With the launch of the Xbox 360, the idea of the Uncanny Valley is becoming a popular meme.
Clive Thompson writes in Wired:
My hat is off to whoever designed the new King Kong game for the Xbox 360, because they’ve crafted a genuinely horrific monster. When it first lurched out of the mysterious tropical cave and fixed its cadaverous eyes on me, I could barely look at the monstrosity.
I’m speaking, of course, of Naomi Watts.
Not the actual Naomi Watts. She’s heart-stoppingly lovely. No, I’m talking about the version of Naomi Watts that you encounter inside the game.
In some ways, her avatar is an admirably good replica, with the requisite long blond hair and juicy voice-acting from Watts herself. But the problem begins when you look at her face — and the Corpse Bride stares back. The skin on virtual Naomi is oddly slack, as if it weren’t quite connected to the musculature beneath; when she speaks, her lips move with a Frankensteinian stiffness. And those eyes! My god, they’re like two portholes into a soulless howling electric universe. “Great,” I complained to my wife. “I finally get to hang out with a gorgeous starlet — and she’s dead.”
James Surowiecki discusses the 360 in Slate:
The closer a game gets to resembling the real world, the ways in which it’s different become more obvious, and the more psychologically jarring those differences become. Flaws that in earlier-generation games could be written off as the inevitable product of technological limitations now seem glaring and inordinately frustrating. Sometimes these are small things. Why, in Call of Duty 2, do your fellow soldiers keep running in front of you as you’re drawing a bead on an enemy? Why can’t two people walk through a door without getting stuck in an Alphonse-and-Gaston routine? Why can I jump over that wall but not this fence? And sometimes the flaws are bigger: Why doesn’t this story make more sense? Would a person actually do this?
I think that developers have to take a step back. The blind aim for “photo realism” simply doesn’t work. Think animation, think cartoons instead. Players don’t care about polygons.
Isn’t that what Nintendo has always been good at? When did the trend change, and we started needing polygons more than Marios? I think it would be interesting to check out the history of game journalism and critics to see when and why graphics became the first concern.
(my guess, as culturally biased: when Japan lost the dominance in international markets).
Yes. The drive for photorealism in games is not only misguided, but a dead end. Even 3d animated film can’t create realistic human characters,and they rely vast renderfarms spending hours over each frame; games, inherently animated on-the-fly can’t even come close to digital film in terms of resolution.
Yet another example of the game industry’s colonial cringe toward film: they want to make it look like film because film is “better.” Screw that.
True true.
People keep saying that games need more “photo realistic” graphics to finally be able to really invoke emotions in their audience. The uncanny valley, of course gives this a new meaning; to be able to experience true horror in a game you might need to find the bottom of this.
Well; the saddest movie I’ve ever seen is the anim? “The grave of the Fireflies” – not really “photo realistic” stuff…