I don't know, Clive. Ever since I read about the Uncanny Valley here, it's been one of my go-to cocktail party gaming vignettes.

But I have to disagree with you on this clip--I think it's pretty good. They nail the body motion, the eyes, and the cinematographic techniques that trick you into thinking you're watching live action (focus, light, etc.). Right before the lightning flash, they even have the skin right for a while.

OK, the mouth is horrible and scary ("rictus" is a perfect descriptor). But I think they've got a lot of components closer than ever. Still corpsey-creepy, but this clip convinces me that in the next couple of years we'll see a game that gets it right.

Hmmmm. One can certainly have different views of the success of this stuff: At some point, it's a purely aesthetic viewpoint, and you may well find stuff pleasing that I find awful!

But personally I think in-game humans have been so zombielike for so long that we have adjusted our standards downwards. Something that seems incrementally, slightly better is hailed as a breakthrough. But to any casual observer whose aesthetics haven't been slowly and punishingly ground to dust by 10 years of having the game industry produce wretchedly awful human-face in-game animation, while proclaiming it "groundbreaking" and "photorealistic" and "lifelike" ... this stuff seems just like what it is, which is to say, really, really, really sub-par animation. I mean, this crap wouldn't be tolerated on the most poorly-fudned of low-budget Saturday morning cartoons.

That clip would be great if at the end, a tentacle came out of he mouth, reached out through the computer screen and slapped us all around for a bit, Cthulu style.

I would just like to point out that the Lovecraftian next-to-last paragraph made me giggle. Almost Tycho-like in it's intensity.

Is it strange that when I finished watching this, the first thing I thought was "Clive Thompson has got to see this"?

To me this is a perfect example of the Uncanny Valley. And I think the 360/PS3 are going to be going down to the river, so to speak, quite a bit over the next few years.

The Wii? Not so much. Because I think the Wii is made for more stylized games that it won't be as much of a problem. Just my opinion however.

Jonn, Moxmas, heh.

Karmakin ... I'm pretty sure someone could use the Wii's processing power to create a perfectly ghastly Valley-plunging pseudohuman. But you're right -- Nintendo tends to aim towards more cartoonish, and thus more emotionally convincing, characters.

Some communities will favor persons with faces and motion patterns similar to these generated persons. "Wow, cool, he looks like that game character". Some people will be popular because they are easy to model in certain development systems.

The recent CGI film, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, impressed me in that it largely seemed to avoid the uncanny valley effect. While the characters were obviously slanted toward extreme realism, they were also stylized. The stylization was relatively subtle and yet made such a large difference.

I do think that in video and computer game terms, everyone has become far too used to terrible plastic puppet technology; it probably is true that when something slightly less terrible comes along, it blows people's minds as "the most realistic thing ever!"

Most stars today receive a big doses of Botox, Photoshop, and plastic surgery, which makes them seem uncanny as well. We are used to a weird aesthetic, and it gets more evident as time goes by.

I agree that this generation of consoles will probably have the worst looking "humans", but by the time it gets too strange a seamless-smooth transition will have occurred in our psyche.

Maybe it's just me, but what bothered me most about the clip - much more than the eyes or the skin - was the designers' inability to syncronize mouth movements with speech. This is also an area in which we have mentally enabled low quality craft and provided the link ourselves. But in this clip, it seems, the problem is not that it's so close that we notice the tiny difference, but that the differences are not tiny. Everything else is so close that the speech stands out.

MMhbwwuuahhaaahhaaahhAAaaa!

You have seen nothing... NOTHING!!!

http://www.dearannemovie.com/

Apart from being creepy this is over the limit of "Kitsch" that can be tollerated by the time-space continuum before the universe collapses in a cosmic burp...

And excuse me for the clumsy "me poor italian" attempt in Clive prose...

I agree that attempts to make video game humans more photorealistic usually end up producing more 'creepy' results than abstracted characters - essentially cartoons. But I disagree with the overall theory that extends this thinking proportionally - the more realistic, the creepier. It seems that there are merely some limitations in budget, time, and rendering power within the video game world that limit these human characters. I have to assume that there will eventually be some breakthrough, as there practically has been in the movie industry. Look at the quality of digital doubles. Look at King Kong! Not a human, I know, but he has all the qualities of real life expressions.

Adam

What Clive is saying is actually the eternal question between simulation vs. reality. We used to ask it about theater vs. movie...

At the same time, we have to realize how much video game are new. The technology is not yet stabilized. We are not yet in its golden age.

Trackback, from Grand Text Auto: Dry Water in the Uncanny Valley, and more

"Uncanny Valley"? Clive, you sould take a look at the book "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud (a great reading, after all).

According to Scott, cartoon-like characters are warm because people who's reading the comic gets identified by the cartoon. Cartoons are good for getting deep inside a story.

That's what makes Peanuts, Garfield, Tintin, and Dilbert readers coming back for more.

BTW - Maybe you may find interesting "The future of comics", also by Scott McCloud, for future stories ;-).

I can see where you're coming from Clive. Indeed, this trend toward more and more realistic animation is falling a bit short of the mark. However, I'm not so sure I agree that we'll never get "there". Things have come a long, long way toward genuine animareality. Nobody complained that Mario didn't look "quite right", but as we get closer to the real deal, it's true the differences stand out. Give 'em all some time and we may just be surprised.

Excellent conversation here, folks!

Inigo, indeed, I've read all of McCloud's books, and in fact referred to him specifically in my original column on this subject two years ago! He's amazing.

It is possible that we'll crawl out the other side of the Valley. But for what it's worth, it's by no means certain that we'll have better games for it! Games aren't created by graphics; they're created by rules that constrain our behavior in interesting ways while guiding us towards a teasingly difficult task ... which is why one can play a game with one's eyes closed, looking at nothing (as with word games you can play with someone else.) The big problem posed by the effort by game publisher to "climb out" of the Valley is that they're putting all their energies into the graphics battle, and sparing virtually no innovation on the gameplay.

I think one of the problems with the design is that the human characters are made to be too "pretty"; the skin is too flawless, the eye orbits are too round, the lips are too shaped. By contrast, the "ugly" characters (the fat men with wrinkles and age spots) are much more successful and realistic looking; the flaws create a more tangible landscape of the face to which [real] people can relate. I think one of the fundamental difficulties in the design of game characters is that the designers can't (or perhaps haven't yet) capture the shadows and slight flaws that make the human face more lifelike...or perhaps they've avoided the flaws because they feel flaws make the character less attractive.

Dude.

In the middle distance shots, she was totally convincing. Enough detail was lost to the low resolution that the mouth didn't stick out like a sore thumb.

In the close-ups, the mouth... yeh, they need to work on that. I mean, the proportions are in the range of normal humans... I've seen popular actresses who have really wide mouths like that. But there wasn't anything INSIDE her mouth, the edge of her lips were like the edges of a wound. If they made the mouth smaller, and did something about the lips, I think I'd have to say they could make it to the other side of the valley.