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• X-Blades and the Cultural Uncanny Valley

  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. Take a look, see what I mean. Read More... Posted Dec 23 2008, 02:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, uncanny valley, psp, Playstation, ted woolsey, gaijin entertainment, x-blades, Shadow madness, the simpsons, coded arms, crave

• Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 5

  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... Read More... Posted Nov 21 2008, 10:00 AM by Amber Ahlborn with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: uncanny valley, amber ahlborn, art style, best of 2008

• Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 4

  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... Read More... Posted Nov 20 2008, 11:00 AM by Amber Ahlborn with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: uncanny valley, amber ahlborn, art design, best of 2008

• Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 3

  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. Read More... Posted Nov 19 2008, 10:00 AM by Amber Ahlborn with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: uncanny valley, amber ahlborn, art style, best of 2008

• Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 2

  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. Read More... Posted Nov 18 2008, 10:00 AM by Amber Ahlborn with | with 6 comment(s) Filed under: uncanny valley, amber ahlborn, art style, best of 2008

• Crossing the Uncanny Valley: Part 1

  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. Read More... Posted Nov 10 2008, 10:00 AM by Amber Ahlborn with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: uncanny valley, amber ahlborn, graphics, game design, best of 2008

• The Contrarion: The Future Brings Hi-Res Emotion

  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. Read More... Posted Sep 26 2008, 04:00 PM by Cole Stryker with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: uncanny valley, cole stryker, earthbound, the contrarion

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

  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. Read More... Posted Aug 12 2008, 12:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: john constantine, uncanny valley, tomb raider, lara croft, scary internet, eidos

• Feeling It: Social Versus Primitive Emotion in Videogames

  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. Read More... Posted Jun 25 2008, 11:00 AM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, uncanny valley, fumito ueda, indigo prophecy, heavy rain, farenheit, quantic dream, omikron, david cage

• Video of the Day: Judah Friedlander Explains the Uncanny Valley

  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. Hit the jump to check it out. Read More... Posted May 09 2008, 11:15 AM by Peter Smith with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: peter smith, porn videogame, uncanny valley, tracy morgan, judah friedlander, star wars, 30 rock