"What are the implications for the arts and society?"
Second Life always feels lonely to me, because it always takes hours for the textures to load and it's aesthetically disjointed from island to island. At one point, while walking around the Layachi with The Team, I remarked that I felt like I was walking around a cross between the Dire Straits' "I Want My MTV" video and a first generation Playstation game. What was once the idyllic view of "Virtual Reality" in the late 80's now seems antiquated and, well, downright UGLY.
Is it time for the low-poly look of the 32- and 64-bit generations to take its place with 8- and 16-bit sprites as a legitimate game art style in its own right? Are there artists out there making intentionally austere 3d models, ala pixel art? What are some games that use those big jutting sharp triangles to their advantage? Games with abstract-by-concept aesthetics like Rez aren't a good example, which attempt to represent reality or preconceived art with hopelessly limited/inadequate resources in a effectively abstracted way, as the best pixel art often does.
One thing pixel art has that low-poly graphics never will is precision. Everything fits and has an absolute size and position in a tiny grid of tinier squares. There's something inherently grotesque about triangles bumbling through infinite space in comparison. Perhaps, as pixel art is usually bigger, more colorful, and more stable now than it was in NES days, we'll someday see angular 3d graphics minus all the clipping, pop-in, and camera nightmares that plague your average Second Life experience.
Yet I'm still not completely convinced early 3D could ever be elevated to the level that spritework is, though, simply because 99% of the time it doesn't look anywhere near as deliberate. Blurry textures and jagged lines are almost always objectively ugly, whereas sprites have never really had that glass ceiling to break through - the limitations are more rigidly defined, so the art is easier to appreciate in its own right.
What is really effective about 3D titles from the early days right up until now is creating characters and objects with easy-to-read silhouettes and profiles. Part of why everyone could visually read "StarFox", despite the extremely limited palette, was because every enemy was built out of shapes that anyone could process and interpret as dragons, hopping frogs, butterflies."Panzer Dragoon" completely embraces this idea by populating its world with incredibly alien-looking creatures, yet the player can still visually interpret the abilities and purpose of the games bestiary of bio-organic vehicles and battleships easily. It uses extremely stark, often asymmetrical silhouettes, which stand out against the background, coupled with coloring that heavily contrasts the world (whites and light greys most often, with deep reds and oranges for enemy shots or missiles). Good character design is often constructed by combining basic shapes, so there's no reason this shouldn't carry over to the 3d realm quite naturally. Good low-poly terrain is a bit more difficult, though. It seems to me the era between the ultra-sparse Star Fox/Interstate '76 style and modern hi-res texture bump-mapped clarity hasn't much to recommend in it. The thing about these low-poly models is that they're simple and abstract enough to be iconic in a similar way to early arcade bitmaps: an accurate representation of the idea of the thing, where high-poly models can usually only aspire to be a poor facsimile of the actual thing.
Contemporary art directors are pushing for photorealism an awful lot of the time. Games like "No More Heroes" and ""Team Fortress 2" certainly deserve appreciation for bucking the trends. I like that they jettisoned all semblance of detail or quality out the window in favor of awesomely dynamic shadow and lighting systems.
Early 3D is at its most glorious when things are going horribly wrong, and on the aesthetic level starts collapsing into itself.
Second life is pretty beautiful in all the wrong ways like that.
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