Videogames aren't messy enough. This thought struck me as I stepped out of the Future Publishing offices yesterday lunchtime and was confronted with the apocalyptic site of Bath's Marchant Passage shopping centre being razed to the ground by gigantic diggers. The unsightly Sixties mini-mall is being replaced by the shiny new Southgate development and crowds of people gathered to watch the destruction. I can't be the only games journalist who passed by and thought, 'hey, wouldn't that make a great videogame? Driving bulldozers into soulless brutalist shopping arcades - endless sand box fun!'
But it wouldn't make a great videogame, because videogames are crap at mess.
Player-controlled environmental destruction has been around for years, but in the past it has largely been limited to the odd bullet hole (admittedly effective in Goldeneye), or smashed rows of wine glasses on a bar. Very precise, very controlled and very little, if any, debris.
THQ's Mars-based first-person shooter Red Faction is often credited as the first title that let you blow-up huge chunks of the scenery, but again, there were restrictions imposed by the linear narrative - you could blow up what you wanted, unless it was, say, a crucial locked door you didn't have the key to.
Black and Mercenaries were perhaps the ultimate current/last-gen examples of destructible scenery, Criterion's blaster filled with exploding barrels, falling plaster and shattering glass. But still not intrinsically messy enough for me. If shooting the ceiling brought down individual panels, exposing the sub-structure of the building, the water pipes, the miles of electrical wiring, then maybe...
But mess is expensive in programming terms. Creating buildings that contain mess that just might become visible if a player shoots in that general direction is computationally wasteful and memory-sapping. Also, remembering where the player has made a mess, then retaining that mess when they go into a new area and then come back again is another prohibitively costly endevour when you're working with a teeny amounts of video RAM.
Perhaps PS3 and Xbox 360 will solve the mess problem. When I went up to see Evolution Studios a couple of months ago, one of the artists there told me that no-one was aiming for beauty in environment design anymore - beauty is easy. The aim these days is squalor, wear and dissolution. This is why the Motorstorm artists have spent so long creating realistically deformable mud, why the programmers have developed realistic splatter effects, why the cars disintegrate into a thousand molten parts when they crash. But then, have you seen the crashes in Motorstorm? The bits all sort of fall out, as though they were kept in a bucket in the back of the vehicle - you still don't get the feeling of sickening impact, the weird unknowable result of metal machine hitting metal machine at 180 MPH.
At least next-gen games are looking to do interesting things with mess. In both Battlefield Bad Company and Mercenaries 2 we're promised tactical destruction - the ability to blow stuff up to further your strategic efforts. In the former, for example, you can use a grenade launcher to blow a hole in the side of a building, then use the resulting covered position as a sniper post. The John Woo endorsed shooter, Stranglehold, promises to take aesthetic destruction to the next level - it uses Midway's proprietary Massive D physics 'engine' to bring rag doll-like physical plausibility to environmental damage - everything in the game, they tell us, can be broken.
That's not what I'm getting at really, but it'll do - sometimes scale is a good stand-in for detail. Ultimately, though, in the age of near photorealism, intricate, plausible mess is important to get right. Mess is life.
