Without a doubt the biggest step that gaming has taken graphically happened almost a decade ago, when those familiar characters that we know and love first stepped out into the third dimension. Now that we’ve done that and we’ve seen at E3 what’s in store for us for the best part of the next decade, what’s apparent is that graphics have nowhere to go beyond what we’ve seen before, but bigger and better – more characters on screen, more detail, better textures, faster framerates, etc. Surely it’s a matter of time before true photorealism is achieved, and then all that’s left is to try to give it more and more raw power until there is no real limit on the sheer amount of stuff on screen.

That’s all in the future, but it must be of real concern for the industry bigwigs to wonder how they can sell consoles when the graphics aren’t going to get shiny and new every few years. This upcoming generation is geared towards nothing but more polygon-pushing power, but what is there left when graphics have nowhere to go?

Realistic in-game physics were brought to the forefront last year thanks to Half-Life 2’s tight integration of the Havok physics engine with the gameplay, and the underrated Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy (pick up a cheap copy if you can) showed other ways to use it. There are rumblings of dedicated PPUs (physics processing units) being added to future hardware in the same way that dedicated GPUs came about as 3D graphics began to pick up momentum. Valve showed us how physics could not only provide some interesting puzzles but also create a fantastic form of “sandbox” to play in – who didn’t spend at least some of their time with the game destroying furniture or finding creative ways to fling projectiles at enemies?

Looking at the original Doom and the original Halo, it’s easy to see how far artificial intelligence has come and how much more fun it can make those ubiquitous gunfights. Enemies coming at you in a straight line with no regard for their health just won’t fly anymore, and now it’s almost a requirement that your enemies run and hide when you’re kicking their ass, flank you, and take cover. Now we’re starting to see squad tactics and chains of command in enemies (kill an Elite in Halo and watch his Grunt underlings run away in terror), and the sheer number-crunching power of the latest consoles should see some pretty clever stuff. I can’t wait for Halo 3 just so I can see what Bungie manage to pull off.

This speculation is all well and good and I’m sure that any hardcore gamer can see the possibilities, but the trouble is always going to be getting the casual gamer to buy into it. Selling them lifelike graphics and shiny eye candy is one thing but most of them couldn’t or wouldn’t care less about whether or not you can knock over the scenery or the enemies can react to you. They just want to shoot shit up and get a quick shot of adrenaline, and the closest most will get to a cerebral game that requires any time investment is GTA, and so if a console is capable of photorealistic graphics they’re not going to see any reason to buy a new one.

Of course this could all be moot since arguably any console that is capable of true photorealism will be perfectly capable of running a great physics engine and human-like AI, but as phenomenally powerful hardware begins to give diminishing returns it won’t be long before they really are going to have to find another way to get an apathetic casual fanbase to part with £300 every few years.

I’ve been thinking about the recent announcement of IGN’s new software to allow developers to deploy advertising into games as an additional revenue stream (press release), both for the developer and IGN themselves. There’s been a lot said about the implications of this for IGN’s credibility as an independent news source, as if they’re set to make more money on a game with their software in it will the editorial team be encouraged to inflate their scores even more than they sometimes do? I’m not even mentioning the issues with advertising in games becoming increasingly overt to the point of annoyance, and we all know how invidious IGN’s advertising on their site can be.

Advertising, or rather product placement in games is nothing new but what this technology will allow, in addition to Steam-style automatic content serving, is for your year-old game to suddenly start showing ads for the latest Hollywood movie or a new title from the developer. This has good points (more money for developers as costs rise) and bad points (why am I getting advertising in a product I just paid £40 for?) like any advertising system and whether or not IGN will be as overzealous with their in-game advertising remains to be seen, but the implications for them as a source of reputable games journalism can’t be ignored.

I frequent many message boards around the Internet (including IGN’s) and it’s absolutely inevitable that any reference to an IGN review will bring immediate jokes about inflated scores and payoffs from developers for a few extra points. I don’t know about the veracity of the claims although I will say that they do have a tendancy to rate higher than other sources, but it surely can’t help a poor reputation to actually have a financial interest in the success of the games that you’re recommending to people. It’s expected of official magazines but an independent source should remain independent from what they report on. Even if the involvement is purely nominal and the editorial teams are not impacted, there is already evidence that IGN sales have more control than they should. Just look at this post concerning the dismissal of Dave Smith from former IGN PS2 editor Dave Zdyrko:

“I foresaw Smith getting the boot some day because of constant complaining by the sales department with regard to his reviews costing us ad deals. I even overheard a certain executive in sales say in the bathroom that he couldn’t understand why we still had him on staff.”

I’ll certainly be watching the coverage of any games that contain this new advertising technology.

What better way to celebrate the debut of the new design, tweaked slightly from last night’s preview, than a rant on the bane of any web designer’s existence: Internet Explorer? If you’re using it now go and get Firefox or Opera – you’ll be doing both of us a favour.

So much has been written on the relative merits of standard HTML and the new combination of XHTML and CSS that it hardly seems necessary. If you don’t know what this is about you can read this for a comparison of the two as a medium for web design and just why plain HTML is too antiquated on the modern web. Easier updating, 70% smaller file sizes, huge reductions in bandwidth, increased compatibility with non-computer Internet browsers (a web-enabled phone with limited resolution can just ignore the stylesheets and have a perfectly legible text page, for example)? Sounds great, right? Well, this is where the issues with IE start creeping in.

Whereas everyone else is improving their support for these new standards Microsoft, with their 90% of the browser market, are holding everyone back with their absolutely abysmal support for CSS. Sites like the CSS Zen Garden (every page on the site is exactly the same basic XHTML file but with CSS controlling the layout and images) show how powerful CSS design can be, and the adoption of it is continuing to accelerate as time goes on but you can, and indeed I did many times while writing the code behind this design, write a perfectly valid CSS file that renders on every single alternative browser, only to find that it looks completely wrong in IE. Of every browser that people could be using they decide to stick with the one that doesn’t work properly…

Since writing this design was my first attempt at coding a page completely with the XHTML and CSS combination I was nearly suicidal to find that my pretty page which worked perfectly in Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Camino, Safari, IE Mac, Konquerer, and any other browser that you can imagine but looked completely wrong in IE (see what I mean here). I sat here writing and rewriting code for literally two hours before I finally managed to get the fucking thing to render correctly, and all because Microsoft wanted to rest on their laurels and leave their shoddy product as it was. It was only because Firefox and its community-driven marketing campaign managed to drop their stranglehold on the market to less than 90% that MS even bothered to start development on IE7, and you know that when it comes out it will probably suffer from many of the same bugs but with the same tabbed browsing that everything else had years ago. And chances are they’ll be credited with it, as well.

I’m a definite convert and I’ll be using this powerful combination in any future development that I do, but Microsoft need to get themselves in gear if they’re going to stop holding the rest of us back. I’ve been using Firefox for as long as I can remember (since it was called Phoenix, and the standard Mozilla suite before that) so having these new designs just work has been something that I’m used to. It’s too bad that most people don’t even know that web standards exist and are just as happy with their POS of a browser because it’s the one bundled in with their operating system.

I just saw this about the in-game advertising in Splinter Cell Chaos Theory, where an Ubisoft representative says that the advertising is implemented “in a thoughtful and selective way to enhance the realism of the game.”

Call me cynical, but I haven’t seen security operatives ‘working’ at computers with a parade of Nokia phones scrolling past. I also highly doubt that super spies like Sam Fisher make an effort to hold their packets of Airwaves chewing gum full-frontal so that everyone can see what brand they chew, and although it might technically be true that in the event of a blackout of New York City the only remaining light would come from the Airwaves blimp above the Yankee Stadium, doesn’t that image sound like the perfect opportunity for an advertiser to show their product logo on an otherwise blank screen?

Now I’m all for advertising in games if it keeps the development costs under control – with piracy being rife, competition being fierce, and costs spiralling ever upwards it’s unreasonable to expect games to guarantee their own profit margins – and when it’s done properly it can enhance the realism. You walk down the street and see signs for McDonalds and Coca-Cola after all; not ‘Fast Food’ and ‘Coola’. The Japanese version of Shenmue had Coca-Cola machines along the streets which sold Coca-Cola and Fanta, and it was more realistic than the English versions and their generic soft drink machines. Similarly, the fact that Sam Fisher’s PDA in Pandora Tomorrow had Sony-Ericsson at the top didn’t bother me because they didn’t bash you over the head with it.

It’s not just games that do it – movies and TV shows where the characters drink beverages with generic white labels take will draw your attention more than one where they drink Pepsi and drive a Ford. Castaway was criticised for being one long Fed-Ex commercial, but I contend that it would have been criticised by the same people if he’d worked for a non-existent delivery company that just happened to have offices in most countries and its own fleet of aircraft. That’s product placement done right, but I, Robot is the perfect example of it done wrong.

If you’re a developer sat there trying to work out how to draw a few extra bucks from your new game, don’t be afraid of advertising. It isn’t annoying by default and certainly can enhance the realism for the player. Just don’t cram it down our throat because then it does ruin our experience. If that means you get a few dollars less from the advertisers, who cares? If your fans had a better time with the game they’ll be that much more likely to give you another $50 next time around.