I am a graphics whore. So sue me. Supposedly, this is one of the most lacerating insults in the malign lexicon of the self-defined “hardcore gamer”. Real gamers, you see, are above all that. They can masterfully distinguish good gameplay from mere pretty visuals, and would rather have the former every time. Only the PlayStation2-owning masses, the much-despised “casuals”, have the wool pulled over their eyes by something so trivial as good looks.

Eye candy is called eye candy for a reason - because it’s sweet. Videogames are a multimedia artform, and one of those media is the visual. Show me a game that makes only a half-arsed attempt at visual excellence, because it’s so confident about its other strengths, and I’ll show you a game that could have been even better if it had been prettier. We must be careful when drawing analogies between videogames and cinema, but try this one. Would you say Blade Runner would be just as good a film if it the story were told with hand puppets in a cardboard set? Or if Harrison Ford were replaced by Johnny Vegas?

The question is the same in games. Would Jet Grind Radio be as good if it resembled Paperboy? Would Soul Calibur be as unforgettable if it had exactly the same combat mechanics but had the same visuals as Way of the Exploding Fist? And surely one of the most superlative aspects of Rez is the joyful way in which it reconstructs the history of videogame representation in real-time, to a pumping beat: moving from Tron or Battlezone-style wireframe to a gorgeously stylized, solid-polygon world. Take that away and do it all in the style of 3D Monster Maze. Just as good? I don’t think so.

Naturally there are exceptions to this sensual law. Tetris, for example. None of the countless Tetris sequels and “reinterpretations” have been better games for having whizzy coloured graphics. Equally, however, they have not been worse simply because they have looked nicer. But this follows from the ultimately symbolic nature of the game, and those like it, such as Super Bust-a-Move or chess. The vast majority of today’s videogames are not purely abstract in the same way. And as you move away from abstraction, you’d better have some visual style to stop yourself looking like bad, low-res television.

Why has this myth about the irrelevance of visual quality in videogames come about? Here’s why: it’s down to the ambiguous nature of the term “graphics”. When we say “graphics”, it is often not clear whether we are talking about the aesthetic quality of the designed image, or the technical virtues of that image - resolution, detail, lighting effects and so on. This has entailed an idea that “graphics whores” are people who think that games are always better if they use the latest GPU and have the most fanatically detailed environments. The truth is that such considerations are largely irrelevant. The true visual sensualist considers the visual style independently of the system that it is running on. That is why we can agree that Vib Ribbon looks splendid. That is why I prefer Wip3out to WipEout: Fusion in every way, including visually. Wip3out’s environments are not as detailed as those of its successor, but they have an aesthetic coherence and an overall design character that is far more pleasing to my adrenaline-glazed eyes.

This points to a response to the tired old graphics-versus-gameplay argument from a historical perspective. If Defender is arguably as good as or superior to any modern-day shoot-’em-up, the argument runs, that must be because visuals are irrelevant to gameplay pleasure. After all, look at it: it’s low-res, it’s not 3D, and so on. But to argue this way is rather to miss the point that Defender remains an extraordinarily beautiful game. There is no point attempting to improve the visuals because they accomplish their job with such great élan in the first place: those fizzing rainbow lasers, those particulate explosions, the amazing amount of menace squeezed into the few pixels that constitute a Mutant. It is the style of the visual image, rather than just the brute quantity of information packed into it, that counts to the true graphics whore.

Similarly, the discerning graphics whore does not care how good an image looks in screenshots if it doesn’t move properly. For some reason, there’s a tendency in first-person shooters - Red Faction and Max Payne especially spring to mind - to marshall grimly all the computing power available in producing moody, pseudo-realistic environments, and then to populate these environments with insultingly jerky approximations of human movement. Good animation is an essential tool to encourage the player’s psychological projection into the gameworld.

The ideal situation, of course, is for the brute informational quantity embedded in the visual image to grow, without stultifying style. Because it can hardly be denied that better graphics (in the technical sense) can allow for innovations in gameplay. You wouldn’t improve Defender by upgrading its innards to 128 bits, but you would make an entirely different sort of game - such as Halo - possible.

The problem we have with contemporary games is not that everyone is concentrating on flashy graphics per se, but that aesthetic innovation has lagged behind technical innovation, for understandable and purely practical reasons - the pressure of development cycles, for instance, or the plain fact that there are never enough truly talented artists to go round in any industry.

But when authentic artistic imagination is married to contemporary technology - as in Ico - the result is a game where looks are supremely relevant, firstly because they define so beautifully the psychological atmosphere of the game; secondly because, with the technical power available to create Ico’s gorgeously grandiose architecture, they actually constitue the context in which such haunting gameplay is allowed. In fact, the distinction between those two terms - graphics and gameplay - is almost obliterated. And we can count ourselves fortunate that such a game has only now become possible. We can, finally, rejoice in being graphics whores.

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