During my time at Clocktower Games, I had an on-going debate with Henry, the writer. He was of the opinion that realism in games – creating accurate simulations of water, ragdoll physics, gravity or any other natural phenomenon was a pointless waste of time. These things already exist in reality, so why bother making what would inevitably be a poor copy of them?
Over the course of this Opticks project, I’ve been wondering a lot about that – after adding in lensing and additive/subtractive light systems it started to get important. The next step is chromatic aberration – making red split from green and green from blue – but what’s the point of this? How far is it worth going?
Fiat Lux!
I think the answer is this: When you create an artificial system that mimics the laws of nature, you’re in control of when the laws are the same and when the laws are different. In reality, mirrors are never perfect reflectors – they might reflect 99.99% of light (many do) – but if you bounce light between them indefinitely then it’s eventually going to dissipate.
In Opticks, I can make a perfect reflector – even a mirror that reflects 110% of the light that falls on it. I don’t know why I’d want to right now, but the point is that I can.
And the errors in simulated reality can look so funny!
Arbitrarily altering the simulated reality doesn’t even need to be useful, either – it can be done just for the enjoyment of experiencing an altered reality. If you want to change your perception of a thing, you can either change your perception, or change the thing. Drugs do the former, simulations allow me to do the latter. This way, I can take screenshots of what I see!