The Kids Don't Care About Graphics

But the new PAW Patrol game does look sick on my RTX 5080

Grow A Garden | Image credit: Game File

You’ve probably seen the reporting on the astonishing popularity of Grow A Garden. It’s a massive hit, often with more concurrent players than the entirety of the top 10 games on Steam combined. Crazy!

But if you look at screenshots or videos of the game, there’s something else you may have noticed about Grow A Garden. It’s something most of the press has been too polite to point out.

I’m just gonna say it: The game looks like butt cheeks.

To be fair, it’s a Roblox game made by a teenager, and those all sort of look like this: weird fonts and garish colors. Modern game devs put so much effort into UX design and high-fidelity visuals. Isn’t it kind of interesting that weak “graphics,” and really the lack of any art direction at all, just doesn’t seem to matter for games like Grow A Garden? The kids playing it simply don’t care.

I’m not exactly a graphics purist myself. It’s long been a source of minor embarrassment for me that, despite working on PC games for a decade, I’ve never owned a truly top of the line gaming PC. The idea of dropping $1,000+ on a rig always seemed like overkill, especially when I was working on League of Legends, which can run at 30 FPS on a toaster.¹ Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen PUBG and Apex Legends on max settings, and I led global comms on those games. My old, beat-up ROG laptop ran the games at a decent framerate, and they looked good enough to me on “medium” settings.

But recently curiosity got the best of me and I decided to go all-in on a big rig: an Alienware Aurora pre-built machine with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 card. After first booting up the beast, I spent some time installing a bunch of games and cranking all the settings to the max. Expedition 33 looks incredible on it, as does the Resident Evil 4 remake and the new Doom game. But when you’re actually playing these games, you’re usually too busy to notice the high-end graphical features like reflections in the water or more luscious shrubs.

Still, I was excited to show off my new toy to my oldest son, who’s almost five. I sat down with him and we started installing a bunch of stuff included in PC Game Pass.

The first thing he wanted to play? The new PAW Patrol game. It’s a cute and well-made kids game, but doesn’t exactly push the limits of technical possibility.

PAW Patrol Mighty Pups Save Adventure Bay, which is actually pretty great as a first platforming game for very young players.

We were stuck on PAW Patrol for a few sessions, and after the boy finally got tired of it I convinced him to check out some games that might actually require a graphics card. RoadCraft on Steam piqued his interest first. Like most four-year-old boys, he’s a big fan of large trucks and construction equipment. But RoadCraft was a bit complicated, and he wasn’t into the missions.

“This game is boring,” he said after about 20 minutes.

Back to Game Pass. We switched over to Firefighting Simulator - The Squad, which had him absolutely stoked at first. But it’s also not really a game for kids: it’s slow-paced and more concerned with realism than accessibility.

So we tried a few more Game Pass titles. Spray Paint Simulator was particularly fun for a bit. But soon he got tired of that too, and he asked if we could go back to playing Pikmin on the Nintendo Switch. Not Pikmin 4, mind you, but the very first Pikmin game that came out 24 years ago on the Gamecube. It was ported to the Switch recently with widescreen support and some light resolution improvements. Otherwise it looks more or less like it did back in 2001.

The textures are a little muddy, and sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s going on with all the Pikmin on-screen, but my boy doesn’t care. He laughs at the little grunts and squeals the Pikmin make when they’re carrying something heavy, and he’s devastated whenever a big monster gobbles up one of his little soldiers. He loves this game.

With the never-ending popularity of Minecraft and Roblox among kids, it’s hard not to notice that some of the most popular games in the world today are more than a decade old.

This would have been unthinkable in the ‘90s or 2000s. The tech was improving too quickly. You’d walk into a Best Buy and see groups of dudes gathered around a demo station, gawking at whatever hot new game was coming out. Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox 360 looks primitive today, but it was a head-turner in 2005.

Call of Duty 2 (2005)

When Heavenly Sword came out for the Playstation 3 in 2007, people literally could not believe how good it looked. My local GameStop kept the demo display running for a full year, and for good reason: the visual splendor was really the point of the new machines. You bought a PS3 because you wanted to play the new thing, and the new thing was obviously, objectively better than the old thing. Anyone with eyes could see.

Heavenly Sword (2007)

It was a pattern that repeated every console cycle. New games were presumed, as a matter of course, to be better than old games.

With the latest console generation, that old presumption no longer holds. And sure, part of the reason is that, as many others have noted recently, new games don’t look that much better than the old games.

But the other reason is that a huge percentage of the audience just stopped caring. The 2.5 million kids playing Grow A Garden as I write this don’t care that it looks like it was designed in Microsoft Paint. It’s a fun game, it looks good enough for what it is, and it runs well on a tablet: that’s the bar.

I can feel my own tastes changing as well. I find myself more and more drawn toward games with stranger, older visual styles. It hit me hard while playing Lunacid recently that this looks really good. That’s a game that’s visually “outdated” on purpose, but the result is beautiful.

Lunacid (2023)

And when I watch my son playing Pikmin, I find myself appreciating it more. The team that made it was going for a much more realistic look than almost any other Nintendo game from that era, and they were naturally constrained by the limits of the platform. I remember first playing it 24 years ago and feeling a little annoyed by the ways it fell short of “real life.” I could imagine a version of the game that looked better, and tried to look past the ways it failed to live up to that vision.

A quarter century later, I look at my son’s beaming face as he plays Pikmin, and the game’s supposed flaws don’t stand out so much.

There’s something beautiful in that.

That’s it for this week.

I’m gonna go play PAW Patrol with an uncapped framerate on an 8K monitor.

1. The QA team on League of Legends used to test new patches on a row of absolutely garbage-tier computers—an area of the office lovingly referred to as “the potato farm.”