It looks like footage from a news report. A cop approaches a graffiti-covered, seemingly abandoned building, the sound of his own footsteps and his uniform brushing the mic and disturbing the silence. Only 30 seconds in does the trailer start to look more like a video game: the exaggerated gun reload, the way the cop effortlessly vaults a barrier. But at a passing glance – even at close examination, on a phone screen – it looks as if it could be real. Even when the cop shoots someone and they crumple immediately to the floor.
Unrecord, a “bodycam first-person shooter” being created by French independent developer Drama, made an impact with its shockingly realistic trailer last week. It looks so close to reality because of the natural lighting, muffled sound and shaky camera movement, and the fact that it’s being made in Unreal Engine 5, the cutting edge of video game graphics. The internet is replete with YouTubers screaming in all-caps disbelief about how close it looks to reality, while others are claiming it looks too good to be genuine, and must be an elaborate feat of fakery. And still others have asked: do we really want games to look this alarmingly realistic? Especially when that game is a cop story, and we’ve all seen more bodycam footage of real police shootings than any of us would like.
The conversation moved the developer to post a few clarifications on the game’s Steam page. (Unrecord is very early in development, with no release date on the horizon.) Assuring readers that the game is, in fact, real – “considering the high production costs of a video game and our global reputation at stake, if Unrecord were a scam, it would be a blockbuster scam” – the developer also attempts to assuage concerns about the game’s content and its obvious potential to cause discomfort.
“As a French studio addressing a global audience, the game does not engage in any foreign policy and is not inspired by any real-life events,” it asserts, in a dispiriting echo of Ubisoft claiming that The Division 2, a game about how the US military responds to the collapse of government, was not political. “The game will obviously avoid any undesirable topics such as discrimination, racism, violence against women and minorities. The game will have no biased or Manichaean take on criminal acts and police violence.”
This is a good time to reiterate that games are political whether they want to be or not. Even Wordle can be political. This is not a bad thing. Nobody is suggesting that cop games shouldn’t exist, only that they exist within the real-world context of police violence, and so players are inevitably going to bring their own interpretation to that.
Unrecord’s appearance at the centre of gaming conversation raises another question: as game graphics improve, to the extent where you don’t need millions of dollars and dozens of people to create games that look impressively realistic, how far do we go with it? Motorcycle racing game Ride 4 made waves recently with ultra-realistic gameplay footage of bikes zooming around rainy Northern Ireland; in that context, photorealism is a boon. But when games involve violence, as they often do, it becomes much more uncomfortable. I have suppressed mild disgust for years at the gratuitous neck-snapping or stabbing animations in most first-person shooters. How much worse would that instinctive ickiness be if the game and its characters looked more real?
Perhaps this will be a non-issue for some. We have realistic violence in film and TV, and people who don’t like it can choose not to watch (or, as I often do for particularly horrible scenes in The Sopranos, watch through my fingers). But the interactivity of games does make it different. It is easier to bat away concerns about violence in video games when it is as cartoonish as Grand Theft Auto V, but if footage from that game were indistinguishable at a glance from livestreamed footage of actual shootings, the implications are obviously unpleasant.
There is already a case study on this: Arma 3 (pictured above), a long-established realistic, moddable war game, has been used to generate “fake news” videos of actual conflicts, most recently the war in Ukraine. This footage has proliferated across social media, particularly TikTok, has been shared by various government sources, and has even made it on to TV news.
The Czech developers of Arma 3 released a statement late last year urging players to help them curb this unforeseen abuse of their game. “Arma 3 videos allegedly depicted conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, Palestine, and even between India and Pakistan … With every video taken down, 10 more are uploaded each day. We found the best way to tackle this is to actively cooperate with leading media outlets and fact-checkers (such as AFP, Reuters, and others), who have better reach and the capacity to fight the spreading of fake news footage effectively,” wrote Bohemia Interactive’s Pavel Křižka.
Links between violent media and real-world violence have never been credibly established. A 2020 review of all the studies in this area showed no causative effect whatsoever. But in our post-truth era, when deepfakes and AI-generated photographs are scrambling our ability to tell what’s real from what’s not, there’s more than one reason why the prospect of photorealistic games is discomfiting.
What to play
I have been quietly revisiting The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for a month or so, in preparation for Tears of the Kingdom. (On that note, if you’re excited about Link’s forthcoming outing, check the Guardian’s games page from about 2pm today.)
I had never played the Master Trials or Champions’ Ballad expansions, so I had not yet experienced the giddy joy of riding a motorcycle around Hyrule, and now I’m zooming around discovering new corners of the map. I am amazed there is still so much I haven’t seen. It’s a rare game whose appeal feels truly bottomless.
Available on: Nintendo Switch
Estimated playtime: Six years and counting …
What to read
I had a brilliant conversation with Shuhei Yoshida, the behind-the-scenes face of PlayStation, who won Bafta’s prestigious Fellowship award last month (pictured above). The first two games he ever worked on were Gran Turismo and Crash Bandicoot, and since then he’s been involved with a host of PlayStation’s most successful series, as well as helped countless independent developers to bring their games to Sony’s consoles. He also plays everything – it’s genuinely impressive.
Somebody asked AI art generation tool Midjourney for some photos of people having fun playing video games, and discovered that it creates Cronenburgian horrors in place of normal game controllers.
I love this story about a woman in Ohio who didn’t realise she was entering a Candy Crush tournament, but came out top of her bracket and stood a significant chance of being flown to London to compete for the final prize of $250k. Aspirational gamer-mum energy.
Having seen the Mario movie twice in one week with my son and his wee pal, I would be quite happy not to think about it again for a good long while, but the news that Jack Black’s Peaches song has made it into the Billboard Hot 100 has still made me laugh.
What to click
Shoot ’em up! California’s retro games arcades – in pictures
Tron: Identity review: moody sci-fi detective game is all light, no cycle
‘Muted, soft, like watercolours’: The Last Guardian’s soundtrack was an appeal to the heart
10 interesting video games about immigration
Question Block
Reader Jeanne asks:
“I have a five-year-old nephew who absolutely loves playing games with me. But as much as I love romping through the Lego games, a ton of games that I love are most certainly not appropriate for him (eg Persona 5). Is there anything out there that’s adult-oriented while still being appropriate for a child to at least watch an adult play?”
It depends how you define adult-oriented – it’s not always about the age rating on the box. I was confounded by my stepson at that age, whose most beloved games were the Ghostbusters tie-in, an execrable Ben 10 piece of licensed garbage, anything Spider-Man, and a very strange demoscene tech experiment called Linger in Shadows. (Why?!)
The obvious recommendation here is anything Nintendo – especially the more esoteric and adult-pleasing products of Weird Nintendo, like WarioWare or Earthbound (throwback) or, to a lesser extent, Kirby and the Forgotten Land. Five years old might be a bit young to watch Zelda, but it also might not; The Wind Waker might be especially appealing. Outside of the big N, there are even more options in the indie space: things like Lil Gator Game (above), A Short Hike or Alba: A Wildlife Adventure.
I’m sure there are many, many more, so please, readers: what games do you play in front of your kids that aren’t kids’ games, per se? And if you have a question, please do hit reply and send it in.
