One of the intriguing aesthetic stories of the PlayStation2 launch has been how the world’s biggest videogame developer failed to “do” snow as well as the nearly three-year-old 1080 Snowboarding, despite having a machine many times more powerful to play with.

EA’s SSX is a snowbound game almost by default: you’re hurtling down mountains on a white course, so you guess it must be snow. But SSX is far closer to Trickstyle, arbitrarily relocated to a bunch of icy peaks. The soft thump as you land on deep drifts, the puffs of powder billowing up behind your boarder, the sensation of actually cutting through crystals of frozen water - these are all done so much better in Nintendo’s classic. (That same Nintendo studio, of course, also designed the seminal Wave Race, whose representation of water has rarely, if ever, been equalled since. The brief GameCube rolling demo of its successor had fans rightly salivating. Do the secretive Japanese somehow have a magic key to the ingame recreation of such phenomena?)

Earth, snow, trees, grass - let’s call this category of phenomena by the technical term “natural stuff”. One approach to representing natural stuff in a videogame might be a brute-force computational method. At last year’s ECTS, for instance, one graphics-card company was demonstrating its latest chipset with a field of grass swaying in the wind, each blade polygonally modelled.

You could then have a deeply boring argument about polygons versus voxels (the natural stuff in Outcast is particularly well rendered). But even if you don’t worry how much processing power the raw computational approach is going to leave for gameplay, it’s clear it has to stop somewhere on a domestic system. Climatologists routinely use supercomputers to simulate patterns of snowdrifts and the behaviour of avalanches, with a huge array of variables that include 3D vectors of wind velocity at every square centimetre over the snowy area, as well as the effects of directional sunlight. Even they stop short of computing the purportedly unique crystalline structure of each snowflake.

Clearly, nothing like this amount of simulation is going on in 1080. But of course, the way we perceive natural stuff in real life is only partly visual: up to four other senses can come into play. Hearing is obviously important, but the difference between SSX and 1080 is negligible in terms of sound design. For the moment, of course, we cannot smell, taste or actually touch natural stuff in a videogame, although sensory feedback must surely soon move on from the basic two-speed vibration of a Dual Shock Pad. Even so, we can on occasion be fooled into a visceral appreciation of the qualities of natural stuff without direct sensory feedback. Hideo Kojima, for instance, has said that he wants the player actually to “feel cold” at some points in MGS2. Certainly the freezer room in the first game, with Snake’s breath condensing in the air, left a chilly place in my imaginative memory.

But the crucial thing is the modelling of how natural stuff behaves: how it interacts with the player in the gameworld. We have an idea of what snow is like, for instance, not just because we’ve seen it in real life but because we’ve played with it, packed it into balls and thrown it at people, skied down it. We’ve heard Frank Zappa advise us not to eat the yellow snow; we’ve made carrot-nosed men with the stuff. We have an intuitive understanding of the material nature of snow.

And it’s that intuitive understanding that a well-designed game will exploit. 1080, unlike SSX, puts the player’s control precisely where it matters: at the interface between board and snow. The deft analogue control of the board’s angle, combined with visual and aural feedback, enables the player really to feel that she is skimming the top of deep powder, or blading sideways across the ice on the very edge of her board. She is able to alter her control of the board according to the behaviour of the type of snow underneath, and so the snow becomes part of the game, rather than a mere decorative background. That’s why, though SSX has better particle effects and textures, it’s 1080 that feels like the real thing. Similar considerations apply for driving games: a sand or gravel pit at the side of the road may be a ropy, lo-res texture, but it’s the change of your car’s behaviour when it leaves the road that really convinces you of what’s under your tyres.

When natural stuff fails to exhibit the behaviour we expect of it, gameplay always suffers. A species of what I have called “functional incoherence”, for example, arises in the Tomb Raider series when a rotting old wooden door just can’t be blown up by a rocket-launcher. We know that in real life bits of dead tree are no defence against explosive projectiles, and so the disparity between the door’s visual appearance and its function in the game deprives us of a deeper sensory involvement with the gameworld. The sand of desert levels, meanwhile, does not hinder Lara’s movement one jot: it might as well be a wooden or a concrete floor painted yellow. By contrast, natural stuff in Zelda 64 exhibits a reassuring consistency of behaviour. The hookshot will bounce off stone, but sink satisfyingly into wood; and you can be sure that a wooden Deku Stick will always be lit by a nearby torch.

In a videogame, then, seeing is not everything. In particular, we should recognise that natural stuff does not have to be photorealistic. For a purposeful artistic stylisation is often more interesting than an accurate representation of the real thing. This can be seen by the fields of bleached white grass in the paintings of Edward Hopper, for example, which don’t look exactly like real vegetation but manage to “say” grass to the viewer with far more grace and understanding than a photograph ever could. But the videogame designer has the extra job, not given to the painter, of deciding how his grass is going to operate: how it will feel when we run across it, canter through it on a horse, or just roll in it idly. This is a challenge, to be sure, but it is also a great aesthetic opportunity.

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