Character: The Next Great Gaming Frontier?

4/24/2009 6:36 PM | 5 Comments | Page 2 of 3

Chris Buecheler
Status: @CG-Gabe - just bought a sixpack of Goose Island Mild Winter Ale. Cheers!

Not a lot of depth. Let's be honest here: We have yet to see Vance express any more-than-token nods to many of the less-pleasant human characteristics. She is rarely jealous, appears unwilling to lie or cheat for either political or social reasons, and displays neither hypocrisy nor selfishness. She is without greed, is never smug, arrogant or self-satisfied, and is as loyal and dedicated to both her father and her cause as one could possibly hope. Her brilliant white teeth suggest that even personal hygiene is not outside of Alyx's daily attention; apparently, when the Seven Hour War occurred, great stores of Crest Whitestrips were hoarded by members of the resistance. This is a woman whose main flaws, as best we can tell, are a tendency towards goofy humor ("That must be a 'zombine' ... get it?") and a short battle with self-doubt when confronted by the same creature which at one point stabbed her in the abdomen and nearly killed her. Speaking as someone who hates getting stabbed to death, I don't think I'd be thrilled about another encounter of that type either.

This, then, is the state of gaming. We have reached a technological point where fast, fluid photorealism is at hand. We can render tiny halls and vast expanses in great detail, often without the slightest hitch, drop in framerate, or even load time while moving between the two. Our game characters have multilayered skin textures, cast soft shadows that blend and change with the dynamic movement of light, and even have hair that can wave and shift in the virtual breeze. The steps that computer gaming has taken visually in only 10 short years are nothing short of amazing, and in the next 10 years we will see games which make today's high-resolution titles look like the original Super Mario Bros., or perhaps even Pong. This is the digital future, driven by the law of accelerating returns, where things can only get better, and at an exponentially faster pace.

Character: The Next Great Gaming Frontier

Charming, attractive, and scripted to love you no matter how many times you throw a paint can at her head.

Why is it, then, that a character like Alyx Vance represents arguably the pinnacle of our achievements in producing a realistic virtual human? Vance is simply not realistic; she offers the very best of humanity, but reflects virtually none of its flaws. More importantly, she is incapable of reacting to her environment, and cannot change or grow as a person. She is a programmed automaton -- a mannequin with a voice -- one whose every movement, gesture and facial tic is purposefully scripted to achieve a very specific, and usually very positive, reaction from gamers. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, and in many ways Vance and the technology that powers her represent an incredibly important step for gaming -- but she is not a human, nor even truly a simulation of humanity.

The answer to the questions asked at the beginning of this article -- what makes a character compelling, and how can we pursue this effect in modern games? -- actually lies in the same realm of programming as the visual technology which has overtaken character development by leaps and bounds: simulation. Modern videogame rendering has moved with ever-increasing speed and precision toward simulation, rather than scripting. Not content with burned-in lighting, developers have moved to ray-tracing technology, coupled with advanced texturing techniques like bump and normal mapping in order to simulate depth. Not satisfied with simple animation, complex shader code has been written to simulate the movement, reflection and refraction of light on various materials. These technologies are still nascent, little more than teenagers in the total lifespan of world-rendering technology, and there are many great leaps yet to come. Still, if our visuals have reached the teen years, our characters are just now learning to walk.

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Comments

ShakeyLo
5/5/2009 9:49:27 AM

Great article - I think this is one of the things Far Cry 2 achieved. Though the characters were generally poorly acted and had an extremely barebones "character background" - which is to say, they had little in the way of pre-scripting - the reaction and interaction between the player and the other characters is what sold them. You would actually develop relationships with other characters through gameplay events that are not pre-scripted but are built into the game system. For example, one of your buddies will always come and save you when you die, in a game mechanic not dissimilar to BioShock's Vita Chambers. However once one particular buddy saves you multiple times, and you fight alongside them and complete missions with them enough times, you start to feel a relationship or even loyalty with them. The relevant factor though is that the buddies that appear in your game are chosen randomly, they are not prescripted into the narrative, and a player's actions in the game will cause different buddies to rise and fall in importance to the narrative. So it is through the game system, through reaction and interaction, and through the player's own empathy and anthropomorphism of the AIs, that these characters and relationships are built. In the future this technique could be further developed by giving each AI a personality matrix ala The Sims which causes them to react to events in a way that still defines themselves as a character without being pre-scripted by a writer.
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togmkn
4/27/2009 1:14:45 AM

I've always thought that the character you played as in Morrowind (the Elder Scrolls game before Oblivion) had a fairly deep personality.

In Oblivion, any time you could choose what you wanted to say, it was just a simple subject-predicate sentence. All of your journal entries read: "So-and-so wants me to do something. I should try looking in Some Giant Cave." I suppose they tried to make your character a blank slate so that the journal wouldn't contradict what the role-players were pretending to be.

In Morrowind, though, reading your character's journal showed that you were pretty sharp but not always sure of yourself and overwhelmed by your situation.

I really liked Morrowind's style better. It seemed like you were writing a book as you were playing it.

Great article, by the way! It'll be really exciting when games can have dynamic characters that are affected by what the player does. (And I don't just mean like/dislike point system.)
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CaptainHomeless (Game Trust Writer)
4/26/2009 5:02:34 PM

@MikeBBetts:

While I don't disagree that there's some decent writing happening in videogames, the point I'm trying to make is that these experiences are basically all scripted. The most interesting and exciting thing about videogames is that they can go far beyond the sort of character experience we can get from a movie, or even from a book. Having decent dialog and plotting in cinematics or in-game scripted sequences is certainly important, but in the long run far less compelling than it would be if, each time you played the game, characters were able to change, grow, and react based on your actions, the actions of other NPC's, and their surroundings.

We can do a lot better than just simulating movies. :)
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CG-Prophet (Game Trust Writer)
4/25/2009 2:28:02 AM

This article ties in nicely to the Bioware piece. Improving character interaction in video games will have a positive effect on storytelling.

I do think that games like L4D are laying the groundwork when it comes to this stuff.
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MikeBBetts
4/25/2009 1:44:04 AM

I might suggest you're just looking in the wrong places. Reactive AI partners might be far away, but many characters in Assault on Dark Athena, for example, are enormously compelling. I could have watched Dacher act all day. I've also had the same reaction, believe it or not, to a few characters in Heavenly Sword (a game which is slowly convincing me that anti-Japan critics are also looking in the wrong place).

Of course, there's a difference between a character who is written and acted well in cut-scenes, and a character who acts like a real person during gameplay. Even so, the former can keep me enthralled with a game for a long time (see any Blizzard game pre-WoW).
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