[seabombs]

There's a term I read about a long time ago, I think it was "aesthetic completeness" or something like that. It was used in the context of video games whose art direction was fully realized in the game, i.e. increases in graphics hardware or capabilities wouldn't add anything to the game in an artistic sense. The original Homeworld games were held up as examples.

Anyway, this reminded me of that. Making these pictures in anything but the tools of the time wouldn't just change them, they'd be totally different artworks. The medium is part of the artwork itself.

[timoth3y]

The same holds true for everything from cave paintings to Roman frescos. It's part of human expression. The tools of that expression shape it.

For example, Bach's music was shaped by the fact that the harpsichord had no sustain. The piano changed that, but "upscaling" Bach's work to take advantage of this new technology would destroy them. You use the new technology to play them as they were written for the old. The beauty comes through despite the change.

[madaxe_again]

Similarly, Liszt made full use of what modern, powerful pianofortes are capable of - although were he a man of our times, he’d probably have been fronting a heavy metal band.

[dahart]

Switched on Bach is one of my favorite albums of all time.

[drewlesueur]

This reminds me of how the pixel version of Chicago font looks great but the vector version doesn't.

https://x.com/susankare/status/1599662756252483585?s=46

[libraryatnight]

Understanding this point about cave paintings is crucial to not being a human piece of garbage.

[techpineapple]

It’s interesting to think about the intersection of cultural, technology and aesthetic.

Gaming embraces most of its historical aesthetics while say movies do not. There aren’t serious attempts to replicate the aesthetic of 50’s tv (which are tied in heavily with the culture of the time) similarly, jn the eighties and I imagine prior, I’ve been watching Miami vice and you can tell lots of the rooms are cheap sets with pretty minimal props. This is on the one hand definetly not full formed, but on the other hand I’ve grown to appreciate that aesthetic, And again other art forms like painting and video games seem to appreciate all eras of aesthetics in their modern versions in a Way tv and movies don’t. (Maybe just due to expense?)

[bane]

I was also considering the effect of how silent computing used to be. It created a tension and expectation when waiting for an image to appear like waiting for a curtain to open on a play. So when the artwork appeared, the artists worked to make it beautiful. It was almost pushing the edge of what these systems could do, and so as a viewer placed you in an engaging experience right at the state of the art.

[al_borland]

I have to imagine that fully realizing a vision can only truly take place when the artists are not working at the limits of the present day tools. I’m thinking of something like games today that choose an art style and run with it, rather than trying to push the hardware as hard as possible.

Was this the artist’s vision, or were they simply making the best of the tools they had?

[nine_k]

I'd say that the nearly opposite is often true: the limitations shape art and even make it art. The masterful handling of limitations, and doing apparently impossible, is a legitimate part of art.

Academic Western poetry shed the metre and the rhyme in an attempt to be free from limitations and more fully express things. Can you quote something impressive? OTOH rap, arguably the modern genre of folk poetry, holds very firmly to the limiting metre and rhyme, and somehow stays quite popular. If rappers did not need rhyme as a tool of artistic expression, they probably would abandon it, instead of becoming sophisticated at it.

Same with pixel art, and other forms of pushing your medium to the limits, and beyond.

[zozbot234]

Pixel art is very much still around today, even though it's far from "pushing" the limits of current hardware. It's pursuing a rather consistent "vision" of maximizing quality while staying within the bounds of a predefined level of detail (i.e. resolution) and color depth.

[AndrewStephens]

I am not a game purist and modern games are just fine, but I do not see the point of AAA games employing 300 artists to model blades of grass that have no gameplay effect. Sure, the screen shots lot great but unless you are making GrassSimulator2000 it would have been better to use those resources for something else.

[bredren]

As a person who spent a great deal of time restoring a long neglected backyard to include a small lawn to play on, I am interested in playing GrassSimulator2000.

[noufalibrahim]

When id was pushing the envelope of technology (mid to late 90s) and creating more and more startling games, I remember thinking that none of them really had the appeal of many of the earlier games. And apparently Carmack thought that the story etc. of the game wasn't important. Reading masters of DOOM and watching my 8 year old play DOOM on an emulator made me reconsider. He had a jumpscare in a way that would have been impossible unless the game was so immersive and that is a technological feat. I do agree with you that one can go too far but it's not wholly a pointless side quest.

[dehrmann]

There's a solid chance GTA VI will include a lawn mowing minigame.

[mattbettinson]

Maybe recency bias cause I’m playing it right now, but Breath of the Wild comes to mind

[tinco]

It might be but it's hard to tell because it's such a recent game. The Wind Waker might be a better example because it's now 20 years old and still renders and plays basically as if it's current gen on modern hardware.

[z3c0]

I don't know, I think some improved hardware would greatly improve the aesthetics of the Lost Woods, which severely drops in frame rate when docked. Handheld, the diminished fidelity at 720p buys back some frames.

I'd be inclined to agree about some older Zelda games though, namely Wind Waker. I replayed it on GCN recently, and can attest that HD Wii U version really didn't add anything to the aesthetics.

[anton-c]

Thats an interesting concept. Considering it, the big first party titles certainly had stellar presentation art-wise. Doesn't seem like they were limited in achieving their vision in say, sonic the hedgehog. Even the later games with pseudo-3d the art direction makes it feel complete and like it fits the aesthetic.

And even the new ones that have gone back to that style have the same 'look'(obviously because they're trying to be like those old games) but the graphical fidelity doesn't seem to change much beyond more pixels.

[xgkickt]

Vib Ribbon is one example I can think of that also exhibits that property.

[SlowTao]

A lesser known title that I think hit that perfectly is Rez. So much so that the re-release almost 15 years later was for the most part, just higher resolution and cleaner rendering. But the overall style was not touched one bit.

[st_phan]

Do you think you could find the article? It sounds super interesting.

I tried Claude and it mentioned the term might actually be „Aesthetic sufficiency“, but I couldn‘t find an essay with Homeworld on it.

[niedzielski]

maybe https://www.gorzek.com/nonfiction/essays/homeworld/ which I found via https://duckduckgo.com/?q=aesthetic+completeness+%22homeworl....

[tonijn]

Yes indeed! "The medium is the message" - Marshall McLuhan. Although you could also argue that "The interface is the message"

[commandersaki]

Sounds like they're describing Interstate 76.

[lukan]

Hm, are you sure that there is not some nostalgia at play here?

To me they look horribly pixelated and at least some would improve aesthetically a lot for me with a higher resolution.

[zozbot234]

Even today these pictures have an almost perfect resolution for showing on a compact e-paper display. The viewing area on the original Mac models was not that much bigger, either. They only look "horribly pixelated" when artificially upscaled for a modern big screen.

(A pixel-art specific upscaling filter would mitigate that issue, of course.)

[fwipsy]

Of course there's a subjective element, but I was born about a decade after these were created and I find them to be beautiful. I love the mural with the tree, it's amazing how it creates a sense of openness that wants me to go outside, even with such a limited palette.

[tumnus]

Your opinion isn't popular, but I agree with you. Taking just the first image as an example... this is a digital recreation/modification of a Saul Steinberg cover for the New Yorker originally done in 1976. This cover created a extremely popular subgenre of stylized map drawing at the time, but the Mac version looks like mostly clip art images all splodged together with no real sense of composition or perspective. There are many other examples in here which I feel were made by people who happened to have access to the technology, but did not necessarily have great artistic ability.

That being said, although there are also some extremely good examples in here (in my subjective opinion), I absolutely think there is a nostalgia element at play. I worked on these machines in the 80s and feel that nostalgia myself.

[const_cast]

Many new games are released today with pixel art because that's the aesthetic they want to portray.

Some games, like Borderlands or Wind Waker, use aggressive cell shading. They age like wine, because the game has a distinct art style that gives it character.

[anthk]

You have no idea on how charming these games look.