I admit it. When screenshots first appeared, I was one of those people who didn’t like the new cel-shaded Zelda look. After the granular gorgeousness of Ocarina of Time (the grass in Hyrule field is still my favourite videogame grass ever, because it has a wonderfully atmospheric stylisation that Halo’s hyperrealistic grass lacks), the pictures of cel-shaded Link left me distinctly underwhelmed. Yes, it looks like a cartoon; but, look, I’m no avid consumer of cartoons. South Park’s combination of acerbic script and deliberately lo-fi animation style is wonderful, but the flat perfection of this left me cold.

And then I finally got to play a bit of it. A mini-game involving a sailboat jumping over barrels. And, of course, it was glorious. We all know that you shouldn’t judge a game on static aesthetics alone, but sometimes it helps to be reminded of just how pointless that attitude can be. Nevertheless, one wonders just how far this fad can be taken.

For there is an increasing aesthetic schism in videogames, between those that strive for visual naturalism and those that flee it. Blame Jet Grind Radio, if you like, but the second constituency seems these days to have nearly as much of a herd mentality as the first. There is still mileage in adding cel-shading to a genre that previously has not experienced it - and the impressive networked play of Auto Modellista vindicates this sort of aesthetic surprise value - but it is already as much of a cliche as pointy realism itself. And quite apart from the games’ inherent merits, there is an unavoidable publicity problem with this visual style. Johnny Massmarket, bless him, is going to see shots of GameCube Zelda, and is only going to have his prejudice that Nintendo is for kids reinforced.

The major problem with this visual style, perhaps, is that it is too close to something we are already familiar with from other forms of entertainment. You might call it a craven sort of Disney envy. Isn’t it more admirable to invent a kind of representation that only a videogame could handle, in order to stake out the unique aesthetic territory for our form? But between the two extremist camps already mentioned - as much naturalism as you can squeeze out of the CPU and GPU, versus the cel-shaded Disney envy - lies a third way, which one might call naturalistic fantasy. In some regards it is this that may be the most promising as a tradition to build on, and for reasons that run deeper than the solely aesthetic.

It is exemplified, for instance, by TimeSplitters2, with its detailed, pseudorealistic environments populated by heavily stylised characters. Again, to use the game in action dispels any doubts one might have had about the visual aesthetics, particularly when one experiences the top-class animation. One of my main criticisms of the first TimeSplitters game was the lack of blood, but Free Radical have now improved the feedback given to the player on a successful shot to such an extent - with reactive postures of localized pain, slumps and falls, and an especially satisfying diagonal spin through the air - that one doesn’t miss the gore at all. The game is constantly, avidly rewarding the player’s actions with engaging audiovisual responses to a degree that few other FPSes can manage: it is as eager to please as a lovable puppy.

But perhaps the most useful virtues of this form of representation are the political ones. The criticisms of violence in videogames, however misguided the cognoscenti may think them, are not going to go away. The recent release of the America’s Army games, an extraordinary PR project by the US military, only exemplifies the problems such games have in the current edgy climate if they try naturalistic representation, because the lack of any blood at all - so that the game can be marketed to teenagers for propaganda purposes - looks ridiculous in the context of what claims to be the most realistic simulation of combat ever made. Certainly the idea of showing school-age consumers exactly how accurately-modelled US-issue weaponry works, and schooling them in commando tactics, has elicited off-the-record condemnations by some commentators close to the American military. Furthermore, one might wonder just how good an idea it is to code all this realistic information into a game that is freely accessible for download. It doesn’t take much to imagine members of al-Qaida taking more than an academic interest.

Such, then, are the political - not just aesthetic - deficits of the pseudo-photorealistic visual style. If you are going to pursue a violent, realistic course, you had better make sure either that it features nagging inconsistencies such as a lack of blood, or that the player’s opponents are zombies, or demons, or aliens, so that you can claim your game features only “fantasy violence”, unless you want your audience to be limited by ratings boards. My NTSC copy of Metal Gear Solid 2 is rated “Mature”, and if this didn’t limit the game’s success owing to the laxity of current ratings enforcement, we can be sure that such enforcement will be more vigorously pursued in the future. In this sense the videogame industry appears to be going the same way as Hollywood, where nearly every major studio release is dumbed down or sanitised so as to receive the all-important new 12A rating, and thus ensure maximum box-office returns.

If this is an inevitable consequence of videogames attaining a mass-market entertainment status, which development on the whole can only be good for the industry, it might not be such a bad thing, in that it might force designers to take a more structured and coherent approach to the imaginative design of their visuals. TimeSplitters2 and Ico, to take two of the more outstanding examples, do not look like cartoons; but nor do they try to look like action movies. Because TimeSplitters2 eschews gore, it has made more efforts in terms of character design and animation, with the result that its zombies, for instance, are to my mind more frightening than your House of the Dead or Biohazard zombies, even while they retain an undercurrent of friendly comedy. Furthermore these games do not feature the tired species of twee elves and predictable monsters that have traditionally been associated with this form of representation: I have nothing against elves and monsters per se, but there are few that are not reminiscent of thousands of others, in hundreds of other games.

Between the twin extremes of photorealism and cartoon, these games remind us, there lies a vast landscape of aesthetic possibility which, paradoxically, was far more well populated twenty years ago than it is now, owing to the abstract stylisation enforced by hardware limitations. It must be time to map this territory anew.

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