The uncanny valley is a hypothesis regarding the field of robotics. The theory holds that when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness.
Above is the definition of the “Uncanny Valley”, taken from Wikipedia.
After robotics, the Uncanny Valley has been refered in fields as computer graphics and audio design; what I want to discuss now is the effects of this in narrative and storytelling in games.
I was discussing with a friend of mine the other day about how the games before (in the 90’s, for example) would immerse us more than the games nowadays… Now, I don’t want to sound like an old man saying that what was done before was much better than what his done now… this would be a lie and an insult to all game developers out there… Most games nowadays are much more complex and are more evolved in any sense of the word.
So, why would older games make me think back to those days with happiness and fond memories, while I can’t remember most of the games I played last year?
First theory: I’m older, so games don’t appel to me so much anymore… I don’t believe this to be true, or else I wouldn’t want to make games so badly… On the other hand, one of the most influential games I played this year so far was “I Can Hold My Breath Forever” (see my last post), which immersed me as much as the old games.
Second theory: By playing so many games over the years, I became more demanding… Still a false proposition, since I loved playing God of War 3, which is not better than any of his predecessors.
Third theory: Older games relied more on imagination, since their graphics, sound, etc, weren’t so evolved… Now I think I might be on to something with this!
The third theory shift the game from a “watcher” perspective, in which I play but the storytelling/narrative is all showed to me, to a “participant” perspective, in which I still play, but I have to fill in the blanks in the narrative.
Old games didn’t have fancy “facial modelling” technology (some characters had a 8×8 pixel square for a head!), nor “top-notch voice acting” (lots of them didn’t even have voices!), “realist physics” (stuff just fell down linearly, if that much!), etc…
That kind of “backwards technology” demanded more on the players… it demanded the players to use their imagination to playout the character’s voices, to imagine that the crate actually was accurately falling over, what kind of expression the character was making, etc…
That made us an integral part of the story, the same way a children that can’t read gets a book up and starts making up their own story based on the illustrations on it. And by making us integral part of the story, it made us “invest” something of ourselves in it, and that in turn made us want to get a return on our investment, which made us sell the game in our minds better than it actually was…
A good example of this, in my opinion is the “Legacy of Kain” series… the first games was just gastly, graphic-wise. And yet, the story was so rich and powerful that I couldn’t help but playing it… And while the “Soulreaver” games were awesome aswell, as an extension of that story, the series lost his flair with the introduction of better technology… maybe the story couldn’t keep up with the ammount of games (5 games in all), but it’s also possible that when Rhaziel and Kain became more real, they lost some of the allure they had in the first two games of the series… I had to imagine Kain in my mind, in terms of voice and expression… And Rhaziel was just a husk of a character in the first Soulreaver, with not many dialogs and insights into itself…
So we filled in the blanks… And that, as game designers and game writers is a powerful tool… build enough into the game story that players can initially hooked, then enable them (not talking about editors, but narrative-tools) to get engaged in the story themselves, to have a stake in it (either by choices they make, or what they are forced to imagine, or better yet, both!)…
Related to this, lately I’ve been hearing a lot about a game called “Sleep Is Death”, which basically is a two-player colaborative/competitive game, in which one the players creates the story the other player is traversing. You can find it here.
Just to wrap up this post, be sure to check “Pixels” by Patrick Jean… this is one sweet short:
Also, getting very psyched for Alan Wake:
