Bruno Dias

tv show about reluctant teenagers being forced to repair, maintain, and operate vintage refrigerators. Freon Genesis Evangelion

So it occurs to me that without a bit of term-grounding, people might think I'm making somewhat contradictory claims. I'm saying: "It's not great for the III Initiative folks to connect playtime directly to quality" but then also saying: "III to me implies a high level of polish." So I want to clarify that when I say 'polish' and 'quality' I mean different things.

Quality is a subjective value judgement of how good something is. It is, of course, inextricably linked to what we think the purpose of that thing is. Your values about what games are for and what games should be inform what you think a game's quality is.

Fidelity, usually graphical fidelity, is a descriptor for how well a game disguises the underlying technical realities of how it makes images (sprites, meshes, etc) and successfully evokes an aesthetic. Typically we say this about games that adopt a photorealistic aesthetic; the less a game looks like a video game and the more it looks like something else, the more the fidelity. In a sense, 'fidelity' is used in the sense of reproduction; a game's ability to reproduce the look of a photographic image is fidelity. But this can also apply to aesthetics other than photorealism. The Guilty Gear games, for example, aim for a high degree of graphical fidelity in reproducing cel animation aesthetic.

Polish is more an evaluation of just resources and effort. Attention to detail. A game has high polish if environments in it are detailed and different from one another, if the UI functions smoothly, if it runs consistently on the hardware it's designed for, if players are unlikely to encounter bugs, etc. Polish is a set of technical evaluations divorced from an evaluation of quality; it just implies that attention was paid. Polish is a necessary component of achieving fidelity; I think most people in most cases would also say that polish is necessary for quality. But polish isn't quality. You can, after all, polish a turd (Hyneman 2008). An example of a high-polish, low-quality game is something like Detroit: Become Human.

On the level of 'this annoys me but it's not that big a deal': Triple-I as an industry term has been around for a while and historically would not include most games in the 'III showcase', IMO. To my mind, 'III' implies:

• Either an independent studio or one that has creative autonomy and identity even if it's not independent
• A pretty significant budget and team, but still not at 'AA' level
• High level of polish in a limited scope. I joked that 'III means there's exactly one high graphical fidelity character model' but honestly that's not a bad rule of thumb
• More visually or mechanically experimental than a bigger production can typically afford to be; strong authorial vision; identified with indie trends, aesthetics, or process

This is all very vague, but it definitely doesn't include something like My Time at Sandrock or whatever. It overlaps more closely with 'AA' than with proper indies.

An example might be something like Stray... big publisher, pretty big budget. High graphical fidelity but with clear limitations on scope (eg, no human characters). Experimental, high-concept premise.

Basically: Indie aesthetics or process but at 'A' scale. A category that might encompass some of the bigger Annapurna or Devolver projects.

If you said 'III' to me, I'd think of a category that's closer to including Echo or Returnal than Shadows of Doubt.

Part of the problem with defining III though is that 'independent' has two senses:

• Self-published
• Not owned by a major publisher

And we are constantly getting in trouble by confusing the two things, or getting mad that someone said 'independent' (sense 1) when they meant 'independent' (sense 2). It doesn't help that 'self-published' is a description that applies to games while 'not owned by a major publisher' is a description that applies to studios.

As an example, people will refer to Kojima Productions as an independent studio, and they certainly are! But their only released game thus far, Death Stranding, had a publisher (Sony IE on PS5, and later 505 games on PC).

Which means that there's a bunch of other ways you could define 'III'. And they can have zero overlap or even contradict:

• A triple-I game is just a triple-A game made by an independent (sense 2) studio. For example, Death Stranding is a triple-I game.
• A triple-I game is a game made by a major publisher or one of their subsidiaries, that partakes of indie aesthetics or niches. For example, Pentiment is a triple-I game.

...but either way, My Time at Sandrock isn't that.

On the level of 'this annoys me but it's not that big a deal': Triple-I as an industry term has been around for a while and historically would not include most games in the 'III showcase', IMO. To my mind, 'III' implies:

• Either an independent studio or one that has creative autonomy and identity even if it's not independent
• A pretty significant budget and team, but still not at 'AA' level
• High level of polish in a limited scope. I joked that 'III means there's exactly one high graphical fidelity character model' but honestly that's not a bad rule of thumb
• More visually or mechanically experimental than a bigger production can typically afford to be; strong authorial vision; identified with indie trends, aesthetics, or process

This is all very vague, but it definitely doesn't include something like My Time at Sandrock or whatever. It overlaps more closely with 'AA' than with proper indies.

An example might be something like Stray... big publisher, pretty big budget. High graphical fidelity but with clear limitations on scope (eg, no human characters). Experimental, high-concept premise.

Basically: Indie aesthetics or process but at 'A' scale. A category that might encompass some of the bigger Annapurna or Devolver projects.

If you said 'III' to me, I'd think of a category that's closer to including Echo or Returnal than Shadows of Doubt.