61 Frames Per Second : uncanny valley

The Art of Heavy Rain

John Constantine — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 GMT

We have absolutely no clue what Heavy Rain is going to be. Well, we have some idea, sure. We know that Quantic Dream’s unsettling detailed three-dimensional characters and environments recall the world on its most, dreary rain-soaked day, shades of grey and brown and green. We know that the character’s have facial expressions that dip so low into the Uncanny Valley that they stop being repellant and become entrancing. We know that the game will be played predominantly through quick time events. We know that, if Indigo Prophecy and Omikron are anything to go by, Heavy Rain’s going to be, if not good, one hell of an interesting game. Truth is, we know so little because Quantic Dream hasn’t shown the actual game to anyone besides a small handful of journalists and employees of Sony Computer Entertainment. They’ve shown two demos as examples of the technology and style that will make up Heavy Rain. That’s it. No actual game. Quantic Dream are mysterious Frenchmen, so they are.

Today, we can add some new pieces to the Heavy Rain puzzle. This concept art may not tell us a whole lot about the game’s story or what it will actually be like to play, but they speak volumes about its tone. This game is going to be unsettling.

The three color environments are spooky enough. They’re dark, lonely places. Even the hotel room is ominous, inviting at first until you spot the cracks in its ceiling. The black and white drawings are flat out disturbing in their depictions of violence. Weary policemen standing around a rainy murder scene aren’t uncommon in games. Mid-coital stabbings, and possible rapes, however, are.

Sony’s classified Heavy Rain as a “Psychological Mystery/Dark Thriller”. Seems that’s an apt description.

Much love to NeoGAFfer Cyberia for finding these.

Related links:

Feeling It: Social Versus Primitive Emotion in Videogames
In Defense of the QTE: Ninja Blade
Less Than Perfect: Jak and Daxter and The Flawed Character
Crossing the Uncanny Valley

Star Ocean: The Last Hope Is Creepy as Hell

Bob Mackey — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Whenever I see media for Square-Enix's Star Ocean: The Last Hope (out this week if you didn't know), I can't help but feel a deep, troubling sickness in my soul as my skin literally tries to crawl off of my body to a safe place where the game's creepy anime RealDoll versions of human beings do not exist. Of course, I could just be feeling residual effects from having suffered through Star Ocean: Till the End of Time oh so many years ago, but that doesn't mean something is not very wrong about Star Ocean 4's creepy puppet people--especially when you consider the fact that the director harbors a desire to make "adult" games. I don't know if you can picture dead-eyed automatons like the one above bumping uglies, but I imagine the rape scene in Silent Hill 2 is far more arousing.

The Last Hope developer tri-Ace seems to have a serious problem with making human characters that don't want to make you jump through the nearest window; just check out their work on Infinite Undiscovery--the 1:55 mark is when you should start screaming.

There seems to be a strange set of mixed priorities at work here; namely, how developers like tri-Ace motion-capture actors who over-gesticulate like costumed theme park characters, but pay absolutely no attention to how everyone in their games have the facial expressions of corpses. I'm not sure if Japanese developers turn a blind eye to The Uncanny Valley, but the effect seems to be at work more often in Eastern games--which is odd when you think about how willingly the Japanese audience accepts a more cartoony aesthetic. I guess the only way to teach them a lesson is to not buy Star Ocean: The Last Hope, unless you feel safe about a loved one or family member possibly walking into your living room and seeing something like this:

Related Links:

Star Ocean and the HD-JRPG Conundrum
Looks Are Everything
Turning Japanese: Microsoft’s Latest Ditch Effort to Win the East

X-Blades and the Cultural Uncanny Valley

John Constantine — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Years of schooling in composition left me with absolutely no sense of proper grammar, structure, and only a passing familiarity with proper spelling, but I did come away with a good sense of how not to seem like a jackass in an opening. The golden rules: don’t open with a question and don’t start with a definition. These rules can be broken only when absolutely necessary. Like now for instance!

How many of you have heard of X-Blades?

For clarity’s sake, X-Blades is a third-person action game in the Devil May Cry mold and it looks like a parody of Japanese videogames that you might see on The Simpsons. It stars a young woman sporting knives, blonde hair, and enormous eyes/breasts. She wears some string and tiny scraps of cloth over her privates and kills monsters in a fantasy land where it is apparently always dusk. Her name’s Ayumi. Of course it is! It's a videogame so overfull on cliché that it can’t possibly be real. But it is, and it actually seems fairly inoffensive, a potentially good way to drop a few hours between games that you actually give a damn about. Thing is, though, every time I’ve seen screens or footage of X-Blades something has just seemed off. I know that isn’t the most journalistic statement in the world but there’s no other way to put it. It’s just wrong, off-putting, something rotten inside of its seemingly pure trope-soup.

The reason X-Blades seems so peculiar, I think, has to do with where it’s from. The game, despite appearances, isn’t Japanese. It’s developer, the appropriately named Gaijin Entertainment, is Russian. It isn’t that there’s anything specific wrong with X-Blades — well, maybe Ayumi’s ridiculous design — but that the game suffers from a cultural Uncanny Valley effect. It seems that, when one culture tries to emulate another’s game design, the result is repellant. Take Japanese attempts at the first-person shooter, like Coded Arms. Even beyond it’s questionable PSP control, it’s lacking in the feel inherent in Western FPS design. Or how about the long-forgotten PS1 RPG, Shadow Madness? Even with Ted Woolsey steering that ship, Crave Entertainment’s attempt at making a “Western JRPG” fell flat on its face.

This isn’t what you’d call a scientific observation, dear reader. But still good food for thought.

Related links:

TVTropes' "Woolseyisms"
Crossing the Uncanny Valley
The Uncanny Valley: Tomb Raider and Lara Croft Are Starting to Freak Me Out
Video of the Day: Judah Friedlander Explains the Uncanny Valley

Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 5

Amber Ahlborn — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

In this day and the foreseeable future video games will continue to push the envelope of photo realism and, no doubt, continue to send the occasional victim down into the Uncanny Valley by accident. Of course, as technology and associated animation techniques advance, the game industry's ability to fool us will get better. I say, more power to them, but...

...let's not put photo realism on a pedestal as though it were the goal of visual artistry.

Every game project is an opportunity for artistic expression, a chance to create something unique. There is a near infinite variety of styles out there to try. While it is certainly true photo realism suits some types of games very well, especially anything trying to simulate reality, there are so many other interesting choices. Anything can be created in a game, so why are we (we as in Americans for the most part, the rest of the world seems less fearful of whimsy) currently obsessing over imitating the real world? I'd like to see a little less dirt and grit and a little more...

...ink and watercolor...

...crayon...

...cartoon...

...comic book.

And the list goes well beyond what has already been done in a video game.

Okay, I admit it, I have a rather strong bias against photo realism. As an artist, I've always been attracted to stylization and the current trend toward photo realism seems less about artistic possibilities and more about graphic processing power. Reality is limiting by nature but art is limited only by imagination. Also, in line with this post series theme, stylized characters are much more forgiving to design and animate. What I perhaps find most offensive about photo realistic graphics is how they more often than not fail to fool my eye and jar me out of the reality of the game than draw me in. But I have to ask, are people these days becoming numbed to the Uncanny Valley affect?

More now than at any point in the past, in everything from movies to games to robotics, we are exposed to visual frauds asking that we suspend our disbelief and simply accept them. Is the Uncanny Valley reaction becoming lesser as a whole? Of course, your mileage may vary when it comes to personal reaction towards the pretenders, so I shall end my series with a question to my readers: I've shown a variety of video clips and alluded to others as examples of both the Uncanny Valley and its cousins like clashing juxtaposition, but did you react to them as I did? Where I was bothered, did you see nothing wrong?

Related Links:

Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 1

Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 2

Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 3

Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 4

Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 4

Amber Ahlborn — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:00:00 GMT

In my previous post in this series, I talked about the pitfalls associated with animating faces, specifically pointing out how incredibly hard it is to photo realistically animate a human face due to the array of subtle yet complex interactions of muscles and skin. Now we move on to the broader animation of the body. You can divide animation techniques into two broad categories: by hand, which means the animation was achieved manually by an artist; and assisted animation, where most or all of the animation has been created through mechanical means for the purpose of capturing greater realism in movement. The two mechanical techniques I'll be talking about in this post are rotoscoping and motion capture. Naturally, since this series is about the Uncanny Valley, I'll be focusing on how these assisted animation techniques can go horribly wrong...

...horribly, horribly wrong.

Video Clip Found Here

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Most gamers are probably familiar with the term motion capture. There are different styles of motion capture but they all involve the use of computers to record the movements of a live actor and digitally mapping those movements onto a 3-D animated character. Rotoscoping is a much older technique that gives much the same results. Invented by Max Fleischer around 1915, this technique involves taking film footage of a live actor and tracing the animated character over the actor's movement frame by frame.

Motion capture is the technique most often used in today's video games, particularly in sports games to translate the actions of athletes into digital form. However, these mechanically assisted animation techniques have a number of drawbacks. The one of major concern to an artist is noise (excessive motion).

When people move around, they don't exactly do it with efficiency. People wiggle and wobble and gesture meaninglessly. While this is natural in life, it can look very off when applied to animated characters, as Samwise's disturbing flailing in the film clip above demonstrates. Why this is so is a problem of juxtaposition.

Let's say I drew a robot. It's a very blocky robot made of metal cubes and cylinders, but when I go to animate it, I give it incredibly fluid and organic movements. This juxtaposition of clashing elements results in the character looking wrong. Putting together dissimilar elements can have a powerful desirable effect, like drawing a murder scene in black and white but coloring the blood bright red to draw the viewer's attention to the results of the carnage. Or, it can be incredibly jarring, like putting Sonic the Hedgehog into a Final Fantasy game and having him date the female lead. The clashing cartoonie and realistic art styles might make one wonder if this incarnation of Sonic was a battery operated plush toy running amok in the real world.

Stylized characters, whether they are cartoonie or realistic achieve a distillation of reality. The human or animal form is refined to its most essential parts. Anime characters are prime examples of this refinement. The human form is simplified and important features exaggerated to maximize those characteristics that are most critical. The eyes in particular are the focus for expression in Japanese culture so they are enlarged. Some anime styles even do away with such non-essentials as the nose to put more focus on the eyes.

The animation applied to such characters should match their visual style. Where the Uncanny Valley affect comes in is when noisy photo realistic movement is applied to a stylized character. The motion captured animation stands out like a sore thumb. This can be especially egregious in games that use hand done animation during play but switch to mocap during cutscenes.

Motion capture and its elder sibling rotoscoping are powerful tools that can be used to great affect, but they often need an animator to clean up and often tone down the raw animation so that'll fit the character. When misapplied it can be easily spotted as an anomaly in the scene, and when mixed with minimalist hand done animation, it can look creepy enough to fall into the Uncanny Valley.

I began this series with a link to a video that treated the subject of photo realism VS stylization very even handedly. I, however, am a lot more opinionated on the subject. I'll be wrapping up the Uncanny Valley series with a final look at where graphics and realism stand today and a plea for greater artistic expression.

Related Links:

Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 1

Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 2

Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 3

Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 3

Amber Ahlborn — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

So close and yet so far... (scene from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within animated movie)

There are over 50 muscles in the human face. Those muscles that control expression make the face an incredibly mobile part of human anatomy, capable of both extreme and subtle displays of emotion. The skin that lies over those muscles is highly elastic. It stretches and creases, wrinkles, bulges, and puckers. While catching every last subtle motion of the face isn't impossible, it's certainly a herculean task to ask of an animator, much more likely to end in failure than success. Even Squaresoft, who spent nearly enough time, money, and talent to bankrupt itself on an incredibly ambitious movie failed to perfectly cast the illusion of true human expression. Video game budgets are much tighter on all resources, thus, when photorealism is the goal, the end result typically ends up squarely in the Uncanny Valley the moment the camera focuses on a face.

The more realistic a face is drawn, the harder it is to bring it to life. From my experiences in my animation courses at DigiPen, it seems like one of the main reasons is a reluctance to “push the extremes”. Cartoonie characters practically beg to be exaggerated and this goes far to give them a genuine feeling of life.

Edit: I recommend watching these videos with the sound off to get a better feel for what the facial expressions and body gestures are trying to convey.

Daxter is particularly great at demonstrating how lively a cartoonie character can be. Now compare the characters of Jak II to the characters in Castlevania: Lament of Innocence.

When I first watched these cut scenes I immediately thought: “Fantastic Plastic People”. While far from universal, realistic characters tend to have almost mask-like faces, as though the animators were afraid they'd break the character's face if they made it too expressive. The results are, frankly, a bit creepy. Even though the character designs here are anime styled, their body movements are motion captured from live actors. That realistic movement combined with the stiff faces has a pretty strong Uncanny Valley effect.

For a final comparison, we turn to one of my favorite games, Legacy of Kain: Defiance.

Again we have stylized characters that trend towards realism, however the animators were less reluctant to push the extremes of expression. Raziel is a particularly interesting case since all we really see of his face is his eyes, which must carry the weight of his expressions. This is done incredibly well, bringing forth his moods very clearly with the aid of his exaggerated features and facial animations.

It's ironic that it's harder to bring to convincing life realistic characters than cartoonie ones and that photorealistic characters are often the least convincing. Nowhere is this more true than with the face, the part of the human body that we social animals are hardwired to read the expressions of. We spend a lifetime perfecting our abilities to pick up on the subtle cues faces tell us about the people we interact with and the social situations we navigate. While the broad animations of the body may fool us into believing an animated photorealistic character is truly real, this illusion most often comes crashing down the moment the face is focused on. The moment it smiles or speaks the jig is up and the fake revealed.

I hope everyone is finding my Uncanny Valley series interesting. Tomorrow's post will talk a little about techniques that have been used to capture realistic animation and how they don't necessarily work when applied to animated characters.

Related Links:

Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 1

Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 2

Mother 3 Makes Me Feel Human Again

Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 2

Amber Ahlborn — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Welcome back, dear readers, to my Uncanny Valley Special. For part two we're actually going to take a side trip out of the Valley and look at a related artist's dilemma: that of familiarity. Part of the reason we are repulsed by characters that are a fraction off of being truly human is our familiarity with what healthy humans should look like. This familiarity also extends to nonhuman animals and some critters can give an artist trouble if she or he isn't familiar with the anatomy. The hilarious results can be painful to look at.

Do you know what a colugo is? If somebody put one in a game and animated it moving around, could you tell if it looked right or not? For most people, the answer is probably no. Where exotic animals, aliens, and fantasy creatures are concerned, so long as the animations look like they fit the body it doesn't matter if they move correctly or not. Nobody is going to know the difference. The opposite is true for domesticated animals in general and the horse in particular.

Horses may not be as common a sight as cats and dogs, but the average person is exposed to them on farms, television and movies, and even in cities drawing carriages in parks or mounted by police officers. They are also one of the more common animals playing major roles in video games: we have Epona from the Legend of Zelda series and Agro from Shadow of the Colossus to name a couple. They are also hard suckers to draw or model in 3-D and harder to animate right. Even major developers can have trouble with them. Check out Nintendo's flub with the horses in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance:

Note to Nintendo for future reference:

Why do horses present such a challenge to artists? It has to do with how the bones in their legs are arranged. All animals that have arms and legs have the same basic set of bones and the joints all bend in the same basic ways. However, how those bones are proportioned can vary a great deal. Humans stand flat footed, dogs walk on their toes. Despite this difference, it's easy to draw parallels between how our limbs are arranged and how a dog's are. Horses by comparison seem to have too many joints in their legs, especially near the hoof. This illusion is due to the fact that horses walk on their finger and toe nails (the hoof is a modified nail), and those “extra” joints are simply the finger and foot/toe bones.

This arrangement gives the horse a distinct way of moving that sets it apart from other animals. Ultimately, the only way to overcome the challenge of the horse is to study its anatomy and watch much footage of horses in motion. Considering how often horses pop up in video games (even if just in cut scenes) it is a valuable beast for artists to become very familiar with.

Tune back in tomorrow for part 3 of my Uncanny Valley Special, where I'll return our focus to humans and take a close look at the face and creating expressions.

Related Links:

Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 1

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: Why I Let Termina Go Squish

The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History, Part 3

Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 1

Amber Ahlborn — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Time doesn't seem to be on my side. As my day job devours so much of my time I tend to wait until the weekend to do the majority of my writing which means that sometimes somebody else writes about what I was planning to write about. In this case, it would be the Uncanny Valley; a theory concerning design (mostly visual but it can extend to the other senses as well). The Uncanny Valley is an incredibly important concept for artists in the video game industry to grasp. With today's systems being as powerful as they are, photo realistic graphics are not simply possible but becoming ever more common, and if I had my way, no artist (or director, or producer) would be allowed to work on a game project without having a solid grasp of what the Uncanny Valley is and how it relates to the art assets used in video games.

Seriously, somebody has already done the heavy lifting for me in describing what the Uncanny Valley is. Go here. The article even includes an awesome little video that explains the theory in simple, clear, and entertaining terms. Do it, I'll wait...

Back already? Okay then, let me add to what we've learned.

Photo-Realism: The Devil is in the Details

It isn't difficult to make a still image look like something from real life. This is why it's easy to be impressed by screen shots. As the video pointed out, it's mostly in the animation that everything goes to hell. The problem is one of subtlety. A program that perfectly simulates the way living flesh moves does not exist yet. It's mind boggling how many subtle interactions occur between skin, bone, and muscle in a gesture as simple as a smile. Skin stretches a bit here, puckers up there, and creases elsewhere. A footstep causes the concussive force of the foot impacting the ground to travel up the leg, resulting in fat, muscle, and skin jiggling in a particular way (interactions of other objects, like cloth, only complicate matters further). These are not things most people are conscious of noticing, but the eye picks up on them and the brain files them away; categorizing movements as natural or unnatural, healthy or ill, familiar or foreign. The moment the eye spots something that's not quite right, alarm bells go off in the brain and what was a subtle error becomes a glaring deformity.

Why do we have such a strong reaction to these subtle errors? I don't know, but I can reason the root of our pickiness lies deep in our evolutionary past. Imagine an individual of an ancient hominid troop looking for a mate to start a family with. Let's say our hominid is very cavalier in its attitude towards mate selection. Not particularly caring who he/she hooks up with, our hominid picks out somebody who's sick. The sickness causes this person to move a little stiffly, or smell slightly odd, or something else that's not quite right. Alas for our hypothetical hominids, it's a bad pairing and they fail to produce many children, resulting in a genetic dead end.

Another couple have much better luck. These hominids are very particular in who they bond with, rejecting anyone who's not perfect in health and form. They have a pile of children and grandchildren. Their picky tastes are passed on, coming to dominate the genes of future generations. A few thousand such generations pass and that eye for detail has been reinforced again and again, ultimately resulting in modern human beings who are not easily fooled by mere imitations.

Interestingly, this eye for detail is not limited to us recognizing our own species, rather, it's a matter of familiarity that extends to us recognizing errors in other animals as well. In Part Two, I'll tell the tale of the horse, and how much trouble it can give video game artists.

Related Links:

The Uncanny Valley: Tomb Raider and Lara Croft Are Starting to Freak Me Out

Feeling It: Social Versus Primitive Emotion in Videogames

The Contrarion: The Future Brings Hi-Res Emotion

The Contrarion: The Future Brings Hi-Res Emotion

Cole Stryker — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Activision President and CEO Robert Kotick dishes about the future of the games industry. It's an interesting read, but what struck me as way off was tucked away at the end.

We struggle with the emotional connection between the audience and the character and the ability to deliver a story. Part of the limitation is that facial animation and mouth movement is not realistic. It's very hard to deliver a line that you would find compelling or somehow to be able to engage with.
I think that with next generation hardware you are going to start to see facial animation and mouth movement that looks like it is real. That's going to open up whole new opportunities for advances in the medium and introducing that story element and character dimension that has not existed yet.

Kotick should look up the "Uncanny Valley" phenomenon, whereby " [when] robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers." The idea is that things that don't look like humans -- say Wall-E -- aren't creepy, but things that look almost like humans -- like Real Dolls -- are. Check out the above link for a graph that explains it a lot better.

I think we're going to be stuck in that valley for a long time. See, the closer our video games come to looking like real life, the more difficult it will be for us to experience real emotional connections with their characters. We'll just find them creepy. Yet, some games with very primitive graphics allow us to fill in the blanks with our own imaginations, almost like reading. This is why I felt a real emotional connection to characters from old 16-bit adventure games. I think Kotick's dead wrong with this vision of the future. It's not what we see that determines emotional connectedness; it's what we don't.

Related Links:

The Contrarion: Games Critics Awards are a Pointless Waste of Time
IGN Pwned by Random Dude on a Forum
Oops, I Don't Like Super Mario RPG As Much As I Thought I Did

The Uncanny Valley: Tomb Raider and Lara Croft Are Starting to Freak Me Out

John Constantine — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

The world has seen a lot of Lara Croft. Back in the mid-90s, it was downright hard to avoid videogames’ so-called first sex symbol and even more difficult after the Angelina Jolie “films” started coming out in 2001. Lara as ridiculous-looking-game-character has always been more of an icon than Lara as actual-human-being. Of course, that hasn’t stopped Tomb Raider’s publisher Eidos from paying models to dress up like her from the beginning. It was pretty silly back in 1996; Lara Croft looked more like the freakish offspring of Barbie and a Dire Straits video than a woman. The only thing the model had in common with the character were guns and leotard. But as technology has advanced, and photos of models have gotten more photoshopped, over the past twelve years, the real and fake Lara’s have been getting more and more similar in appearance.

Frankly, it’s starting to freak me the hell out.

Let’s take a look at the eight Laras that coincide with the soon-to-be eight Tomb Raider games. See if it freaks you out too.

Here’s Katie Price in 1996 for Tomb Raider 1. Like I said, pretty silly.

Nathalie Cook in 1997 for Tomb Raider 2.

Rhona Mitra and Tomb Raider 3. Game character still looks scary but is losing the whole jagged edge thing.

Nell McAndrew on Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. Here’s where it’s starting to get a little freaky.

Lara Weller and Tomb Raider Chronicles. Lara Weller does not look like a real person.

Jill de Jong and the ill-fated Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. The crappiness of this first PS2 version of the series provides some respite from the uncanny valley because Jill de Jong looks like an attractive young woman in a costume and Lara Croft has got angles again.

Karima Adibebe in 2003 for Tomb Raider Legend. Lara’s a little bit more realistically rendered in the game (a little, mind you.) Karima looks a whole lot like the character though.

Alison Carroll. Tomb Raider Underworld. 2008. This is fucking terrifying.

Yeah. Well, now I don’t know what’s scarier. That real and imaginary sex symbols are converging, that I noticed this, or that I put the time together to write this. Sheesh.

Related links:

Feeling It: Social Versus Primitive Emotion in Videogames
Gamepro Mourns the Loss of Mammaries
The Five Greatest Enhanced Remakes – And Five That Weren’t So Great
Video of the Day: Judah Friedlander Explains the Uncanny Valley

Feeling It: Social Versus Primitive Emotion in Videogames

John Constantine — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:00:00 GMT

In a recent talk at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in France, Quantic Dream’s David Cage discussed emotion’s role in videogames. Quantic Dream have claimed their new game, still known after two years by its codename Heavy Rain, has conquered the Uncanny Valley, creating human characters so lifelike that players can’t resist identifying with them. In his talk, Cage discussed mixing motion captured performances with hand-drawn animation in Heavy Rain to achieve such natural expression in an interactive setting. Performance is only the beginning of Rain’s ambition, though, as Cage turned the topic to utilizing finer, more social human emotions as love, jealousy, and shame to create a game’s foundation for immersion versus the more primal emotions traditional to games, such as anxiety and aggression.

Quantic Dream’s previous games, Indigo Prophecy and Omikron: The Nomad Soul, were laudable attempts at drawing players in through empathy rather than fight-or-flight response, though not always successful. Omikron was an ambitious project limited by the technology of its time and Indigo Prophecy, for all of its remarkably directed dialogue and Law & Order-quality characterization, is even less interactive than Metal Gear Solid 4. The now ancient (by technology standards) demo for Heavy Rain is certainly impressive, its digital actress’ fury and desperation conveyed well, but the character still comes off as robotic and, subsequently, repulsive.

Cage makes a good point. Videogames, by nature of design and player trends, have traditionally relied on tension-and-release to ensconce a player — the vast majority of videogames rely on reflex and strategy as a basis for play, after all. The problem inherent in using more complex and subtle emotions to immerse players is that, no matter what your medium, these emotions are difficult to evoke at all. How do you actually use play to make a player feel shame or pride without relying on the language of another art? A cutscene speaks like film, text like prose.

Whether or not Heavy Rain will, in its final form, cross the Uncanny Valley — and find its strength as a game in tapping players’ compassion — remains to be seen. What’s clear is that Quantic Dream and David Cage will only achieve their goals by making something that is, itself, compassionate.

Our thanks to Gamasutra for their report on Cage’s talk.

Related links:

Team Ico’s Fumito Ueda at the Nordic Games Conference
Happiness in Games: The Importance of Being Earnest

Video of the Day: Judah Friedlander Explains the Uncanny Valley

Peter Smith — Fri, 09 May 2008 15:15:00 GMT

Watch this 30 Rock clip quick before NBC yanks it: Judah Friedlander explaining the Uncanny Valley to Tracy Morgan, "in Star Wars." As readers probably know, the porn videogame that Morgan dreams of is actually all too real, but we appreciate Friedlander trying to talk him out of it anyway.