiment and sentimentality, the gulf separating childlike wonder from childish foolishness is oceanic), plot development, nothing came even remotely up to the standard of the visuals. One particularly outstanding development was that the voice actor for Faust portrayed him as being about one step away from Lenny in Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men. His (and here I am being charitable) (really, quite charitable) labored vocal affect, coupled with the patently ridiculous things he was given to say (one suspects the non-English speaking origin here of the development team – where in the Christing hell are all those foreigners who are supposed to have grown up with English as a second language?) lent a certain odor redolent of unintended humor to the proceedings. One other curiosity: once again, as in a number of other games (I feel a future column subject coalescing here, don’t you?), we have strangely inappropriate music. When characters were discussing dire and mysterious events, for example, we heard, inexplicably, a ditty fit for a boulevardier’s morning constitutional along the Seine. This brings to our attention an obvious question:

DOES ANYBODY EVEN CARE ABOUT THIS CRAP?

I guess not – which is all the more shame, since so many gaming reviewers apparently considered this in the nature of a masterwork. Perhaps they thought that adventure gamers, being something of a lower order species, would be perfectly happy with a game that insults not only their basic intelligence, but their sense of themselves as engaged, critically equipped beings. Because, don’t forget, there was a lot of eye candy.