Painting with pixels: how stylized art can heighten a game’s narrative

destructoid.com:

Photorealism in games can be really fun. Having characters and environments that look just like real life can help immerse you in a game’s world, and it can be exciting to see how graphics continue to improve year after year. But here’s the thing — I sometimes feel like we can obsess a bit too much over how real or not real a certain game’s art style is, picking apart every environment and every little detail on the character models.

I think back to the PS1 era, when people thought that the first Metal Gear game was as realistic-looking as they come. Players gushed about the immersion because of how lifelike it was. We laugh about it now, but anecdotes like that really speak to how much our minds fill in the gaps when it comes to storytelling, something I don’t think we give ourselves enough credit for these days.

A thread I saw on Twitter the other day does an excellent job of starting a conversation about how different styles of art can be effective in different scenarios. The initial tweet is a meme about photorealistic versus stylized art, but it’s actually referencing a famous quote from the classical painter Pablo Picasso. You know, the guy famous for making everyone look like a bunch of colorful shapes. Picasso was prodigious from an early age, and could paint at a level that was basically photorealistic when he was still a young child. Of course, as he got older, he developed one of the most iconic art styles in history — one that many argue portrays human emotion better than photorealism ever could. As the quote goes: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

Wait, isn’t Destructoid a video game website? Why are we talking about art history?

Well, I think that this