Recently a PR executive involved in the games industry spoke out against what he perceived as an unhelpful tradition in videogame reviewing. Why, he asked, did reviewers insist on talking about the technology in games? After all, film reviewers don’t harp on about technology. If we want to give games the attention they deserve, he argued, we should be judging them on the story, and the experience they provide.

Well, maybe he is half right. When attempting to evoke the splendours of Devil May Cry’s gothic architecture, or the delicious fear induced by Half-Life, it’s not very helpful to describe the polygon engine: we need a higher-level aesthetic vocabulary that might borrow from the fields of art criticism, psychology or graphic novels. And any discussion of Metal Gear Solid 2 among the cognoscenti is probably going to be centred on the content of the story and the game’s handling of its story elements. Again, no need to speak in very technical terms.

But in a sense, these games are the exception. We don’t need to discuss them in technical terms because, at base, the technology works (unless you are unfortunate enough to be playing the nasty PAL version of DMC). Book reviewers don’t need to mention the fact that a book’s pages are of a certain size, printed on both sides and bound together at the spine, because the technology of the codex is mature and standardised over centuries. And the cinematic technologies of camera and projection have also been standardised for decades. There is no appreciable difference for an audience even when a film is entirely shot, edited and projected in the digital realm. And so, in these cases, there is no reason to talk about the medium’s technological aspects: we are freed for higher-level aesthetic discussion.

But videogames are not as mature a form as books or films. And so it is often necessary to talk about the technology in a game, precisely because that technology is broken.

Take, for example, framerate, that eternal bugbear of over-ambitious developers. The importance of a smooth and consistent framerate - a high temporal resolution - can hardly be overemphasised. Inadequate temporal resolution limits the flow of information available to the player, and thus limits the speed and fluency of her conversation with the game system - which is one definition of what “immersiveness” might imply. When I’m playing a busy level of Perfect Dark in Perfect Agent mode, and I find that the horizontal swing of my weapon has been quantised into absurdly large arcs by the low temporal resolution, I find that the outcome depends more on luck, or grim determination, than the exercise of subtle motor skills. As one of the Free Radical team said recently, framerate directly affects the quality of the experience in this style of game. This is true of racing games as well, where in some poorly programmed cases the player must negotiate snapshots of a road that occur 20 metres apart, rather than smoothly racing through coherent space.

The temporal resolution of film has been standardised at 24 frames per second. Not much room for discussion there. But there would be if we were constantly subjected to movies whose temporal resolution fluctuated wildly. We’d complain about a film that dropped to 10 frames per second every now and again. And films must still occasionally be discussed from a technological point of view. When I reviewed the Tomb Raider film, for example, it struck me that the quality of CGI was unusually poor. The digitally animated rock monkeys seemed far less convincing than the painstakingly realised stop-frame monsters of Ray Harryhausen 35 years ago, and the visual disjunction between the (literally) incredible enemies and the naturalistic live action rendered the monsters less convincing, in context, than they were in any of the Tomb Raider games, where Lara, her environment and her enemies are all rendered at the same level of visual complexity.

A videogame, like a film, is an aesthetic monument built on foundations of technology. If the foundation is shaky, the building is going to wobble. And so far the foundations are shaky more often in games than they are in films. Take Grand Theft Auto 3. To say that this is an excellent game which could have been improved with higher temporal resolution does not seem to be an unfair comment. In fact the real technological flaw in its system is the targeting of non-scoped weapons in the third-person view. There has been no excuse for such amazingly poor implementation of targeting since at least the innovation of the Z-lock in Ocarina of Time. As a game critic, I could spend my whole time waxing lyrical about the city’s atmosphere, the stunt jumps and the amusing Sopranos-esque storyline, but I’d be remiss not to point out that the targeting system makes it harder than it should be to enjoy those rarefied qualities. Technology is not just one aspect of a game that can be happily divorced from the others; everything else depends upon it.

I have a dream: that one day, all videogames will be like Jak & Daxter. Before you prepare to burn this magazine in disgust, let me explain. There can hardly be any argument that J&D is technologically superb. So the PS2 is condemned to jaggies and low-resolution textures, is it? Uh, no. The temporal resolution is mostly very solid; there is a 60Hz mode; there are no loading times; the camera behaves itself. Faced with a game of such outstanding artisanship, we can immediately move to higher-level discussions of the environmental design, the range of interesting actions available, and other considerations of aesthetics and gameplay. We are freed to decide whether we like the game or not for its own sake.

When technology works properly, it becomes invisible. At high levels, it becomes indistinguishable from magic. But there’s no short cut to such immersive sorcery. The technology has to function first, and if it doesn’t, we have to stand up and say so.

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