XBOX 360 Wire

Photorealistic Characters, the Dream Machine gets a step closer

I recently read this report over at the BBC site. For many gamers the concept of the ‘uncanny valley’ is nothing new. It is essentially a scale used when talking about realism in games and virtual worlds. As an industry gaming has been gently progressing towards the Uncanny Valley for some time, but are we treading on dangerous ground.

Back in the early days of computer games characters and objects were depicted by blocky pixilated graphics. They were designed to, more give the impression of what they should look like, rather than actually looking like something. Back then playing a game was all about the skill involved in doing so, how quick you were on the keys, how subtle your control on the joystick.

As time has passed and technology progressed graphics have steadily improved, looking at recent releases like Gears of War shows just how far things have come. I remember playing around with the ‘photographer’ mode in Project Gotham 3, and after tweaking some of the after shot effects thinking “that could actually be a photo”, and that is what developers are now aiming for. The problem at the moment is to produce that effect in game. It’s all very well being able to manipulate a still image into looking lifelike, but that has to carry across into the action. The characters have to look, move and simply ‘be’ lifelike. The dream for many developers is to get to the stage where it is impossible to tell whether computer generated or real actors are being viewed on screen.

However, therin, as they say, lies the potential problem. Recently (In Amsterdam) Europe’s first rehab clinic for people addicted to computer games opened. A rehab clinic for people who spent all day everyday playing games like World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft is a great game with fantastic graphics, though they are not what I would call ‘realistic’, the world looks and feels ‘cartoon’ like in many ways. My point here is not to say anything against World of Warcraft but to show that addiction already exists in the gaming world.

Now let’s jump two years down the line (the time period predicted in the BBC article) and imagine a world where we have true photorealistic characters, where what you are looking at on screen appears to be, to all intents and purposes another person. Games are all about immersion, making you feel part of the game, making it feel like that is what life is at that point in time. Most gamers can tell you at least one game that sucked them in, a game where they ended up feeling some connection to the characters (for me it was Final Fantasy 7, but that’s another article). Getting sucked in becomes so much easier when the thing you are looking at appears real.

Many people reading this will probably be smirking now at how sad this sounds, comments like ‘but it’s only a game’ and ‘you’re looking at a screen how can it feel real’ will be springing to mind. Okay that is all true, but graphics engines and techniques aren’t the only things advancing. Display technology is also improving year on year. For my gaming needs I run a 106″ high definition screen, meaning that in a game like Oblivion, where you play in the first person and spend a lot of time engaged in conversation, the characters are almost life sized. Also the recent launch of the Nintendo Wii and it’s subsequent popularity have shown that more intuitive control systems (i.e. user movement being directly represented on screen) are appealing to more and more people, even pushing out further beyond the gaming community.

Most people will have heard the philosophical debates regarding the ‘dream machine’ argument (Anyone who has seen the Matrix has seen the most recent depiction of it, the concept is also covered in the series Red Dwarf in the episode ‘Back to Reality’) The idea is that if someone could be plugged in to a machine where they lived in happiness, and it seemed completely real why would they ever want to be disconnected. The argument has always, until now at least, seemed too far fetched to merit real consideration – technology has always fallen short of creating something realistic enough to fool us. But maybe we are closer than we think and more importantly maybe the body and brain take less fooling than we think?

It has always been argued that the body and brain would have to be completely fooled in order for the dream machine to work, but if we are seeing gamers getting addicted to games that in no way fool their brain and bodies (they are fully aware they are playing a game) then with games becoming more realistic surely the scope for the dream machine argument has to be increased. There have been reports of people becoming unwell due to their addictions to games, and with the increase in realism and the desired escapism, then, in the future should we possibly worry that we will see an increase in this problem?

I don’t know, maybe I’m going a bit over the top, getting a bit carried away with my own thoughts. So I will sign off with a note to developers, proving you can produce photorealistic games would be a magnificent achievement, but if you could just keep my characters looking a little less than real, I would be grateful thanks.

Posted by Mr-J - February 23rd, 2007 -