Every once in a while, I dig out some old screenshots from role-playing games. It was on my mind this week because I’m going to write about the game Starfield, which I’ve been playing lately (and feeling very critical about as I play).
These games often enable taking “photos” within the game, and I occasionally experiment with them to see if I can get images that are compositionally and visually interesting to me aside from being documentation of time spent in games. Mostly I don’t succeed, and the images I keep are more like a family album, a record of experiences and time and in some cases, the odd relationships you can form with people you don’t really know as well as imaginary connections with characters written by the game developers. The one enduring set of connections I formed was through the group weblog Terra Nova, which helped to sustain a guild of professors, graduate students, and writers for a long time.
There are games with beautiful landscapes where you can actually create compelling images, controlling much of what you would control if you had a camera in your hand. And yet those pictures frequently feel dead to me when I make them. They’re often of distant vistas that you never actually get to visit directly, in the person your in-game avatar—mountains too tall to climb, oceans you can never sail on or swim through, buildings that can’t be entered. Or they’re evanescent landscapes that you visit on a quest to which you can never return unless you play again with another character, places you don’t really inhabit or see, which have no quality of lived memory to go with them—they’re just backdrops to something functional, a kind of in-game work you’re doing where you remember the task and the outcomes (loot, experience points), not the setting or place.
Or, as in the case of Starfield, they’re landscapes that look great the first time you see them but that you discover are repeated over and over again in more or less the same form. You could argue that’s like life, too: mountains look similarly everywhere, beaches look much the same, even cities blur into one another, and the only really obviously unique landscapes become banal simply because everyone who visits them takes the same damn shot. I’ve already seen Horseshoe Bend in Arizona and Gullfoss Waterfall in Iceland so much that I almost feel I’d gain nothing by being there. But somehow the repeating landscapes in video games a different kind of turn-off, a revelation of the underlying technique used to make them. I’ve only ever seen a few landscapes in video games that struck me as both organic and genuinely unfamiliar, that weren’t just trying to mimetically invoke “much taller mountains” or “a desert, only purple”. And oddly enough, on seeing those, I often forget to take a picture, because I’m too busy taking it in.
The game whose screenshots I most treasure visually, not just for the memory, is probably still Witcher 3, partly because the visuals are so sharp and the landscapes were both familiar and particular, worth seeing and worth playing all at once.
One of these is not like the other.
I really liked the landscapes in Gothic III. Not the best game, but very epic and lush and lived-in. Also Everquest, if you remember that, because every place you go is a real place, where you spend serious time, often with friends.