body language

As I said yesterday, technology might soon enable game characters to respond to players by reading our faces. There's a flip side to that. Players could better respond to characters if facial animations and body language were improved.

The most basic benefit of this is obvious: improved empathy. A character's dialog and actions have more emotional impact when those actions correspond well with the character's physical expressions.

Another benefit is to replace dialog entirely. Animating is not simple, but it's cheaper and easier to refine than hiring voice actors. It also saves valuable memory space. Silent expressions often have the greatest effect. But I expect refining such animations would be very difficult, considering that even good actors have difficulty replicating some emotions, like despair and terror.

The use of animations that brought this subject to mind is translation. Having taken many linguistics courses in college, I know that not all body language is universal across the globe, but the basics are.


On the one hand, you have games like The Saboteur. The game is set in Paris, so one might expect some of the dialog to be in French, even if the majority is English with a French accent. A bit of dialog local to the setting can add flavor, and good body language can make that dialog more meaningful.

On the other hand, there's the inherently national nature of any game. Games published worldwide either pay translators to adapt the dialog or apologetically ask foreign players to enjoy the game as it is. Something is always lost in translation, and body language helps to counteract those losses. And while great facial animations won't allow foreigners to play a dialog-centric game, it can be pivotal in action and puzzle games for making environmental dialog bearable.

Anyway, the usefulness of better facial animations and body language in games seems obvious. What's less obvious is whether or not each developer must tackle this issue on their own. Might it be possible for a company to develop a program for such animations to be used in a wide variety of games by different developers, similar to something like SpeedTree? Or must representation of the human face evolve only as a collective effort, like the modeling of skin or eyes?

facial recognition

As I'm reading IGN's interview with Peter Molyneux, I think about pets. No, not because Fable 2 has a dog. Pets come to mind because they demonstrate how personal something can be without verbal communication.

All a dog needs from you to respond accordingly is your face. Project Natal currently includes accurate enough facial recognition to distinguish one player from another, but I doubt it can detect all the subtle signs of emotion in a human face.

If a game publisher can create a camera system with that kind of accuracy at an affordable price, the sympathetic connection between players and game characters will be able to strengthen exponentially.

true pets are personal

A repost of my response to Brian's latest challenge, on pets:

I'm very interested to see how the dog in Fable 2 plays out. It's a combination of both combat and show, and has uses well beyond those... such as pointing out hidden treasures and reacting to NPCs.

What I loved most about the Creature Handler system in Star Wars: Galaxies was the variety in pet types and ways of acquiring them. By making wild creatures open to taming, the designers provided a huge assortment of potential pets without having to design a lot of pet-only creatures (the wild creatures could be fought and skinned, thereby providing PvE content).

A pet is much more meaningful when it clearly represents a personal choice, individualizing the player. In real life, people show off the individuality of their pets, not the common features. They might describe their pets from afar as "a black lab" or "a beagle", but they always point out the pet's individual personality and appearance when we actually meet it. And the individual characteristics are what we take the most joy in, even when watching wild animals.

Fable 2 allows individual players to train their dogs differently. That's a good example of making pets both personal and meaningful.

Spielberg "gets people"

According to Louis Castle, "More than anything he [Steven Spielberg] gets people. I have made a lot of games, more than a hundred and I am quite accomplished in this field, even I don't have that kind of instinct."

It's a surprisingly simple characteristic that explains so much about his mastery of film-making, right? He gets people. And because he understands them so well, he's remarkable apt at tapping into universal themes, desires, and habits, and letting those insights guide his craft.

I can't help but think that's the core characteristic of a master game designer, too. They get people.

Think of Will Wright, when he's explaining how human beings learn through experimentation, and love learning. Think of Peter Molyneux, when he proposes that Fable 2 will touch gamers' hearts... not through romance, but through an unshakeable companion (a dog) and unconditional love.

If you need a demographic chart to know what people want, then you don't really "get people".

Give characters a bit of mystery

One of the things missing from many characters of fiction is mystery. Often, authors reveal too much. They explain every action, every dialogue, every relationship and circumstance. It's generally good to flesh out a character to some extent, but a little mystery goes a long way in making characters interesting and believeable.

It's like the one locked door when all other doors are open. Curiosity is an attractive force. When we're denied access to an area, we want to know what we're missing. And when the light are out, our imaginations replace the light with guesses.

If a character refuses to talk about something, we wonder why. If a character momentarily acts contrary to his or her usual personality, we wonder what we're not seeing and our imaginations race.

Sometimes, it's good to build tension like that and then allow the audience to find out how truth compares to their theories. But real persons always have a little touch of mystery, and I think audiences connect most strongly with fictional characters that are never fully explained. The mystery has to be smartly placed... there are certain things the audience will feel they have a right to know. But don't give them everything, no matter how hard they plead.

Nobility and reward

Originally, this was part of a blog I'm writing concerning group gameplay versus individual gameplay. But it's become so long, I'm going to make this its own article.


FOR LOOT OR NOBLE REWARD
The Three Amigos faced El Guapo to save the town, not to rob the thieves.

Current MMOs are more encouraging of mercenary alliances of convenience than of noble causes. In real life, individuals are often filled with a powerful sense of self-satisfaction when they recall memories of good deeds he or she has done, or when the deed's recipient smiles back appreciatively. If noble action can be so fulfilling in reality, then it could certainly be fulfilling in a game as well. There's a significant affectual difference between helping another person and helping an NPC, but each can be gratifying.

Sure, games regularly offer players opportunities for noble deeds, but there is always another form of reward (and usually not just one) that often seems to overshadow the player's good will. It might be only experience points, or loot, or faction that can be "cashed in" for something beside good favor. As I'm sure I've written somewhere before, I'd like to see rewards more separated: loot alone, xp alone, faction alone... and nobility alone.


ORGANIZED CHARITY
Players could join organizations for the expressed purpose of noble deeds, perhaps even of a particular scope. And the appeal isn't limited to roleplay (enter the "virtual world vs game" debate =P ). These can be fun.

Those paladin pansies...
For example, a paladin might occasionally group with fellows of his order to keep an enemy population in check. In the upcoming MMO Darkfall, a dynamic spawning system allows a creature population to "migrate" after being overhunted in one area. Such a setting would be ideal for this sort of organization.

The paladin order could not only maintain safety on one particular border, but they might also perform reconaissance and travel from one area to the next hunting zombies or demonspawn. If developers allowed these creature populations to grow to burdensome levels if left unchecked, then player paladins might even receive encouragement from non-paladins! In this case, though there may be many types of rewards involved in the struggle at any given time, it is clear how such a system may keep an impression of noble action front-and-center.

Herbs on demand
Another possibility is an alchemical organization driven by NPC groups with alchemical needs. In fact, this provides a way to show how one altruistic organization might be bound to another.

Suppose that the undead, which the paladins attempt to keep in check, can have some negative effect on NPC villages that they come into contact with. The effect might be perpetual fear, illness, or might even be a plethora of maladies. The alchemical organization would then enter the village to obtain, create, and apply remedies (with visually perceptible effects) to the NPC population.

The paladin order might often be the messenger of need, calling upon the alchemical society after raids; or vis versa. There might even be circumstances in which the two organizations must work cooperatively for success. For instance, a stricken village might be extremely hard to cure as long as undead just outside its borders exert a psychic hold over the villagers (i.e., undead leaders must be slain to release the town from corruption). Or (in the opposite direction) the paladins might call on the alchemists to purify a holy pool which is a boon to paladin powers in the area, thereby strengthening the paladins against nearby undead.


In short, it is feasible for altruism to be its own reward at times in games (within the context of enjoying the act itself...like combat). It isn't necessary for grouping with other players to always involve a possibility of personal gain. Sometimes enjoyment come from feeling helpful and identifying one's self with a larger and nobler cause.

Molyneux, I salute you

Of course, I wasn't able to attend the GDC, but I have been reading the interviews and watching videos. And after seeing Peter Molyneux explain the dog companion in Fable 2, I wish I had been there to shake the man's hand.

It has the potential to be--and, from the video, appears to be meeting that potential--the greatest advancement in storytelling this industry has seen in the past decade. It may be one of the most important games releasing (presumably) this year.

Finally, a game developer has the cojones to introduce true empathy and make a game about more than mere entertainment, a game that will actually pull at players' emotions and sanction behavior through emotional punishments and rewards. Finally, a developer has introduced unconditional love to a game, for the player to not only enjoy but also face responsibility for.

Other games have included drama and serious storytelling, but I'm hoping this will be the first to approach the effectiveness of literature and film. It will take a lot of work and luck to get it just right, but I thank Molyneux for even trying.