Renewing the struggles of Realism with Digital Texts

“Here’s how Bruno Reichlin recently described neorealism in Italian literature: “A surgical examination of matters of society, an almost documentary attention to the everyday, an adherence in thought and language to the social origins and personalities of the characters, a more-or-less direct criticism of current society and morals”. I suggest that game studies should follow these same arguments and not turn to a theory of realism in gaming as mere realistic representation, but define realist games as those games that reflect critically on the minutiae of everyday life, replete as it is with struggle, personal drama, and injustice.”

— Alexander R. Galloway “‘Social Realism’. In Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture” (2006)

In his 2006 article, Galloway examines how concepts of reality and realism are challenged in gaming by the digital format.  The immediate issues that arise when discussing theories of realism and what makes something realistic are often articulated in the semantic applications of the words themselves.

When something is realistic, it is said to be accurately articulating the proportions which it occupies in the physical world. Physical proportions in this instance don’t just refer to the visual qualities, but also the way a thing moves and reacts to the physical world; in this instance an objects realization is in part, synonymous with its physics. In contrast, when something is investigated for its realism, it is being investigated for the way it achieves its realization. In simple terms, realism refers to the way something operates, and realistic refers to the way something is. Galloway (2006), is then emphasizing how important it is to be mindful of how realism is achieved differently in video games than in traditional literature.

The way a video game achieves realism, and a realistic experience is different to the way a book might achieve the same thing. In gaming, the mechanics of articulation move beyond linguistic expression, escaping the confines of words. Realism comes to depends, for example, on the number of pixels on the screen, the ordinance of these pixels, its music and or its smooth game play. In other words, realism intones the physics of engagement. Realism is the quantified by the number of sensory organs required to engage with the text. To engage with an interactive fiction like a video game, you need your eyes to see, the coordination of your eye with your inner ear for proprioceptive projection and prediction of your player’s movement, you need your hands to operate the controller, you need your ears to hear the diegetic sound – maybe the approach of an adversary.

A realistic video game then copes with realism in two ways: in the mental experience it conjures and the physical experience it approximates. If one was to expect that the realism of a game was defined merely by its physical experience, one would be overlooking a reality where the experience of smelling a rose is different to reading about how a rose smells. This is the point Galloway emphasises. If a video game presents a rose as thorny blue flower that renders a temporarily positive disposition in a protagonist, the appropriate critique would not state that the rose is not realistic, because in the real world roses cannot actually do that. The appropriate critique would involve a line of inquiry into which aspects of the real world is the video game rose is relating to. This article then suggests that a realist critique in digital literature and interactive fictions, must, more than it would with books, analyse and celebrate why and how aspects of digital literature are represented as they are. Realism in a digital text then stems from both what it is and what it isn’t.