by Andrew Krigline

Created on: April 18, 2009

In this day and age, video game producers seem to be under the impression that the better looking a game is the more it will succeed. This is demonstrated by the ever increasing "Minimum Requirements" needed to play a new PC game. In their plight to make a game's graphics the best they can be and better, they have spent little time on thinking through the actual storyline or gameplay. This is a mistake. A game's aesthetic qualities do not dictate a game's greatness.

Take a look at the best selling PC games of today, among the top 10 is "StarCraft." StarCraft was released for the PC in 1998, requires a single-core .9 GHz processor, 9 MB of RAM, and an 8-bit display with a screen resolution of 640x480 pixels. The average home computer has over 2 GHz and most often in Dual Core if not above, has at least 1 GB or RAM and the average computer monitor has a 32-bit display with a resolution over 1280x1024 pixels. We can rule out that this game, which sold over 9 million copies worldwide in 2007, has stayed alive by its Graphics alone. In fact it is almost certain that StarCraft's popularity has not been aided at all by its aesthetic qualities, but rather its gameplay.

The list continues with titles such as The Sims, Half Life, Diablo II, Counterstrike, and more, all released before the higher end graphics processors and game consoles were in production. Yet these are the best selling PC Games worldwide? This makes it quite obvious that a games quality is not determined by its graphical superiority. Don't take this wrong and assume that the Graphics have nothing to do with the quality of a game. The Graphics of a game should reach some standard of decency because you can't enjoy even the best gameplay with graphics that are impossible to make out.

However, if a game's graphics are truly dazzling but the gameplay is such that a person cannot move past the first level without extreme frustration, then the game is not worth playing. A person does not buy a game to look at the seemingly realistic scenery or the intricately detailed characters. A person buys a game to play it and enjoy it, to have fun. A person buys a game to relieve stress or take a break from work for an hour or two. If someone goes out to buy a game where you inflict mass destruction on some invading alien race, thinking that it will be the perfect stress reliever, only to find that the game's levels are long, repetitive, and extremely limited that person will not be very happy. In spite of superior graphics

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