Aesthetic completion
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Aesthetic completion is the achievement of an aesthetic's fullest expression.
Aesthetic completion can be seen as the measure of dissonance between the mental model of an interactive system, created in a player's mind via representative elements, and the actual workings of said interactive system as defined by its mechanics.
The majority of today's (popular) video games strive for realism through photorealistic graphics. As a result, these games' visuals are impressive immediately following their release. Over time, the visual quality of a generation is overshadowed by the achievements of the next, and they appear worse and worse. Players introduced to such games later in its life will notice a significant amount of decay. Expectations of these players, as determined by today's standard, are retroactively applied to such games without being in the context of history. As such, regarding photorealism, the older a game is, the more it has visually decayed.
In contrast, games using a visual aesthetic well tuned to the available computational resources do not suffer such consequences. Examples of such games include StarCraft, Diablo, and The Sims. They have enjoyed long lifespans partly due to their 2-D graphics which would likely not improve with better hardware. The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and a number of other cel-shaded games, as well as abstract games such as Rez, Ōkami, or the shooters of Kenta Cho, hold up longer than games such as Splinter Cell and Chronicles of Riddick. Homeworld and the first two games of the Thief series are additional examples of games that exhibit aesthetic completion.
Aesthetic completion need not apply only to graphics. The concept can be applied to nearly any facet of game design, such as the player's vocabulary and environment. System Shock 2, for instance, disallows talking with NPCs by putting the player in a situation where this wouldn't be possible anyway. This decision was made due to the difficulty of crafting convincing player-NPC conversations at the time. Gonzalo Frasca makes a similar point comparing Grand Theft Auto III to Shenmue in this Game Studies article.
