{"id":1726,"date":"2009-08-20T11:36:07","date_gmt":"2009-08-20T16:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=1726"},"modified":"2009-08-20T11:36:07","modified_gmt":"2009-08-20T16:36:07","slug":"a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-lies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2009\/08\/20\/a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-lies\/","title":{"rendered":"A Picture is Worth A Thousand Lies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Ohle has written a nice explanation<\/a> of the “bullshot” process – the hows and whys about screenshots that do not accurately reflect what a game will actually look like.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, he says, it’s all of our fault.<\/p>\n

If I see a screenshot, I expect it to look cool, or else I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll probably lose interest in that game. So let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s say a publisher takes the honest route and releases a screenshot of an in-development game without doctoring it. Imagine the outcry with me. NeoGAF would explode with cries of, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hahah, what a piece of shit!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Other hardcore fans would laugh at the lack of anti-aliasing. Yet others would ridicule the terrible facial expressions. Or the missing texture on the floor. You get the picture.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He also blames the long cycle of announcements, previews and production information for the procedure. Dragon Age<\/em>, he notes, was announced five years ago and people were starved for content about it for a long time.<\/p>\n

This is why, I think, it doesn’t do a lot of good to put blame on gamers or game forum dwellers. After all, as fussy and obnoxious as they\/we can be, they\/we aren’t the ones who decided that the best way to gin up sales for a game was to promote it as a major media experience for years. Gamers are certainly a part of the hype machine that generates bullshots, but they aren’t the ones who plugged it in.<\/p>\n

We in the games media are certainly part of the problem. I’ve written before<\/a> about how the games media has perpetuated a culture that thrives on the next big thing – previews and predictions – with even the recent past being largely ignored. Exclusive Previews are big eyeball generators and fueled the print arm of the industry for a long time. This means you get screenshots of things that can never happen in a game<\/a>, or use art or info that will be tossed six months before release.<\/p>\n

Link to your favorite bullshot in the comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tom Ohle has written a nice explanation of the “bullshot” process – the hows and whys about screenshots that do not accurately reflect what a game will actually look like. Ultimately, he says, it’s all of our fault. If I see a screenshot, I expect it to look cool, or else I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll probably lose interest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-rQ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1726"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1726"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1727,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1726\/revisions\/1727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}