by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright July 2014
This topic started as a personal mystery: Why are the monsters in CGI movies so boring to watch? CGI is, in theory, animation on steroids. It should be producing visual wonders beyond those of ordinary animation. But in practice it is much more constrained. It does much less "wonder" than ordinary animation. What's going on here? Why do Barnacle Bill the Sailor and Steamboat Willie, black and white animations from around 1930, show lots more imagination in what their characters can do and become than the CGI monsters in 2014's Godzilla or Transformers? I find contemporary CGI monsters to be deadly monotonous -- they all look the same, roar the same, and move the same. At times, I would swear just one person has made every CGI monster in movie existence!
Why is this? The answer is a difference in aspiration of the designers. The early animations are showing off their ability to portray abstraction while the contemporary CGI designers are showing off their ability to portray reality. That difference in aspiration is the topic of this essay.
Communication is the art of moving information from one being to another. As human communication abilities have improved, the styles available have expanded and the range of what can be communicated has grown enormously.
What deeply excites human communication inventors all through the ages is when they find a new way to portray reality faster, better and more cheaply. But portraying reality is, in fact, only half the battle: The other half is portraying good abstractions faster, better and cheaper. To give one example of this difference in aspiration between reality and abstract consider painting. In the 1600's the breakthrough graphic artists were the Dutch Masters such as Vermeer and Rembrandt. They got much better at portraying reality than their predecessors. They aspired to portray realism and made significant breakthroughs in painting technology that let them make a lot of progress in doing so. The converse is the Impressionists of the 1800's such as Monet and van Gogh. These artist were all about doing good abstract, not good realism.
This pendulum swings back and forth. My personal experience with the swinging is in watching the evolution of movies and computer games. In the movies of 2014 the neat portrayal of abstract was The Grand Budapest Hotel. I felt like I was watching a Surrealist painting as I watched this. In computer games the early PC games -- those of the late 70's and early 80's -- were abstract. They had to be. The computing power wasn't there to handle both realism and motion. But the game designers aspired to realism, and as the computing capabilities steadily increased, most of the change in computer game design was to make the games more realistic. The result: tons of sequels in which each sequel had more realistic visual portrayals than the predecessor. But, alas, only a handful of new game concepts. This drying up of new game concepts bugged me deeply, and I steadily lost interest in mainstream PC gaming. With the advent of smart phones abstract came to the fore again, briefly, because the processing power on those was limited. Sadly, only briefly.
The CGI movie and computer gaming industries are deeply caught up in realism. Is there anywhere that is deeply caught up in abstraction?
Yes.
Those human activities that involve fast and important decision making love abstract. Some examples of these are the business world, the military and disaster response.
So, what forms of abstract communication do people use in these activities?
Charts and graphs are two traditional favorites, and Power Point-style presentations are a new variant. In charts and graphs, real world information is getting deeply abstracted. In the process it is getting refined so that what is relevant to making choices is portrayed in a format that is quick to digest, so quick and good decisions can be made. In these environments the goal of abstraction is to reduce distraction.
As we transition into the Post-Snap environment the communications revolution will continue. We have thinks such as Google Glass now, and we will have even subtler ways of communicating in the future. Plus, we humans will have creations and cybers to talk with as well as humans.
Whew! What a mish-mash! What forms of communications will become popular is hard to predict. And which will be the target use -- better abstract or better reality -- is also hard to predict... but I will try.
My prediction is that those systems that strive for even better depiction of "reality" will be used more for entertainment. These systems will be the successors to CGI movie monsters and first-person shoot-'em-up computer games. For this reason they will be more popular with those who are deep into the entitlement culture side of human living.
Those systems that strive for better communication of abstract will be used by those who still have important decision making to do. Those who come to mind are the "financiers", who help the cybers allocate resources; the "engineers", who help them research and design new inventions, science, and technology; and the disaster responders.
This will lead to yet another difference between different social groups: which communications technologies they master. This will then become a social distinction marker -- you tell which group a person is in by which communication technology they visibly sport.