For as long as there have been video games and consoles there has been a driving force in new games to be increasingly more realistic, both in the quality of the worlds the characters inhabit but also the characters themselves. With each successive generation of consoles developers have been given greater and greater resources to create the nirvana of the real world perfectly represented in a game. This can be seen to be reaching dizzying new heights in photorealism in such games as Crysis 3 for spectacular visual surroundings and physics, or LA Noire for facial movement realism to the point where you can tell when a character you’re interacting with is lying to you. This realism of facial expression has been taken to a new level surpassing even that of LA Noire, this has been done by using in depth facial motion capture, as can be seen in the video below.
Not only do we as gamers crave realism in what we can see, how we look, how we interact with the world but we seek to be in more realistic situations. This has been answered in games such as the SOCOM series giving us a chance to be a navy seal, SplinterCell series allowing us to be spies; choosing our own personal balance between stealth and aggression. This has been facilitated by the inclusion of experts from those areas in the development and plot creation, to try to capture the nuances of what it is like to be in those situations and how people react when presented with choices and problems.
| Splinter Cell: Blacklist |
However hard gamers and developers have sought the Holy Grail, that gaming can be become indistinguishable to real life places and situations. It has lead people to becoming uncomfortable, this uneasiness when viewing ever more realistic people and places in games is known as the Uncanny Valley principle. The Uncanny Valley is a hypothesis put forward by Massahiro Mori in 1970 about robotics and gaming, it suggests that when we view human replicas who look and act almost human but not quite it causes revulsion. The closer the replica to human the greater the discomfort, until the replica becomes indistinguishable from a human, then the reaction is positive again. Therefore we may reach a point where realism gets too real in games and just is more off putting than helpful. This fear and revulsion of robots approaching human facsimiles has already occurred, this is a shame as it hampers development as no one wants to buy a robot that makes everybody uncomfortable.
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Mori Uncanny Valley graph |
In conclusion we may end up suffering as victims of our own success in our search for realism, as we are now probably reaching the next plateau of realism in terms of our game characters without being repulsed by them. However this may not be a bad thing in terms of robots, as who actually wants robots that are indistinguishable from humans, we are just bound to end up with an I,Robot/Skynet conclusion being reached by the robots over our treatment of each other and the earth!
So don’t say I didn’t warn you!
Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
http://kotaku.com/5803111/think-la-noire-has-impressive-facial-animations-check-this-out
http://news.discovery.com/tech/realistic-robot-120716.html
Nosh, Signing Out.
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