Why 'Bad Graphics' Make You Feel Good...

Explaining why low poly graphics are the perfect nostalgic tool to make us feel good. In this video I explain why these graphics from the 1990's and early 2000's have aged into an aesthetic people love today.

00:00 Intro
01:44 What does low poly mean?
04:19 Aesthetics culture
06:21 Retro low poly games
08:12 PSX
10:54 Sega Blue Sky
14:44 How nostalgia works
17:04 Closing statements

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[theDragoonyaboiCJ]

youtube keeps recommending me bangers from small channels. Keep the work up.

[kalasatwater]

Low graphics games are more fun, developers nowadays are so fixated with good graphics that they forget the fun aspect

[JHAN]

I swear it's more than just nostalgia. For the past few months I've been only playing old games that I never played as a kid, and I find myself getting sucked into them way easier than modern games despite not having any nostalgic memories attached to them.

[moister]

For me low poly games are easy on the eyes and mind. I can see everything with ease while moving and every object/actor is more distinguichable from the scenery

[djvoid]

Your brain likes to work. Your imagination fills in the gaps and it's satisfying to do so

[panwu]

Less realistic means more removed from reality and this is what we want: To escape reality for even just a moment - that's why it makes you feel good.

[piyaphumL.]

Like someone said, "Graphics is temporary, but art direction is eternal". If the art design in video game is great, it can be the timeless game without look like dated game like Boku no Natsuyasumi (my summer vacation).

[Rasudo]

Shemnue is incredibly high poly for a 90's game

[MakingAndBreakingtheZine]

Bout to Jam Out to the PS1 start up noise, don't call, don't text

[PloopChute]

Its wild looking back at our younger selves when we thought these games "looked like real life"
One of my favorite video game memories is when my dad (who doesn't play games at all) came into my room one day while I was hunched over in front of Gran Turismo 2. He was legitimately awestruck and blurted out "holy shit! That looks real!"
He actually called for my mom to come and look with a "can you believe that? That's crazy!"
That was one of the very few times he actually played a game with me.
His brain practically exploded when I showed him the replay feature with the dynamic camera. Im sure the shitty, tiny 13" Durabrand CRT helped hide a lot of the more obvious graphical shortcomings of the PS1 lol

[Onnya-Lemox]

I don't think it's just nostalgia. To me it's like the difference, in 2D art, between realistic drawings and stylized ones. Low poly graphics are more appealing to people who prefer to see the artistic, even cartoony, touch cause it stimulates the imagination and feels like an escape into a fantasy world that still looks immersive enough. They are overall more playful.
Whereas today's hyperrealistic graphics appeal mostly to people who don't like to put any effort into filling the gaps, that want everything to be already visualized by game artists and feel like a literal virtual reality. They are more "serious" gamers, and I think that the fact that today there is less stigma towards adults playing videogames is partly connected to this loss of playfulness in favor of a sober realism, dim colors that kids would hate etc.
Also, low poly feels more sculptural and clearly defined, you have a stronger perception of shapes as distinct from one another which, even if the rendering is worse than today's, paradoxically appeals more to the sense of touch, looking very solid. Low poly worlds represent an effective simplification of the real world, stripping it of everything unnecessary to show the essence, and just opened the possibility for us to navigate fantasy worlds in all directions.
As soon as 3D graphics became just a struggle for a perfect imitation of life, I lost all interest for gaming, cause I've always been in it more for the fun atmospheres created by the visuals than for the gameplay itself.

[caexy_]

low poly on the graphics, high quality on the Dan

[guybrush]

:) I wouldn't call 1997 an "early stage of gaming". I think a more apt description would be an "early stage of 3D gaming"

[Cryptic]

It's not just nostalgia. They *had* to create art designs that worked with the tech that was available, whereas modern games fall into the "uncanny valley" of almost but not quite looking realistic because they don't have an art style but they also don't *really* look quite real, either.

[JediMB]

I'm glad lower-fidelity art styles in games aren't as universally viewed as "bad graphics" as they used to be. Minecraft alone did a lot of heavy lifting for polygon graphics in that department.

[Iridesca]

The graphics aren’t even bad, they just are low resolution/low poly. Photorealism doesn’t equal “good graphics”

[lowang]

Im glad the younger generation actually likes the low poly even though they haven't experienced it back then, it's a very good thing because we can see how there are indie Games that take inspiration from low poly and the younger generation is all for it, they seem to like low poly Indie games and im glad to see this, i feel like with the release of unreal engine 5 we're actually at a risk of developers losing their artistic touch and making games that looks and feel very similar to one another, so this growing interest in low poly gives me hope.

[JoseJimenez-ilvs]

Whether you use flat or Gouraud shading has nothing to do with the number of triangles. When using Gouraud, the object will appear to be smoother, but it's a more expensive operation because you need to interpolate the colour between vertices. You can have texture mapping and Gouraud shading simultaneously. Crash Bandicoot on the PS1 made extensive use of Gouraud Shading in order to avoid using textures, which helped with the limited amount of RAM the PS1 had (2MB of main memory and 1MB for graphics)

[soraaoixxthebluesky]

Most PS2 titles back the feel like a high poly game to me vs PS1. I can literally fell the massive jump of both graphics and level scale.

[jasonblalock]

I got hit by this recently. A low-budget Mexican game called "Aztech Forgotten Gods." It looks and feels so much like an upscaled PS2 game that it's downright charming, and actually triggered a bit of a nostalgia goggles effect. Even though it's only a couple years old.

(Plus the low-poly look works pretty well with its techno-Aztec art design.)