Carey Chico


My name is Carey Chico, I am the executive art director at Pandemic studios, we're a game developer in Los Angeles.

Recent titles that we've come out with is, Star Wars Battlefront series of games, for Lucas Arts, and uh, the Mercenaries uh, license, uh, that we, uh, invented, also. Uh, we are currently owned by Electronic Arts.

HD really brings a degree of believability to gaming that we've not seen in 30 years. The level of detail is what drives that, and the more detail you can see, the more wrinkles on the face, the wrinkles on the clothes, the reflections on the ground as the rain's hitting it, all of those details are what make up immersion and atmosphere, and the more you can feel, the more you can see is a visceral thing.

We, now, have the capacity to make something in our game not look like a trivial, small, triangular little hero. We now can paint all the facial wrinkles and all the pores and all the skin detail, and we can add all the wrinkles in the fabric of the clothes, and the - the game player can now see all of that, and now, to make that even better, because it's HD resolution, you now can see all of that detail on the characters, which wouldn't have been, uh, purposeful or meaningful 5 years ago.

But it's never been really clear, and maybe it should be stated, hey, we're making games for your TVs, because that's what everything gets viewed on.

My group of art directors, when we came to the Loft to, to review the games, you know, one thing that became inherently obvious was that, in the game industry, we work on LCD computer monitors. We calibrate our colors and our texture and our brightness levels all towards, ah, a certain type of technology, without actually paying heed to all the other technologies out there, one of which is plasma, which has the best dark levels in the business. Uh, it's clear, certainly, as you look at all the different TVs lined up the way they have been presented for us at the Loft, that you can see, how the different technologies play out against one another, so we've effectively darkened our textures and our brightness levels in our games, to get what we believed was an optimum image at that point. Putting it on a plasma screen now reveals all of this in, in, in a different, complex image, which now says, we've made our games too dark, on the plasma screens they are too dark. We now have to ask ourselves, are we, uh, calibrating to the right technology? Are we calibrating to what will make our games look better, or are we calibrating to actually what our game, what will make our games look worse?