When Alexander The
Great stood atop a
mountain and looked
out upon the breadth
of his domain, he wept
for there were no more
worlds to conquer.
That’s a quote from Hans Gruber, the bad
guy in Die Hard, but just as Alexander
The Great Big Cry Baby was sulking
about not being able to do any more
conquering, I too feel that my work as
a fixer of videogames’ worst cliches is
approaching an end.
In the decades since my mission
began I have fixed almost every problem
in games that there is. For instance,
controller cables used to be perfectly
rigid, jutting out of the front of the
console like a pair of eight-foot-long
broomstick handles, before I came up
with the ingenious idea of attaching the
controllers using flexible wires instead.
More recently I went one step further and
launched a successful campaign to get
rid of cables altogether, which allowed
excited gamers to twirl around on the
spot over and over again when they beat
a boss, without getting all tangled up
and yanking the console onto the floor.
Now, thanks to my tireless efforts,
games these days are mostly perfect.
We’ve reached an era of qualm-free
entertainment, a cultural and technical
zenith the likes of which – if you’ll allow
me to be immodest for one moment –
never could have been achieved without
my having been born. When is the last
time you heard a gamer complain about
anything? Chances are you never have.
But unlike Alexander The Great – who
didn’t seem to understand how horizons
work – I realise that I must now look
farther into the draw distance, turn over
more rocks and kick over more bins in
search of gaming’s remaining tropes,
those last few unfixed quibbles hidden
in the darkest recesses of the medium,
like the last Pringles at the bottom of the
tube. No, I will never stop fixing games, Ithey want. We wax it off, we clip it on, we
use high-powered lasers to obliterate
follicles (that’s the hair’s ‘house’ inside
your skin), we surgically transplant it
from our ass cheeks to our forehead, we
shape it, we colour it, we snip clumps of
it off and send it to Timothée Chalamet
along with our baby teeth. Whatever your
feelings about the hair you’ve got, you
can’t deny that thinking about hair is a
core part of being a human.
So why are games so terrible at
representing something so vital to who
we are? Almost every male protagonist
has a tight buzz cut, to avoid having to
waste precious polygons on rendering
a bobbing quiff, or physics processing
power on a beautiful flowing mullet. And
this – along with basic sexism, of course- is why there are fewer women in games
too. Graphics cards can’t handle long
or curly hair, especially if it’s whipped
back or forth. Look at the women in Mass
Effect, for example. They either wear
helmets, have tentacled scalps, or look
like their hair has been pulled out of a
Burger King grease trap.
The solution
You might think that as consoles become
more powerful this problem will begin to
solve itself, but rendering realistic hair
will always be a low priority in the visual
effects department. All of that power will
go towards making a more believable-
looking machine gun, or a high-fidelity
oak tree, before hair even gets a look in.
That’s why I believe games should
dynamically dial down the detail of all
other objects on-screen when a woman
with well-conditioned, shoulder-length
hair appears. As she enters the room,
reduce the complexity of the scene to
a simple, grey cube, and the audio to a
harsh screech, as her incredible, layered
curls dance around the screen like a bad
Tresemme nightmare. Only then will hair
have the treatment it so deserves. nSteve also writes for City A.M.will not go gentle into that good night, or
give up a perfectly well-paying monthly
column in the world’s best Xbox mag.The problem
Hair. We’ve all got it, but nobody in the
world has precisely the amount of it thatinsider opinion
This month Steve finds a solution to gaming’s bad hair day
The Fixer
steve Hogarty is...
“Renderin
realistic hair
will always be a
low priority”
020 theoffiCiAl xboxMAgAzine