The deeper I get into realism and the observation of humans the more and more I ask myself how the concepts of the „uncanny valley“ and the concept of „cuteness“ apply to pixel art and in which ways they efectively affect the styles and the outcome of our pixel art.
By the limits pixel art gives us as a medium, we are also limited on what we achieve.
There are limits we an overcome, like skill problems, then there are problems we can't overcome (restrictions in terms of colors, size, animation frames) and then there are some elegant „solutions“ how to imply something in a problem we can't overcome, that it makes sense to us and feels at least ok.
I definitely think those problems heavily define the way how our pixel art looks and how it's crafted.
Some people say pixel art realism is nearly an impossible thing to achieve and indeed it's hard. Especially since we have to fight the problems of the uncanny valley with big sharp dots.
There is a lot to observe if we get really deep into those things and a lot to say, but to give a short kick-off those videos are a good source to get a basic understanding and maybe to start a discussion on the subjects:
Uncanny Valley:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNdAIPoh8a4Cuteness:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ji0bvwXAvIsome further thoughts for the interested ones and some theories/explanations and ideas:Another thing which hit my mind is, that „cuteness“ might be quite a modern approach to things, especially inspired by Japanese culture. At least I don't know of any artwork before the second worldwar which just relly clearly emphasizes the baby schemata as much as
modern media like videogames and anime do where some productions just build on the
„daaaaaaw-factor“.
I don't want to discuss how wars affect the society and how the Second Worldwar affected Japanese people, that's just a side-note.
However, a lot of the pixel-art defining games were made in Japan (not only, and there is other stuff as well, but it's kinda a majority) and a lot of those used the „chibi“ approach which just emphasizes cuteness.
The big point for me is that this cuteness also seems to heavily correlate to a non-scene audience and a lot of people who start out with pixel art just copying those „established styles“ they know of the roots of popular and successful game series.
The chibi approach definitely has some advantages like: it's easy to craft something decent, it's effective, it's established, nice readable on lower resolutions and so on,
makes it attractive to a lot of people
Some of those people try to add more detail to those things, but by adding just a tad more realism and structure to the „chibi art“ we face the
„muscle-baby“ problem, Helm brought up 6 years ago
http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=7301.msg85004#msg8500k4And there are also quite a lot of other notable distortions which make it look „creepy“, which I also think is directly related to the problem of the uncanny valley.
I really wonder why realism has such a strong impact on us.
A lot of people love realism, triple-A studios love realism and hardware designers love realism too. And I am also loving realism (although I also appreciate other approaches to art and I am not sure why I exactly love it).
Nintendo gives a shit about realism and focus on their style (basically they throw out tons of principles) and some of their 2D games really look timeless and now better as their concurrence back then (which are now mainly perceived as „cheap“ looking 3D realistic styled games).
Zelda Wind Waker (2002)
Burnout 3 (2003)
But now there is the
„Sword&Sworcery-approach" to pixel art as well, which features „spagetthi people“ and a much higher amount of realism as chibi-art does.
This style creates empathy through completely different tools and also is an attractive direction to go.
And it seems to get another „established“ style directions, as a lot of indie games are using it by now, popular examples are Irkalla or Terra Incognita.
Terra Incognita:http://www.curious-expedition.com/Irkalla:http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=35320.0And this style seems to be equally effective as the early featured chibi style and this might be why it finds so much audience, since it really enriches the pool of what one can easily achieve with pixel art.