Rage: The Interactive Painting

Before I can talk about the significance of id Software’s new game, Rage, I have to explain a little bit about how video game worlds are created. You can separate the visual aspect of a game’s world into two categories. There’s the 3D models, which make up the shape and physical boundaries of a game’s environment, then there’s the textures, which add color and patterns to the surface of those 3D models. Without a texture, a 3D model would simply have a flat, solid color on its surface.

Imagine you want to create a brick wall in a video game that’s 30 feet wide and 15 feet tall. The standard procedure for this would be to create a 3D model of a flat, 30x15 surface, and then create a brick texture that would tile seamlessly across the whole surface. This means you would have a relatively small section of bricks (maybe 5x5 feet in size) that noticeably repeats several times across the 30x15 surface.

This is all changed with Rage. In Rage, id Software created a technology that allowed every square inch of the environment to be hand painted (see Hot Hardware's article from earlier this year: "Rage: The Tech Behind Id Tech 5"). That 30x15 brick wall would no longer have a hum-drum, tiled texture. The game’s artists could uniquely paint every single brick. This allowed the artists to add imperfections and a level of character to their work that was previously only seen in paintings and drawings. This is why I call Rage the interactive painting. The amount of detail and character that the artists crammed into this game is astounding. At any given point, you could stop what you’re doing, snap a picture, and hang it up on your wall.


Rage © 2011 id Software LLC


Rage © 2011 id Software LLC


Rage © 2011 id Software LLC

With visual art that’s comparable to what artists can create with paint and canvas, who could say a game like Rage isn’t art? And the best part is this is only one aspect of the game! There are plenty more reasons why this game is art, but they'll have to wait for another blog post!