Video games are a form of entertainment that many people use to step out of the real world to enjoy something completely different for a short while. It’s like getting lost in a good book or being captivated by an epic blockbuster movie, but games put you in the center of the action with the chance to influence the outcome.
Despite video games being an opportunity to experience a different reality, there continues to be a concerted effort by the gaming industry to create ever more realistic video games. Through a combination of better graphics, virtual reality, open-world structures, stories with different possible outcomes that depend on player decisions, and enhanced physics processing, video game developers are now able to make digital spaces that can look and feel like the real world.
This realism is not universal though, some genres are more suited to this trend of ultra-realistic video games. For example, a business simulator is much more closely aligned to the real world than a title about dragons and magic spells.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at the most realistic video games on the market now.
Sports Games
Sports video games have been around since the very first consoles, with Pong being a primitive tennis title from the 1970s.
Today, sports games look more and more like the real thing. So much so, one Canadian man watched the entire first half of a FIFA video game that had been streamed on TV before his daughter pointed out it wasn’t the England vs Denmark Euro 2020 game he wanted to watch.
However, there are much more realistic options than football. One example of this is poker, a sport where players routinely move between online and offline competitions. In fact, it is now common for players to get started in poker by competing in online games before entering tournaments to qualify for live events.
Leading online card rooms even have programs designed specifically for this, such as the Power Path which has three levels of ‘passes’ for players to earn. The top one of these grants a package that can include entry to a European Poker Tour event or a major online tournament. This mobility is only possible due to the near-identical gameplay of digital and physical games.
Motorsport is another area where ultra-realism is possible. In addition to graphics that can recreate cars and race tracks in stunning detail, the physics of car handling can be translated into racing simulator games like Gran Turismo and iRacing.
The accuracy of ‘sim racing’ is so high, all Formula 1 teams and many Formula 1 drivers use simulators to prepare for upcoming events.
Business Simulators
Back in the 1990s, Chris Sawyer released RollerCoaster Tycoon, a business simulation game that let players design their own roller coasters and build them into digital theme parks. It was a huge hit and, whilst not the first game in this genre, helped to make it popular.
Today, you can find thousands of different ‘Simulator’ and ‘Tycoon’ games, ranging from Planet Zoo to Hello Kitty Cafe (Tycoon). Some are more realistic than others, depending on the target audience, though most include realistic concepts of business operations and the need to invest and maintain healthy cash flows.
Attention to detail is often what makes these games feel more accurate. For example, in Game Dev Tycoon, the developers included an anti-piracy feature that meant players who obtained the game via unofficial means had their virtual game development business fall into bankruptcy due to too many people pirating its titles.
Open-World Games
Open-world games are those that don’t follow a fixed linear plot. Titles can have different degrees of being ‘open-world’ with some just allowing players to experience the story in a different sequence and others having different plot conclusions that depend on decisions made by players earlier in the game.
The most prominent of these is Grand Theft Auto, a franchise that pioneered open-world gaming before the hardware could properly accommodate it.
Whilst players await the release of the next installment, GTA VI, the current title Grand Theft Auto V remains immensely popular. The game combines many obvious and subtle features to create a world that feels very real.
This includes stunning graphics, realistic-looking movements (apart from vehicle crash mechanics), and the relationships and interactions between players. GTA V also features a working stock market that players can invest in-game cash into, businesses they can buy, vehicle modding, and a satirical recreation of the internet.
There are also elements that may go unnoticed, such as the way NPCs interact with each other, the AI responses of NPCs to blocked traffic, the random events that occur around the map, radio news broadcasts that report actions carried out by the player, and more.
Beyond improved graphics and more of this NPC behaviour, it’s hard to see how much more realistic a game like this can become before it becomes just a recreation of real life which would likely be much less fun than the carnage and chaos players can create in GTA.
