Development:Realism vs Believability
Since there have been alot of discussions in the forum about Realism in Vegastrike and how it should be done this paghe has been added to summarise all related topics and clear up some terms.
Most of the initial content has been copied from a post by pincushionman (thanks to him) with some small additions and reformatting.
There are more topics in the forum about realism which i didn't search for. If you stumble over them please add them in the "See also" section for reference.
General
Most people have confused the concepts of realism with that of believability (or credibility). They are not the same thing. And I think those people who keep saying "I don't want realism because it isn't fun." may not necessarily know it, but they have a more accurate idea what term means what.
Realism
Realism is bringing real-world concepts and processes into the world being created (in this case the game world, but it could also refer to a movie environment or a book). There is one big reason why realism is difficult to pull off, especially in games. We are immersed in reality all the time, and we know what is realistic, because we see it every day. You can tell a bad magician or a poorly-photoshopped image immediately because it just doesn't look right. In games it's even more difficult because we're still short on computing power needed to properly simulate a realistic environment.
Believability
Believability much more forgiving, and most of the time it's a hell of a lot more fun to be a part of. Concepts of realism can be incorporated into a believable environment, and often are, but only to the extent that they add to the immersion. Anything beyond that is superfluous and is thrown away, and new rules are written. This makes believability much easier to achieve, and at the same time, much more difficult to pull off properly.
Examples
If a person is shot in an action movie, the realistic result is he drops to the floor. But that's not fun to watch, so instead the bullet knocks them off into the water. To enhance the believability, that happens every time someone gets shot (except for the main character, of course, he just bleeds).
In our world, we need to get to a planet far away. Realism would say we need 200,000 years and a fuel tank the size of the moon, but that's not any fun. So we make up a magic super-fast travel system, and use it all the time. And we make up fictional documentation to back up our absurd creation.
Summary
We still know it's not realistic, but we believe it anyway. Why? Because we want to, and we can believe it "exactly the same" every time. The real secret to making a believeable environment is to take advantage of just enough of what reality does give us to help our immersion, then make up stuff to keep people interested, and use that made-up stuff in a way that is consistent throughout the entire game experience, offer "believable" (again NOT realistic) explanations in case people DO question it, and use this made-up material in such a way that the people playing WANT TO BELEIVE IT.
It's called willing suspension of disbelief, people. That's the secret. NOT realism.
End note
There's another big strike against realism and games -- real life is boring! people play games to get away from reality, not to become more immersed in it. If I want to have fun with reality, I'll go call my friends and we'll go outside and play football.
