Realism
For all the medium's excitement about realism in GRAPHICS and in being cinematic, video games that attempt what we might call realism in the sense we might use the term for a movie or book are to this day essentially avant-garde, outside of the simulator space. Narratives and premises often cling tightly to fantastical trappings. Or even when the setting is recognizably the real world, games cling to pulpy genre conventions like those of the detective, the romance, the action movie, the war story, or the medical drama, rather than attempting to recreate the everyday and mundane from first-order observation of real life. This is a list of games that do attempt realism in premise. If you can think of any, please comment!
Borderline games that include realism in stretches but ultimately flinch and incorporate fantastical or pulp elements:
Phantasmagoria 2 (uses long stretches of office-life mundanity as the vital foil for its sci-fi psych erotic horror)
Adios and the Shenmue series (no fantastical elements, but yes gangster-movie elements)
Night In The Woods (not just that it stars funny animal people, but also it eventually has a supernatural turn)
Papers, Please (famously gamifies mundanity and making ends meet, but in a fully fictional context that blossoms into a pulpy "join the resistance" thriller)
Borderline games that include realism in stretches but ultimately flinch and incorporate fantastical or pulp elements:
Phantasmagoria 2 (uses long stretches of office-life mundanity as the vital foil for its sci-fi psych erotic horror)
Adios and the Shenmue series (no fantastical elements, but yes gangster-movie elements)
Night In The Woods (not just that it stars funny animal people, but also it eventually has a supernatural turn)
Papers, Please (famously gamifies mundanity and making ends meet, but in a fully fictional context that blossoms into a pulpy "join the resistance" thriller)
30 Games
A joke, but one that pointedly never leaves the bounds of real life.
May lean too much into sitcom and soap opera stuff — certainly almost every expansion and sequel makes the game more ridiculous. I remember its grounded concept being an intriguing shock even for a 5 or 6 year old me, drawing me into convincing my mom to buy it just by seeing it on the shelf at Fry's Electronics.
Most Maxis games fit this category.
Really, almost all serious simulators fit this category. I'll list a few, but I don't want this list to just be all the simulators there are!
While this is dead-serious, there's a long line of independently-derived Lawn Mower Simulators stretching back to the mid-80s, and it's VERY telling that the idea of gamifying such a mundane chore has usually been considered a joke!
Sports management games are essentially business management games, but I'm mainly putting this here so I have a place to put that I don't think sports games count as realism! Sports is already a game. It isn't realistic in real life, it's theatre.
letshugbro
2 years ago