At Edge Online, N'Gai Croal in his blog discusses some interesting issues relating to realism, verisimilitude, and detail, many of which echo some of my own experiences.

Because even those titles which are widely seen as exemplars of game realism, be they Crysis or Mass Effect or Grand Theft Auto, are themselves stylised in some way. So what is it that we mean when we say that a game is realistic? Are we talking about verisimilitude? Detail? Atmosphere?

I tend to think that of all these, "realism" is actually the least important, followed by detail, atmosphere, and verisimilitude. This is the opposite of the order they are usually discussed (perhaps it's a prejudice against long words).

Realism, especially in a combat game, is the last thing you want. You don't want things to be real, just to seem real, or real enough. The exploits most combat games require of their players in order to "win" are ridiculous by their very nature, even for the super-soldiers those games have as protagonists. The last thing they need on top of that are realistic treatments of weapons, damage, fatigue, and the like.

I think that's a big part of the reason that so many very successful franchises (Halo, Mass Effect) largely operate outside those parameters by operating in the future, where unrealistic situations and damage models can be explained away by advanced technologies-- better shields, better weapons, better vehicles.

It is where realism is misapplied, or rather selectively applied, in games like GTA, where I think there's the most dissonance. Things look and seem like they are happening in the real world, but the perception of verisimilitude recedes as more and more unrealistic things happen, or else the fun turns into frustration when the virtual reality restricts the player's actions.

We have a well defined, carefully orchestrated, properly planned universe to explore not exploit.

--Frank O'Connor, July 2008, GameFocus

I can tell you that if you could think of a game that would work with a party atmosphere that would not gut the franchise, or milk it, we would think about it, seriously.

Jason Pace, January 2009, Videogamer.com

What's next? January 2009, Microsoft announces Halo Kart, Halo Halo Revolution and Halo Smash Brawl?

What part of a "party atmosphere" game in the Halo universe could possibly be exploration and not exploitation? How about a nice clear line in the sand now, not just "we know what we're doing"-- how about a laundry list of what you won't do? Promise us no karaoke, no karting games, no minigolf. Please.

RTS? We'll see, the demo is out any minute.

MMO? Don't blame them for trying, although I think something like this is just a lot harder to execute than a shooter, and the further away the franchise gets from Bungie the harder it is to execute.

This article boils down to this paraphrase:

Everyone agrees sequels are bad. I mean, not all sequels are bad, but sequels in general are bad. And just like every game downloaded by a pirate is a lost sale, every dollar budgeted for a sequel is a dollar less for one of the kind of fun and original games they made when I was a kid and they just don't make anymore because the industry is full of beancounting sellouts who like sequels because they're safe. And that's why I don't want another Bioshock game.

This is almost complete and utter poppycock. It's so ridden with nostalgia masquerading as judgment, logical fallacies taken as common knowledge, and flawed premises that it's hard to know where to begin. But the beginning is as good a place as any.

"this is not a hate piece towards the Bioshock franchise. It is a deep look at one of the biggest problems in the video game industry right now, sequels and how they kill originality/creativity."

So we've got sequels kill originality/creativity. Let's separate those out.

BioWare CEO Ray Muzyka's advanced the possibility that someday gamers would play games on one ubiquitous console. There are "valid reasons," he says, why the market would trend that direction, with the exception of "Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo maybe having some issues with that [as] they might want to continue their platforms."

You think?

This has come up before, and I'm pretty sure that it was Muzyka behind those earlier remarks also. I find it hard to consider the idea anything but the most fanciful of wishful thinking. Bioware makes great games with huge amounts of content, and their efforts would be greatly simplified on a number of levels if they could target a single ubiquitous platform.

The problem is that the benefits for such a scheme are asymmetric, and skewed sharply in the direction of the content producer, offering little or no benefit to platform owners or gamers. If BioWare makes its games for several different platforms-- say, Xbox 360, Windows, and the Sony PlayStation 3, it means that gamers have a reasonable amount of choice for gaming platform and can still assure themselves of access to BioWare games. Reducing the number of platforms BioWare has to target might make developing their games less expensive, but it seems extremely unlikely that this savings would be passed on to gamers in terms of lower title prices. After all, with only a single ubiquitous console platform, there is no longer any choice-- if you want to play a BioWare game you'd have to use that platform. If you don't want to, tough luck. If anything, standardizing on a single platform would likely increase prices (although the higher prices rose, the greater an opportunity there would be for someone to enter the market and therefore blow your "single platform" market right out of the water by undercutting you.