From Pixels to Photorealism: An Analysis of Technical and Aesthetic Development of Contemporary Video Game Graphics

Abstract

The main aim of this dissertation is to analyze the current state and recent history of video game industry to be able to examine the important factors that drive the industry and foresee what it will become in the future in terms of visuals. This examination will serve as a single stepping stone across the stream of tools, issues and graphical styles of today’s video game industry. Since the paper is about art and graphics only, it will address particularly the artists who work on video games. However titles such as ‘designer’, ‘developer’ and ‘artist’ will be used correspondingly referring to the roles in the industry. Methodology of the paper will follow the pattern of giving descriptions and information on the subject, breaking it up with various opinions and examples and finally, statement of main points with a conclusion. This method will be followed for every sub-chapter, chapter and the whole work. Another aim of the paper is to raise interest and criticism on certain issues and it will follow series of topics to achieve this goal. These topics are covered in chapters: (A) Introduction, scope and summary; (B) Background Information, brief modern history of video games; (C) Behind the Interaction, hardware and software used in or influential to the creation of game art; (D) Modern Video Game Art, modern concepts, contemporary issues and graphical styles; (E) A New Interactive Photorealistic Experience: “I’m Martin,” the relation between the paper and diploma project conducted along the dissertation; (F) Conclusions, short summary and final words. A more detailed lineup of topics would be as following: Introduction to the subject with content of the paper and a short summary; modern history of video games; modern hardware that influence an artist’s work on a video game’s graphics such as controllers, displays, graphic tablets, motion capture and 3D scanning devices and virtual reality systems; modern software that has an effect on video game visuals such as game engines, digital painting, modeling, texturing and rendering software and graphics shaders and custom tools; abstraction and its use in video games; accessibility issue, how it is addressed by video games; art games, definition and examples; automated computer generation of video game graphics; various modern video game graphical styles such as pixelart, low-poly, voxels, ASCII, stop-motion and photorealism; relationship between video games and other media such as cinema, music and animation; I’m Martin, a project realized alongside this dissertation with photorealistic visuals that is on the border between a video game and an interactive experience; conclusion with a restatement of information and ideas that took place throughout the paper.