But in a game (which is art if it's called Manhunt!); which by its own premise is not the real world, then adding elements of the weird and unatural should be like the difference between reading a great work of fiction and a text book. Which one would be more interesting.
The difference is more like reading a book which subscribes to the standards of conventional English, or reading a book that arbitrarily puts punctuation wherever it wants, uses different spellings, and doesn't separate words clearly.
Lost! Plan. Nets a game - deSIGn'd Xbox for the 360 : PC,In-car-nation-and-is't,goINg is't letto u no just about this often as. As possible. And by. Means any possible. MiGh t this be? having 'a' Game entirely designed mechanic? console For a; szd-scrn image couldorit be a of a 360 SPLASHED contwollllla inder-throughout-midenly! the game. Just don't. You forget its origins, okay!
The above is a paragraph from a gaming website, with a lot of artistic creativity applied, shunning the boring rules of grammar and spelling. How many books would you buy written like that? I wouldn't buy any, because the story would be lost as I struggled to make sense of it. If the world of the game doesn't make sense to me, I won't appreciate it. I'm trained to see a question mark and interpret it as a question, and it's hard to ignore them and not have them affect my understanding of the text.
One of the new advantages to next-gen is better realism in emotional expression. nAo joked about photo-surrealism, but the game he's working on strives to make the fantasy characters as believable as possible but implementing the subtle facial movements that convey emotion. If they were to throw the standards we all understand out the window, and have the characters walk around with fixed grins and laugh when they're chopped up, how's that going to affect the experience? Artistic liberties can only be applied in some situations, and always at the risk of alienating most of your potential market.
IMO nitpicking over DoF in a game where you pursue the obviously everyday normal experience of flying a dragon whilst being attacked by various weird and wondeful creatures to the backdrop of a world that is at once familiar but strange is, in itself, a waste of forum space.
I can agree with your POV. It's a choice the devs get to make, not constrained by certain limits. There are occasions though where not following the norm is a bad choice, and 'it's a game so they can do whatever they want' is a sweeping excuse that doesn't work. Designers have to work with a degree of realism, the minimum of which makes the game acceptable. eg. Driver had cards floating through the air when they crashed. That's unrealistic, but the game worked because the setting was realistic, there was gravity, cars turned left when you pushed left, things were light on the side the light was, and so forth. And also the game wasn't trying to be serious. We had a good laugh over those spectacular, unrealistic crashes. If the same was in a more intense and serious situation, it'd ruin the experience.
