Game Development, Art, and the Desert of the Real-Time Rendered; a Precession of Simulacra

The Map That Engenders the Territory

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, in his seminal 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation, invoked a fable borrowed from Jorge Luis Borges to illustrate a profound shift in the nature of reality. In this fable, the cartographers of an Empire create a map so detailed and perfect that it covers the territory it represents on a one-to-one scale. As the Empire declines, this magnificent map frays and decays, leaving only tattered shreds in the desert; vestiges of a representation whose original has also vanished. Baudrillard argued that in the postmodern epoch, this relationship has inverted. It is no longer the territory that precedes the map, but the map that precedes, and indeed engenders, the territory. This phenomenon, which he termed the “precession of simulacra,” describes a world where the real is no longer simply represented or distorted, but is actively generated by models and simulations that have no origin or basis in reality. The result is a state of hyperreality, an inability of consciousness to distinguish the real from the simulation, where the simulation becomes “more real than real”.

Baudrillard defined a simulacrum as a copy without an original, an image that does not reflect a profound reality but masks its absence, eventually bearing no relation to any reality whatsoever. His analysis, rooted in the rise of mass media, consumer culture, and the proliferation of signs, identified a society saturated with these simulacra, where human experience itself becomes a simulation. He saw this process unfolding in television, advertising, and even in the manufactured nostalgia of theme parks like Disneyland, which he argued exist to make us believe the rest of the world is “real” by comparison.

Yet, while Baudrillard’s critique focused on the passive media of his time, the medium of video games represents a quantum leap in this process, the ultimate realization of his theoretical framework. Video games, by their very nature, do not merely present a spectacle to be consumed; they construct operational, interactive systems that demand active participation. The player is not a spectator of the hyperreal but an agent within it. To play a game is to internalize its rules, to master its systems, and to accept its simulated logic as the only reality that matters for the duration of the experience. This active participation transforms the “map”, the game’s world, mechanics, and aesthetics, from a mere representation into a lived, experiential territory. The precession of simulacra is no longer a theoretical abstraction; it is the core gameplay loop. In the world of game development and art, the simulation does not just precede the territory; it colonizes the player’s consciousness, leaving the material world to become what Baudrillard chillingly called “the desert of the real itself”.

The Orders of Simulacra in Game Aesthetics

The historical trajectory of video game art and technology offers a uniquely vivid illustration of Baudrillard’s four successive phases of the image. From the honest abstractions of the arcade era to the photorealistic simulations of today, the evolution of game aesthetics can be mapped directly onto the progressive detachment of the sign from its referent, culminating in the pure, self-referential simulacrum of the hyperreal.

The Era of Abstraction and Stylization (First & Second Orders)

Early video game aesthetics, born from the crucible of severe technical limitations, correspond neatly to Baudrillard’s first two orders of simulacra. These games were either simple, faithful reflections of a basic reality or, more frequently, stylized “perversions” that masked and denatured reality, creating distinct artistic visions precisely because they were incapable of achieving realism.

The first order, the “sacramental” image that is a “reflection of a basic reality,” finds its exemplar in the earliest arcade games. Atari’s Pong (1972), with its two white lines and a moving dot, is a faithful, if abstract, copy of the core reality of table tennis. The representation is honest; its rules mirror the rules of the territory it simulates, creating a “good appearance” that does not seek to deceive.

Far more prevalent, however, was the second order of simulacra: the image that “masks and denatures a profound reality,” which Baudrillard called the “order of maleficence”. The aesthetics of the 8-bit, 16-bit, and early 3D eras (PlayStation and Nintendo 64) perfectly embody this phase. Technical constraints such as limited color palettes, low screen resolutions, and low polygon counts were not failures to achieve realism but were, in fact, powerful creative catalysts. The iconic design of Mario, for instance, with his mustache and cap, was a direct result of the need to create a recognizable human character with a very small number of pixels. Similarly, the dense, atmospheric fog in the original Silent Hill was a clever solution to mask the PlayStation’s limited draw distance, but in doing so, it became a defining and terrifying aesthetic element of the game’s world.

The N64/PS1 aesthetic, in particular, is a masterclass in the second order. The low-poly models, warped affine texture mapping on the PS1, and blurry, filtered textures of the N64 were all techniques that “denatured” reality. Games from this period did not look “real,” but they created powerful, idiosyncratic impressions of worlds, leaving a great deal to the player’s imagination and forcing artists to rely on strong art direction rather than technical fidelity. The modern resurgence of these “retro” aesthetics in the independent game scene, seen in titles like Celeste and Shovel Knight, represents a conscious artistic choice to return to this second order, valuing unique stylization born from self-imposed constraints over the relentless pursuit of realism.

In a Baudrillardian sense, these technical limitations served as an unintentional firewall against the hyperreal. The very impossibility of creating a convincing illusion of reality ensured an ontological honesty; the representation could never be mistaken for the real. A low-poly model is always, unequivocally, a representation. This forced distance between the sign and its referent kept these games firmly in the second order. They were “evil appearances” in the sense that they were unfaithful copies, but they were honest about their status as copies. The aesthetic value of these retro games, therefore, lies in this honesty. They are maps that proudly proclaim, “I am not the territory.” This prevents the slide into the third and fourth orders, where that crucial distinction collapses entirely. The powerful nostalgia for these aesthetics can be understood as a nostalgia for a time when the map was still just a map.

The Rise of Cinematic Fidelity and the “Impression of Reality” (Third Order)

As hardware capabilities grew, enabling more complex 3D rendering, a significant portion of the game industry pivoted towards emulating the language of another medium: film. This “cinematic turn” moved video games squarely into Baudrillard’s third order of simulacra: the image that “masks the absence of a profound reality”. These games create a compelling “impression of reality” not by simulating life itself, but by simulating the well-established aesthetic conventions of cinema, thereby “playing at being an appearance” in what Baudrillard termed the “order of sorcery”.

Franchises such as Uncharted and The Last of Us are exemplars of this approach, meticulously employing cinematic techniques to heighten their narrative impact. Their design incorporates dynamic camera angles, sweeping wide shots, dramatic lighting, emotionally resonant musical scores, and seamless transitions between gameplay and non-interactive cutscenes. The perceived “realism” of these games is measured less by their fidelity to lived experience and more by their fidelity to the conventions of a Hollywood blockbuster. This creates a simulation that masks the absence of a real referent by pointing to another, pre-existing set of signs in the language of film as its source of authenticity.

This progression represents a critical step in the precession of simulacra. A second-order game like Super Mario 64 simulates the physics of jumping within a stylized world; its referent, however distorted, is the real-world act of moving through space. A third-order cinematic game, by contrast, simulates the experience of watching an action movie. Its referent is the filmic language of another medium. It is a simulation of a simulation of the real; a copy of a copy. This process further detaches the game from any “profound reality” and pushes it into a self-referential loop where “good graphics” and “good storytelling” are judged by their proximity to cinematic tropes, not their connection to life.

The most extreme manifestation of this order is the “cutscene simulator,” a pejorative term for games that frequently wrest control from the player to deliver lengthy, non-interactive narrative sequences. In these moments, the player is transformed from a participant into a passive spectator, and the game ceases to be a system for play, becoming merely a delivery mechanism for a simulated movie. This design choice perfectly encapsulates the “order of sorcery,” conjuring an appearance of depth and narrative weight by mastering the signs of another, more established art form, while masking the absence of interactive substance.

Photorealism and the Hyperreal Engine (Fourth Order)

The contemporary AAA industry’s relentless pursuit of photorealism, powered by sophisticated game engines like Unreal Engine 5, represents the culmination of this trajectory: Baudrillard’s fourth and final order of the pure simulacrum. This is the stage where the image “bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum”. These are simulations that do not reflect, mask, or pretend to be real; they generate their own self-contained, internally consistent, and often preferable reality.

The technology enabling this shift is transformative. Unreal Engine 5 can be understood as a “hyperreal engine,” a toolset designed not just to represent worlds but to generate them wholesale. Features like Lumen, its dynamic global illumination system, and Nanite, its virtualized micropolygon geometry system, are not merely incremental graphical improvements. They are technologies aimed at creating simulations of light and form so detailed and physically accurate within the engine that they become indistinguishable from photographic reality. This is further amplified by techniques like photogrammetry, where real-world objects are scanned with thousands of photographs to create perfectly detailed 3D assets for libraries like Quixel Megascans. This practice is the literal, technological enactment of the Borges fable: the territory (a real-world rock) is exhaustively mapped and digitized, at which point the original referent becomes irrelevant. Only the perfect, infinitely reproducible digital copy, the simulacrum, is used to populate new, simulated territories within the game world.

The unsettling potential of this fourth order was made manifest with the announcement of Unrecord, a tactical shooter presented through the lens of a police officer’s body camera. The game’s graphical fidelity, achieved in Unreal Engine 5, is so complete that early footage was widely mistaken for real-world video. The controversy it generated stemmed from this profound blurring of boundaries, creating a “real without origin or reality” that simulates the aesthetics of violence with such perfection that the distinction becomes meaningless. This is the pure simulacrum: it has no referent in a specific real event, but it perfectly simulates the signs of reality (camera shake, lens distortion, photorealistic lighting) to generate an experience that is entirely self-contained.

The ultimate goal of these technologies is not to represent the real but to replace it with a computationally generated, procedurally perfect, and infinitely malleable alternative. The game engine becomes the new god, generating a world ex nihilo. A game world built in UE5 with photogrammetric assets and real-time ray tracing creates a perfectly coherent internal reality. The light behaves “realistically” within the simulation. The textures look “real” within the simulation. This world has no necessary connection to our own, it can be a fantasy landscape or a sci-fi city; but its “realism” is an aesthetic effect, a system of signs that signifies “reality” without an actual referent. This is the ultimate precession: the code (the map) generates a world (the territory) so convincing that the player’s experience within it can feel more intense, more perfect, and more real than their own lived reality. This is the essence of the hyperreal.

The Political Economy of the Hyperreal

The aesthetic evolution of video games toward the hyperreal is not a neutral, technologically determined process. It is deeply intertwined with the commercial and ideological forces of the market. Applying Baudrillard’s critique of consumer society, which posits that late-stage capitalism is organized around the production and consumption of signs rather than goods, reveals how the dominance of photorealism in AAA gaming is a commercial imperative that leads to aesthetic homogenization and a crisis of artistic meaning.

Commercial Imperatives and Aesthetic Homogenization

The relentless pursuit of photorealism in the AAA gaming space is less an artistic choice than a market-driven necessity. In a consumer society, Baudrillard argued, commodities are valued not just for their use or exchange value, but for their sign-value: their ability to signify prestige, power, and status. “Good graphics” have become the primary signifier of a “AAA” product, a visual shorthand for a large budget, technological sophistication, and a “premium” experience that justifies a high price point. This transforms the aesthetic itself into a commodity.

The economic realities of producing this commodity are staggering. The creation of hyper-realistic assets and vast, detailed worlds requires immense financial investment and thousands of work hours, creating a high barrier to entry for all but the largest publishers. This extreme financial risk actively discourages creative risk-taking. Publishers, needing to ensure a massive return on investment, gravitate toward proven, formulaic game designs that can be packaged within the marketable shell of photorealism.

This dynamic has led to the emergence of what critics have called the “Ur-game”: a homogenized, third-person, open-world action game with a predictable suite of features like RPG-lite progression, crafting systems, and map-revealing towers. Franchises like Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, or Sony’s Horizon: Zero Dawn, while technically impressive, often converge on a similar aesthetic and mechanical template. The great paradox is that as these games strive to look more “real,” they begin to look more and more like each other, losing the distinct artistic identities that characterized earlier, more abstract eras. This process exemplifies the total alienation Baudrillard described in a fully commodified society: the creative potential of the medium is subsumed by the economic necessity of producing a marketable sign, resulting in a landscape of technically proficient but often “soulless” products that adhere to the same aesthetic logic.

A potent case study of this phenomenon is the “Call of Duty effect.” The 2019 release of Modern Warfare was widely praised for its photorealistic graphics, detailed lighting, and gritty art direction. However, this very realism created a gameplay problem: in the competitive multiplayer mode, the complex lighting and deep shadows made it difficult for players to see enemies, leading to complaints about visibility. In subsequent titles, developers flattened the lighting, reduced contrast, and brightened shadows to create a clearer, more readable playspace. This demonstrates that the “reality” being simulated is not the real world, but an optimized arena for competitive engagement. The simulation’s logic is entirely self-referential, prioritizing gameplay functionality and the visibility of monetizable cosmetic skins over any allegiance to realism. The hyperreal aesthetic is thus revealed to be a flexible marketing tool, readily compromised to serve the commercial demands of the game as a service.

Idiosyncratic Vision in the Desert of the Real

In a media landscape increasingly dominated by these commercially driven, hyperrealistic simulacra, stylized and non-realistic art has emerged as a powerful form of resistance. By deliberately rejecting photorealism, these games reassert the primacy of artistic intent, creating unique “maps” that offer meaningful, interpretive realities rather than attempting to replace the real one. This act re-establishes what Baudrillard called the “sovereign difference” between the representation and the real; the very difference he claimed was erased in the hyperreal, and which forms the “poetry of the map and the charm of the territory”.

Occasionally, this resistance emerges even from within the AAA space. The 2008 title Mirror’s Edge stands as a remarkable anomaly, a major release from a large studio (DICE) that eschewed the prevailing trend of gritty realism for a clean, minimalist, and intensely stylized aesthetic. Its world is one of stark white architecture punctuated by bold primary colors. This art direction is not merely decorative but is deeply integrated into the gameplay. The iconic “Runner Vision” highlights interactive objects in a vibrant red, creating a diegetic user interface that guides the player through the environment, a concept the game calls “The Flow”.

Mirror’s Edge constructs a hyperreality, but it is an overtly artificial one: a “hyper-clean” rather than a hyper-real utopia/dystopia that feels more like a piece of architectural concept art than a simulation of a real city. Its stylization is a constant reminder that the player is in a constructed world, allowing the game to function on a symbolic level where the sterile environment reflects the society’s oppressive control.

More commonly, this aesthetic counter-narrative is championed by the independent game development scene. Often born from the creative constraints of smaller budgets and team sizes, indie games have become a bastion of aesthetic diversity. Titles like Hollow Knight, with its haunting, hand-drawn 2D world; Journey, with its minimalist 3D desert-scapes; Disco Elysium, with its painterly, “oil-on-canvas” aesthetic; and Okami, with its beautiful Sumi-e ink wash style, all use non-realistic art to explore profound and complex themes of loss, wonder, mental illness, and spirituality. Their abstraction invites player interpretation and allows them to achieve a powerful emotional resonance that hyperrealism, with its risk of falling into the “uncanny valley,” often struggles to attain. By celebrating the difference between the map and the territory, stylization allows a game to function as a work of art that comments on reality, rather than a technological product that seeks to supplant it.

Interactivity, Art, and the Human Condition

The final and most crucial element in this analysis is the role of the player. Interactivity fundamentally distinguishes video games from the passive media Baudrillard critiqued, creating a feedback loop between the user and the simulation. This interactivity is a double-edged sword: it can be the ultimate tool of seduction into the hyperreal, or it can be a unique artistic medium for making players critically aware of the simulated systems that govern their lives.

The Player as Participant in the Simulation

In a hyperrealistic game, player agency serves to deepen the seduction of the simulation. The ability to act within the world and have it respond with seemingly perfect fidelity using the realistic physics of a collapsing building, or the lifelike animations of a character reinforces the simulation’s validity at every turn. This seamless interactivity closes the gap between player and avatar, deepening their absorption and making the simulated world more compelling, immediate, and seductive than the complexities of actual reality.

However, this same interactivity can be wielded as a powerful tool for critique. A genre of “empathy games” has emerged that uses the mechanics of play to explore difficult human truths. In a game like Papers, Please, the player is cast as a border agent in a totalitarian state. The gameplay is not about heroic action but about the mundane, bureaucratic process of checking documents against a constantly changing set of rules. The player is forced to make morally fraught decisions: turn away a desperate person with improper papers and doom them, or let them through and risk penalties that mean your own family goes hungry. The player does not simply watch a character struggle with these choices; they must physically perform the mechanics of this oppressive system: stamping passports, cross-referencing data, enforcing cruel logic.

This forced participation makes the underlying “code” of the simulated system and by extension, the real-world systems of bureaucracy and state power it critiques tangible and visceral. The frustration and anxiety generated by the game’s rules are the artistic message. The unique power of games as an art form lies in this ability to make the logic of a system an object of play. While a hyperrealistic blockbuster uses its seamless code to obscure its nature as a simulation, a critical art game makes its code painfully visible, providing a potential antidote to the very hyperreality it is so adept at creating.

Redefining Art in the Age of Simulation

The popular, often heated, online discourse distinguishing between games with “soul” and “soulless” games can be understood as a vernacular expression of the audience’s struggle with Baudrillard’s orders of simulacra. The concept of “soul” is a search for authenticity: a perceived link to a “real” origin of artistic intent; while “soullessness” is the feeling of interacting with a generic, market-driven, fourth-order simulacrum.

“Soulless” games are consistently described in terms that evoke the hyperreal: they are formulaic, corporate, “paint-by-the-numbers” products that feel like copies of other successful games, lacking a unique, authorial vision. They are the output of the “Ur-game” template, referencing market data models and focus group feedback rather than a “profound reality.” Conversely, games praised for having “soul” are described as having a clear, uncompromising vision, a passion and personal touch from their creators that is palpable to the player. They feel as though they originate from a specific creator’s intent, even if they have rough edges or technical imperfections. They are perceived as a reflection of a profound reality, that reality being the creator’s unique artistic worldview.

The intense debate surrounding the 2023 remake of Resident Evil 4 serves as an ideal case study. Many critics of the remake framed their argument in terms of “soul vs. soulless”. They argued that the new version, despite its superior technical fidelity, replaced the original’s idiosyncratic, quirky, and “soulful” art direction and tone with a more generic, dark, and realistic aesthetic that felt homogenized and corporate. The original was seen as a product of a singular, eccentric vision, while the remake was viewed as a product designed by committee to appeal to modern AAA sensibilities. This search for “soul” is, in essence, a defense mechanism against the hyperreal. It is the player’s search for an “author” or a human origin point in a sea of algorithmically generated and market-tested content. In a world of models without origin, the attribution of “soul” is an attempt to reconnect the simulation to an authentic human creator, a way to find meaning in a world increasingly saturated by impersonal simulacra.

Deeper into the Simulation or a New Abstraction?

The future of video games as an art form appears to be bifurcated, heading down two divergent paths. One trajectory, driven by technological advancement and the commercial logic of the AAA industry, leads deeper into the simulation. The other, fueled by the democratization of development tools and a desire for authentic expression, points toward a renewed appreciation for stylized abstraction and idiosyncratic, personal game design.

The hyperreal horizon is defined by technologies that seek to dissolve the final barriers between the player and the simulation. Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) represent the logical conclusion of this project, aiming to eliminate the screen and make the map sensorially indistinguishable from the territory. Concurrently, the increasing use of Artificial Intelligence and procedural generation to create game content threatens to produce worlds that are literally “without origin or reality,” algorithmically generated rather than authored by human hands, thus accelerating the precession of simulacra. This path leads towards the “Metaverse”: the creation of totalizing, immersive simulations that function as new territories for human existence.

Simultaneously, a powerful counter-current is gaining strength. The widespread accessibility of powerful game engines like Unreal and Unity, combined with alternative funding models like crowdfunding and direct-to-consumer distribution platforms like Steam and itch.io, has empowered a new generation of individual creators and small studios. This could lead to a “golden age for individual creator game artists,” where personal, diverse, and inclusive stories are told through a vast array of non-realistic art styles. This trend may also see a shift in design philosophy, moving away from explicit, cinematic narratives and towards creating dense, mysterious environments that rely on environmental storytelling. In these “archaeological games,” the act of play becomes a process of interpretation and discovery, as seen in titles like Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch.

This split creates a fundamental tension in the medium’s artistic ambition, a tension between games as all-encompassing “worlds” and games as focused, authored “works.” The former aims for totalizing simulation, seeking to become a new reality. The latter embraces its artificiality and constraints to comment on reality. This dichotomy will define the artistic landscape of gaming for years to come, posing a crucial question about the medium’s ultimate purpose in an age of simulation.

Waking Up in the Desert

The evolution of video game development and art provides a startlingly clear and tangible illustration of Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra. The medium’s history traces a progressive journey away from reality: from the honest, second-order abstractions of its youth, which openly declared their status as representations; to the third-order cinematic illusions of its adolescence, which masked the absence of reality by simulating the signs of another medium; and finally, to the fourth-order hyperrealism of its maturity, where photorealistic engines generate pure simulacra; worlds without origin that are often more seductive than the real one they have come to replace.

This trajectory, driven by a confluence of technological advancement and the commercial logic of a commodified culture, has profound implications. The ultimate paradox of the video game medium is that its relentless technological quest for “realism” has made it the most potent and immersive creator of the “hyperreal.” This path is fraught with the dangers Baudrillard warned of: the homogenization of art, the erosion of meaning in a sea of self-referential signs, and the slow decay of the real from disuse.

Yet, within this “desert of the real,” there are signs of resistance. The very interactivity that makes games such powerful engines of simulation also provides artists with a unique tool for critique, allowing them to make the underlying rules of systems, both virtual and real, the subject of play. The persistent human desire for authenticity, expressed in the search for games with “soul,” fuels a vibrant counter-culture of independent and stylized art that celebrates its own artifice. The final question, then, is not whether video games can be art. It is whether art, in the form of idiosyncratic, critical, and “soulful” games, can provide a map out of the hyperreal, a way to critique and understand our simulated condition; or whether it will simply make the desert a more beautiful and comfortable place to live.