It wouldn’t be fair to blame any layman-of-videogames for taking the image on the left for a vista. Correction:a photograph of a vista. Scour the internet for a high-resolution version of it, or something close enough, and in minutes you’d have a sharp wallpaper to spread across the digital workspace most of us gravitate to when we’re “home”. Take it how you like, but what we have is a still an image, a .jpeg, of the game Flower for the Playstation 3. Try again. Not a flower, not a vista, not a photograph. This isn’t about the art theory of abstraction, though, or how literal of “pipe” this is – I’ll let Magritte and a lot of art history books tell you how treacherous images can be. This is about the affect aesthetics have in modern game design, the interactive images in motion – are they just as guilty? The natural progression of technology in games ramping towards photo realism more and more each year has given space for wondering what it says about the function of the medium. Simply, I’m talking about graphics.