Words    Words    Words

• 1 GWW // Feb 10, 2008 at 12:26 am

  Morrowind was always enjoyable. I did a bit of modding for it 5 or 6 years ago when it was first released.

  I felt Oblivion wasn’t quite as good for some reason. It felt like a poor port to PC from a console. When you have a keyboard and mouse, but everything you do uses 4 buttons or so like you do on a joystick… eh. I think they should have worked on the control scheme.

  As to uncanny valley… Beowulf. I kept thinking to myself in the theater: Why didn’t they film this live action?

  I had the problem in Oblivion during character creation too. Your character looked just human enough to make you want it to look real. But it always looked… wrong instead.

• 2 Tom Kater // Feb 10, 2008 at 12:35 am

  I’ve encountered the Uncanny Valley with surprising frequency in Roger Ebert’s hilarious negative movie reviews, mostly of shitty motion-capture Robert Zemeckis movies like The Polar Express and Beowulf as GWW mentioned, though I think he might even have invoked the term to describe the CG-enhanced looks of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct 2. Read them for a good chuckle sometime at Rogerebert.com. I enjoy narrowing the search to, say, zero star movies first, then work up from there.

• 3 PS Birch // Feb 10, 2008 at 1:11 am

  I find idiom to be the most eye-rolling, suspension-of-disbelief-breaking facet of Fantasy and SciFi. I’ve read too many otherwise interesting books, set in highly detailed and exacting worlds, with characters who say such things as, “Wait there just a second, Buster,” or “Hold your horses, lieutenant.”

  What does a second even mean to a faux-medieval adventurer? (those without access to the Orb, of course) When you’ve been flying starships since you were knee-high to an Algonquin zeeble-cricket, do you even know what a horse is? (Captain Reynolds notwithstanding)

  Not that idom doesn’t have its place in either genre. I still recall fondly how you worked one of the nicer character-reveals in Orca via idiom; “She didn’t even break the stick,” if I remember correctly. The initial usage and subsequent explanation both, in their own ways, gave a wonderful, if subtle, depth to the respective characters and, by extension, to the larger world.

• 4 burgundy // Feb 10, 2008 at 1:27 am

  I’ve been thinking about the Uncanny Valley lately myself, and about how it applies to the Sims. I’m not sure I could take any more realism in that game. I don’t mean in the visuals, but in the way it operates.

  In the original game, I had no problem doing all kinds of wicked and bizarre things to them, because I wanted to see what would happen or because it just seemed fun. (A particularly gruesome example: a Sim kid was born with a buggy custom head, and there was no way I was keeping that kid around long-term, so I had her get in the pool and then I took the ladders out so she couldn’t get out and she drowned.) The game was unrealistic enough that this was never a problem.

  But now with Sims 2, they go through life stages, and they die of old age, and they pass physical traits on to their children, and they have facial expressions and body language (which is dependent on personality – a shy Sim will hold herself differently than an outgoing Sim will) and they differentiate between family and non-family relationships and they are far too much like actual beings for me to be happy if they are not happy. So there are big chunks of gameplay that I still haven’t experienced, because that would involve me making my Sims miserable, and now it feels wrong to do that.

  Things that are obviously unrealistic are a relief, because they take away some of that pressure.

• 5 GWW // Feb 10, 2008 at 1:33 am

  I dunno, people often say things like that without knowing what it actually means.

  I’d always heard and thus said “loaded to bear”, the other day I was reading a book and it said something like… “came loaded for bear”. I was like… wow.

  I had never actually thought about the phrase “loaded to bear” and that it made no damn sense, but “loaded FOR bear” makes a ton of damn sense.

  I felt quite silly that for many years I had had the phrase wrong all along.

  skzb’s name for example, when I was in highschool a friend said it Brust like rust, so it’s how I had always pronounced it. It wasn’t until I was talking to someone who actually knew him personally and he corrected me, thus making me feel like a dipshit, that I knew any better. When he said it though, it did make more sense given it’s heritage.

  Even after knowing how to say it right. If I’m finding myself using the name in passing, I say it wrong, and then correct myself. Like my brain won’t accept the real name. It wants to use the one I learned first.

  Oh my god, his name to me is sorta like an uncanny valley!

• 6 Rachel // Feb 10, 2008 at 1:41 am

  I remember playing “Silent Hill” for the first time. If you aren’t familiar with the game, the basic premise is that you play a recently-widowed father who was driving with his young daughter near the town of Silent Hill. Car crashes, father knocked unconscious, wakes up to find daughter missing. You spend the game searching the mist-shrouded, abandoned town for your lost girl. Said town, of course, turns out to be a nightmare world crawling with monsters. For the most part, it’s an extremely well-done story, and the town of Silent Hill becomes a world in itself, which is part of the horror; you’re not even sure you could get yourself out should you find your daughter. It’s very absorbing, and I found myself completely sucked into the world and the character I was playing. What nearly wrecked me for it, however, was one scene:

  Picture this: you’re this middle-aged father, looking for the only family you have left. After hours of wandering this town, a wreck populated only with dead bodies and monsters that you’ve fought your way through with the few weapons you’ve found (including a lead pipe and a revolver), you finally find someone else; a man a few years your senior who’s not only sane, seems to have some idea of what’s going on and HAS ANOTHER GUN. You two talk for a few minutes, then abruptly he gets up and says, “Well, this has been nice, but I have to go.” You say:

  A.) “Whoa, don’t you think we should stick together?”
  B.) “At least help me find my daughter, you bastard!”
  C.) “Oh, okay! Catch you later!”

  …guess which one the main character went with?
  Second to that was a scene in which the main character, who it has already been established is an ordinary joe with absolutely zero experience with weapons, has joined up with a policewoman. They need to explore an ominous underground tunnel. Policewoman says, “I should go. I have the experience with weapons and combat, I know what I’m doing…”
  Main character: “Yeah, but I’m the man.”
  …that’s paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it. I realize the main character had to be the one to enter that tunnel to push the story along, but it felt so unforgivably clumsy to me…slapped me right out of the rhythm of the story.

• 7 jamoche // Feb 10, 2008 at 3:12 am

  On out of place idioms -
  Back in jr high school I picked up a book in the library. Seemed like a normal run of the mill fantasy, had a title with a place-name lifted from British mythology, I figure I’m in for a nice enough read, but no surprises -

  - when the main character calls someone else a “ratfink”. Talk about out of place! Instead of being jarring, it was intriguing. It seemed so 20th century Earth, so what was it doing here? Of course the book was Zelazny’s “Guns of Avalon”, the main character was Corwin, and I was totally hooked.

• 8 Thorin N. Tatge // Feb 10, 2008 at 5:31 am

  The Uncanny Valley obviously has some reality to it. Why shouldn’t it? Anything that’s familiar but a little off, not just human beings, will be more jarring than something that’s not familiar, because you don’t know enough about what’s not familiar to say for sure that it’s wrong. I do, therefore, think there’s a Valley for things besides fake human beings, and that may well include fake worlds.

  It seems to me, though, that what you’ve described can better be accounted to plain old disappointment. You liked the game so much that it let you down where a lesser product wouldn’t have. The Uncanny Valley, I think, is represented by more of a queasy disgusting feeling. Maybe that is what you felt though–’this farmer is a freak who doesn’t care about his own livelihood; I’d better stay away from him!’

• 9 Michael Grosberg // Feb 10, 2008 at 7:55 am

  Morrowind. That brings back memories. I was an Elder scrolls fan ever since the first installment, and I followed the development of Morrowind for years. When it came out I was ecstatic with joy. The graphics were impressive, the design and game world captivating and gorgeous, the sense of immersion like nothing I’ve seen before.

  But I never finished it. I don’t know if I can attribute it to the uncanny valley, but something about it just threw me completely off gaming for ever – Morrowind was also the last computer game I ever played. For the first time in my life I was unable to immerse myself in the game world and think of it as a narrative. The game engine behind the plot was always obvious in annoying little ways. The canned dialog did not always fit the actual circumstances and all sorts of bug were cropping up here and there.

  For example, a character gave me dire warnings about fighting two strong foes at the same time, while in actuality each took a swing or two to kill.

  Another part of the plot involved being excommunicated by the priesthood for a while. To end this my character had to perform a mission and then talk with the bishop-equivalent (I’m really hazy on the details, please excuse any inaccuracies). After our talk, in which he declared my excommunication would be over and praised me, I turned to walk, then thought of something and tried talking to him again. But somehow his generic-priest programming took over and he said he would not talk to me as I was still excommunicated.

  But the most infuriating thing was that you could do some things that would cause a pop up window to appear. In it was a massage that said you did something that made winning the game impossible, so could you please be nice and load a previously saved game? Such a rude intrusion of the voice of the game designer into the fantasy world is unforgivable if there’s any attempt at all at immersion. certainly when it was done so… mechanically, without even a thin in-game excuse (the gods are turning the wheel of time back, or whatever).

  Such things happened so frequently that I was always reminded it was just a game – and a poorly programmed one at that. I stopped thinking about the plot and started imagining some overworked level editor somewhere at Bethesda Softworks, being pressed by the boss to get the product out NOW, never mind the quality. From then on I simply stopped having fun playing RPG games. I was too aware of the simplistic scripted systems behind the characters, and figured I can get my dose of SF/fantasy plots more easily through books and TV.

  By the way, this was still better than Daggerfall, in which the player character would every so often literally slip through a crack in the floor and fall down forever (or until you rebooted).

• 10 Jason // Feb 10, 2008 at 11:17 am

  It didn’t occur to me until just now, but I actually had that reaction to the “Pirates of the Carribean” ride at Disney World in the late 1970s. The models looked lifelike while they were still, but I was creeped out by their unnaturally smooth, repetitive motions and their faces–stationary except for their mouths.

  I still liked the ride. I think my discomfort with the animatronics just goosed up the uneasiness I was meant to feel among pirates.

• 11 j h woodyatt // Feb 10, 2008 at 11:35 am

  My least favorite fantasy cliché— heritable magic— is, I think, an example of the uncanny valley. When I see it in a work of fiction, it makes me want to strangle the author with his/her own entrails and set fire to the corpse with white phosphorus. It’s pretty common, so I’m continually having to squelch back a murderous urge, even when I’m reading/viewing something I otherwise like a lot.

  It’s hard to explain why I find it similar to the uncanny valley effect. Maybe someone else who shares my reaction will help me out with the words.

• 12 Will // Feb 10, 2008 at 11:43 am

  Ok, I’m a huge fan of Elder Scroll games (including Morrowind and Oblivion), so here goes…

  The Netch you killed did not technically belong to the farmer. There are many wandering Netch. So, it’s a bit more like you killed A buffalo, not HIS buffalo.

  The farmer most likely thinks you’re a jerk because you’re an Argonian. In Morrowind, your lizard people are considered inferior, mostly only good for keeping as slaves on the plantation. Killing innocent Netch wouldn’t make him think any more of you.

  Given the above, plus considering that I’d guess you are a heavily armed adventurer, I’m not surprised that the farmer would ignore you – the same way a person might “ignore” the large, armed foreigner kicking over trash cans. He could call the cops, but would they get there in time…?

  It is technically quite easy to flag a Netch as belonging to specific farmers if the game designers had been so inclined. There are several examples of other animals that are flagged as “owned,” where the owners will get pissed and either attack or call the police (set a bounty). Instead, Netch are generally wandering, unowned creatures.

  So… in your own way, you’re making assumptions based on coincidence here: you met a farmer, then you killed a Netch, so it must have been his Netch, and now you a) feel guilty and b) want to be punished for it. I’ll let you roll around what that means… :)

  The kind of gameplay you are seeing here is called “sandbox” play, and it’s the notion that you can go anywhere, do anything, and the game has to deal with it:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_game

  The [in]famous Grand Theft Auto series is a urban version of Morrowind in a lot of ways – you run around in a non-linear fashion, interacting with a lot of different people, etc.

  These sandbox games are probably my favorite, and once you get used to that kind of freedom, it spoils you for more…

  And as a final comment, you could argue that my “explanation” is just retcon, but that’s the interesting thing about these worlds – what you really want is to be able to genuinely converse with the characters to get to explanations (”why weren’t you pissed off about me killing your Netch?” “It’s not my Netch, you stupid, mud-eating Argonian”). That’s the real problem, and it’s a big one…

• 13 Danjo // Feb 10, 2008 at 11:44 am

  Having an author or game designer fail to flesh something out appropriately isn’t really an instance of Uncanny Valley, which is a feeling attributed to how much the process of facial recognition is unconscious and automatic. It’s just pointing out that in recreating people there’s a fuzzy line in artistry where the brain is going to treat something either as a not-human that can safely be anthropomorphisized, or instead categorize that something as a human but then hone in on the inhuman qualities.

  When Morrowind threw some inconsistencies at me, I was prepared to roll with it and focus on the aspects of the world that were working. Different people can react differently because it’s a conscious process. Counterexample being the Golden Compass, which freaks just about everyone out. I was willing to overlook inconsistencies in a game because I recognize that even though it’s obvious that a Netch farmer should get fed up when I kill his herd, that’s just one of a billion such obvious reactions the developers would have to take into account. Worlds are incredibly complex. When constructing those worlds every simple interaction that the developers take the time to add, their world gets a little closer to a reality and I appreciate that. When comparing the reactions of a player to how close the world mimics reality, the function is linear. There’s no valley.

• 14 skzb // Feb 10, 2008 at 1:31 pm

  Danjo::13:: “Having an author or game designer fail to flesh something out appropriately isn’t really an instance of Uncanny Valley.”

  True. Also, when someone says, “Hold your horses,” it doesn’t necessarily imply the proximity of equines. And my love isn’t, you know, *exactly* like a red red rose. Sometimes people say, “he makes me sick,” when they only really mean, “he isn’t, perhaps, the best president the US has ever had.”

  And the chemical abbreviation for table salt is NaCl.

• 15 skzb // Feb 10, 2008 at 1:48 pm

  J.H.::#11:: It bothers me, too. So let me hit you with this one: I once concocted a theory that the difference between sf and fantasy is that sf is built on characters who are able to accomplish things through acquired skills, whereas in fantasy characters accomplish things through accidents of birth.

  Of course, the theory won’t hold up any better than any other distinction between sf and fantasy, but it’s fun to play with in your head, and to look at some of your favorite books and re-categorize them with that in mind.

• 16 kit // Feb 10, 2008 at 2:09 pm

  GWW@1: I haven’t seen Beowulf yet but I am looking forward to it. I am curious how I’ll react to it.

  Tom@2: The Polar Express is cited pretty often as an example of the Uncanny Valley.

  Birch@3: Yes indeed the use of idiom can make or break a story.

  burgundy@4: There is definitely a place where games can become realistic and of course that is different for different people. For example, take sports games — I can greatly enjoy a ‘Nintendo style’ sports game where the action is cartoony and all about button mashing (or whatever verb one uses to describe wiimoting). A game like NFL Football 2008 on the other hand is pretty much totally uninteresting to me.

  Rachel@6: It can only take one event to destroy suspension of disbelief.

  Will@12: I adore sandbox style games. I’ve played with the Grand Theft Auto games and enjoyed them too, though I haven’t devoted many hours to them yet.

  You make a good point, in that the game worked to the point that I made all kinds of assumptions about it. I read an interview with Will Wright quite some time ago which talked about how players fill in the gaps in their heads, creating a story from a game creator’s bare framework. People have whole life stories for their Sims built up in their minds, and obviously I created an amusing little scenario for Caspar and the farmer out of what I thought was happening.

  And you’re right, that is exactly the kind of conversation I want to be able to have. Essentially what sandbox gamers crave are artificial people who react like real ones but without the mess of real people when we decide to get medieval on their ass. Blood stains are so hard to remove.

• 17 kit // Feb 10, 2008 at 2:23 pm

  Danjo@13: Although Steve’s comment already addressed it, I imagine that this kind of thing must really irritate some of the more literal-minded scientific minds out there. Someone comes up with a perfectly good theory like the uncanny valley and next thing you know the creative types are throwing it around in all kinds of sloppy, metaphorical ways.

  Which isn’t to say this is my most elegant use of metaphor. I do think that world building is not strictly linear, though — the more realistic something becomes, the higher our expectations become. A tiny inconsistency in something which isn’t intended to be very realistic is a lot more forgivable and forgettable then something for Morrowind’s level of realism.

  To use a writing based example, if I pick up some brain candy writing — say the latest trashy tie-in novel :) — I’ll likely be willing to forgive a lot as long as I am entertained. But I would probably get a bit queasy of a Dragaeran told Vlad he’d ‘be there in a New York minute!’

• 18 Alain // Feb 10, 2008 at 2:29 pm

  I must have encountered Uncanny Valley for the first time when I was very little and I saw my first circus clown. I still consider them at the same level as Repliee or badly done characters in too many 3D computer animation films. I don’t have problems with hand puppets though.

  The most common and “popular” Uncanny Valley that struck me was in the original “Battlestar Galactica” series with Lorne Greene and company. The whole series was filled with Chillofoodfreezes and holovidoviewer. There was near to zero SF, much like most of the Deep Space Nine episodes.

  The most literary Uncanny Valley that I went through, and the one that gave me the longest feeling of unease without my being able to pin it was the one made (and re-made again and again) by Iain M. Banks.

  I read Consider Phlebas (1987) The Player of Games (1988) Use of Weapons (1990) and finally Against a Dark Background (1993) until I gave up on him. I always had a feeling of hunger and unease after each of these novels. My hunger for science fiction was never fed in any of them, yet at the same time he always used a SF background.

  In a sense Banks had done quite a feat: Write classic novels with well turned characters and plots and well placed descriptions while evading any form of SF theme, any form of exploitation of a SF idea (like characters finally accomplishing things through innovations that required acquired scientific or engineering skills ) in any way. Everything was backdrop, like Star Wars, but Star Wars moved so fast (I mean the 1st movie of them all) that I didn’t notice it.

  It was only with Joss Whedon’s “Serenity” that I finally saw (reluctantly, but I bought the DVDs so I felt forced to go through them) a series which did for TV SF what Banks did for Novel SF. There was next to zero SF in Battlestar or DS9 or Babylon 5 but there was absolutely zero, a perfect zero SF in “Serenity”. Quite a feat!

• 19 Paul // Feb 10, 2008 at 5:42 pm

  Jack Vance wrote a book called The Star King which was partly about finding a planet known only from 3 pictures which was beautiful beyond belief, “more Earthlike than Earth” I think was the phrase. When the characters finally showed up there, some of the native lifeforms were jarring and annoying to the human visitors, similar to Steve’s reaction to the netch and farmer.

  One of my peeves along these lines happens when I am reading a story set in a faraway land or remote time when you can assume the language being spoken is not English. (Like Dragaera for instance.) If the author makes a pun based on the English “translation” it is annoying to me! I’ve seen one based on patience/patients at least once and I think twice. Although it’s not out of the question that a similar pun is possible in the original language, it seems unlikely for patience/patients and is jarring to me.

  Jack Vance would probably have a conversation where one person says something that doesn’t make sense like “if you care to try, I will open up my box to you!”, then have a footnote that says “in the Trill dialect the words zapsa (box) and zapso (the contents of one’s hopes and dreams) are similarly pronounced- Selgo Carwan is making a pun.”

• 20 skzb // Feb 10, 2008 at 8:50 pm

  “some of the native lifeforms were jarring and annoying to the human visitors, similar to Steve’s reaction to the netch and farmer.”

  Uh, that post was by Kit.

• 21 amysue // Feb 10, 2008 at 10:12 pm

  Many years ago I worked with a woman (I was her case mgr) who was not only cognitively challenged but also , as a result of a particular syndrome, was born with no eyes. I don’t mean she had eyes that didn’t work. she had no eyes, there was some slight indentation where they would be but they weren’t there. Um, needless to say she was blind.

  When out in the world the responses of strangers to her was often one of distaste and sometimes even fear, certainly discomfort. I always thought it was because she was such a pretty woman and so typical looking until you noticed what was “off” and that creeped out some people. This bothered her for obvious reasons so she asked for glasses and was thrilled to find out that if she went out in sunglasses people weren’t afraid of her at all.

  Perhaps the concept of the “uncanny valley” has some validity or maybe as a species we’re just easily spooked.

• 22 Chris // Feb 11, 2008 at 8:41 am

  Ok, in lieu of coming up with something interesting about the uncanny valley, I’ll come up with something jaw-dropping for Morrowind. If you’re not familiar with the “Done Quick” theme, there are people out there who compete to finish video games in the shortest time, and they are very good at it. Morrowind, for instance, in 7:20… and yes, that’s minutes:seconds, not hours:minutes. Uncanny! http://speeddemosarchive.com/Morrowind.html

• 23 Touchstone // Feb 11, 2008 at 3:41 pm

  A few weeks ago, we sat down and watched “eXistenz”, a movie I’d never gotten around to seeing back when it first came out. Though it’s a tangent, this post reminded me about it. There’s one scene in particular which takes place inside of a virtual-reality adventure game, and is populated by AI characters who have a lot of those same…quirks. Lack of awareness of what’s going on around them, oddly awkward responses in conversation, etc etc. It was amusing seeing those mannerisms blown up to the scale of a ‘whole person’. It’s worth watching if you can rent it cheap; the opening is very uneven, but I think it pays off by the end.

• 24 Miramon // Feb 11, 2008 at 6:04 pm

  To be honest, I think these Bethesda games are far far from any “uncanny valley” of world realism, which I don’t think really exists as such.

  I think in the respects you noted, these game worlds are unsatisfactory attempts to make very large and very free worlds with too few designers. This is what causes the disjunction of expectation and reality — inadequate design. Not “too much” design, as with the uncanny valley of human avatar graphics, which I for one consider to be legitimate within that realm.

  Of course there are many positive features of their worlds as well, but it’s the sheer expanse and the need to fill it up with stuff on a budget that leads to these problems.

  There is also the issue of game philosophy. For example, they chose to make it possible to kill the “cows” to begin with. They did this because they want you to be free of game-imposed morality, but then they failed to code for appropriate consequences. This is typical for Bethesda, they have huge ambitions, but don’t have the vast staff and time that would be needed to implement the implied consequences of their design decisions.

  IMO, more constrained worlds make for generally better gaming experiences, but obviously there are a great many people who prefer the broader horizons (and weaker gameplay) of the elder scrolls games.

  For example, in Lord of the Rings Online, we (I was a game designer for Turbine until just after LOTRO shipped last year) at one point indeed used killable monsters for all the livestock. This was a double mistake — for one thing, even with the vast amount of content design time we put into the game, we certainly didn’t have time to implement appropriate farmer and guard behavior. But perhaps more importantly, we hand long since chosen not to present players with the game-supported freedom to be evil. All the quests assume the player is part of the “free peoples” of Middle Earth, not a brigand, one of “sharkey’s men”, a squinky-eyed southron, a black numenorean, or any other type of renegade, foe or villain. Had we then permitted the “killable livestock” decision to stand (it wasw reversed prior to alpha) that would have been an inconsistent game decision. Similar, we have not placed random chests in the homes of private citizens to be gleefully looted by random players, nor can you rip off random shopkeepers (or even force them to wear stupid outfits due to that silly Morrowind shopkeeping bug).

  Now in Morrowind, you are free to be “evil”, morally neutral, or just whimsically psychopathic, and they have deliberately coded to allow for this, but at the same time they have given themselves a much greater design burden as a result.

• 25 Touchstone // Feb 11, 2008 at 6:16 pm

  On the subject of the Valley itself…I can’t speak to whether the idea of a curve with regards to how we FEEL about human-like things is correct, but I do think there’s a very strong argument in support of the idea that the more human-like something is, the more we will be aware of ways it fails to be human. The behavior of people around us is very important, AND we have enormous amounts of practice at being aware of it.

  There’s an experiment that would demonstrate it nicely, but I’m not sure whether or not anyone has ever done it. Get a large (very large) library of images of familiar things, grouped by type – pictures of human faces, traffic signs, cars, corporate logos, common animals, food products, etc. Throw them up on a computer screen…say, nine images at a time, with each set being drawn from the same category and a single image out of each set being modified in some way to be ‘wrong’. Run subjects through a hundred screens or so as a speed test – as quickly as possible, select the image that is wrong.

  Even if you were very careful in making certain that every modification was of similar magnitude (number of pixels changed, etc etc), I suspect you’d find people were significantly faster at identifying the modified faces than the average for other items. Though it’d be interesting to see how the other items ranked against each other….

  (Digression: there’s specialization here, and it favors the things we’re most familiar with. That can be a problem if our environment changes later. Someone who grew up in a small, all-white town who says ‘All Asian people look the same to me’ may be a racist, but they’re ALSO suffering from having developed an ‘index’ for faces that’s optimized around a certain kind of facial structure.)

• 26 Matt // Feb 11, 2008 at 10:10 pm

  It’s interesting to see the various computer and video game companies that have realized this, and taken competitive advantage of it. Obviously having effects in your game that unintentially creep people out is a bad thing.

  Everquest 2 suffered a lot from this. It was a very detailed, very realistic looking rpg. Unfortunately this high value of realism forced into contrast the parts of the game that didn’t look real.

  For example; seeing a character with an incredibly realistic body and face, but with creepy dead doll eyes. Or those situations where a realistic CGI person moves in such a way that is just a -little- off from reality, and jars you.

  Blizzard realized this was an issue long ago, which is probably why the vastly more successful WoW has very cartoony looking characters. They don’t look eerie, wrong, and they age much better.

  Take one of the old school CGI movies made back 5-10 years ago. Like Final Fantasy. When they came out, they were the height of realism. But now they look awkward, clunky, and just plain silly to us. Contrast that with a movie like Toy Story, which has aged much better.

• 27 Miramon // Feb 12, 2008 at 10:47 am

  EQ2 was a strange case. They really had creepy avatars, that IMO were very badly done. The avatars were so bad, that as I understand it, some Korean semi-pro fans came up with their own avatar set that was so superior that SOE threw the old models away after a year. However, that’s a third-hand report, maybe a bit muddled. Clearly the EQ2 environments were well done, anyhow, but those faces… agh. I have the same reaction to Bethesda faces, by the way, they seem grossly ugly to me, not just creepy, but badly drawn.

  The Final Fantasy movie is another good example. I thought it was a bad movie to begin with. In certain scenes, it almost made it up the far side of the uncanny valley graph, but for the most part the investment in animation time and effort just didn’t pan out.

  Blizzard’s decision to use a cartoony style was, I think, more of a decision to go cheap on the art. It’s a successful and consistent art style, kudos to the art director and staff, but it’s also relatively inexpensive to implement. You can see a certain shoddyness to the approach when you see weapons and body parts clipping through the mounts and similar oddities, but most people just don’t complain about these flaws, so it seems Blizzard was able to judge well what people would care about.

  Other more detailed and realistic environments and characters are possible that don’t fall into the “creepy” category of EQ2, including I would say the mix of realistic environment and anime faces of Final Fantasy XI, and the generally more realistic faces and environments of LOTRO.

  Sometimes the uncanny valley seems to be a design goal. Consider Silent Hill and its related games. This is a horror-survival game that deliberately tries to creep you out. In addition to the swirdling fog and blood everywhere, their character models (apart from the few human characters) seem to be deliberately mannequin-like. The creepy frozen plastic faces, and stumbling shambling unrealistic animations can be quite unnerving at times.

• 28 SaintPeter // Feb 12, 2008 at 6:33 pm

  It’s tough to say if the problem is an “uncanny valley” issue or simply “bad writting” – or is it possible to tell the difference?

  I can say that as I’ve become more educated about certain topics, their mistreatment becomes more pronounced to me and more world breaking.

  Case in point: I was playing around with my new Netflix account and decided to watch an older Sci-Fi called “Soldier” with Kurt Russel as “raised from birth to be a compliant soldier” type character. One world breaker was his character being transported to a “garbage planet” in a hold that, apperently, was pressureized. I couldn’t imagine a universe in which it would be economical to transport waste across interstellar distances to be dumpted on a planet that had a breathable atmosphere. What a waste! Admitedly, I was not expecting much from the flic, but there were so many gaping holes that it became a game of “find the next scientific inconsitancy” rather than enjoying the movie.

  One of my guilty pleasures are the “J.D. Robb” (Nora Roberts) detective novels. They are pure pulp, but have engaging characters. The world breaker is that in 2059 everyone has a cell phone but the police cannot get a record of who called who. Lacking an explanation involving a sudden increase of personal privacy (which is unsupported by the rest of the world), this seems completly inconsistant.

  Actually, failure to correctly predict the future is part of why I rarely read older Sci-Fi. Read sometihng from the 1960s and you have characters punching info into “terminals” and no one has a personal communicator. Internet? What’s that? With rare exceptions, technology that we daily take advantage of is not present in these “far future” worlds.

• 29 kit // Feb 12, 2008 at 9:57 pm

  SaintPeter@28: I rather like that about old sci-fi. I remember being amused and rather startled to realize, while reading one of the earliest Lensman books, that a ‘computer’ was actually a person who calculated things for a living.

• 30 Mark Hall // Feb 12, 2008 at 11:33 pm

  I’ve actually been making a habit of old sci-fi and fantasy, recently; the Lensman “computer” thing got me, too, as did the variety of words that he used for things we have somewhat standardized terms for today (screens likely would’ve been called shields or forcefields or somewhat like that).

  Of course, then there’s the squickiness of implied incest in the last book… the scene where the Kinnison boy meets his mom in space was really uncomfortable to read… but that’s just Lensmen. Other writers predict things far more accurately, and some things (such as the tactical tank used in the last couple books) were borrowed directly from sci-fi.

• 31 Miramon // Feb 13, 2008 at 1:19 am

  Well, hell, it’s not as if sci-fi “force fields” have anything to do with science anyhow, and “screens” and “shields” — Doc Smith did call the inner layer wall-shields, I think — are better names than force fields anyhow, as those names give some idea what their function may be. Why a Q-type helix should be impenetrable is not something I am prepared to answer at this time, however.

  But seriously, yes, that’s how you can tell the author had a clue about the way science works, if an old SF novel still makes some sense. You always have to grant them some missteps and mistakes, but some old stuff does last surprisingly well. You can even go back to Poe’s strange work Eureka and see some surprisingly accurate intuitions about modern physics notions that I doubt most of Doc Smith’s contemporaries would have entertained.

• 32 Don // Feb 29, 2008 at 9:38 am

  Matt beat me to it when he brought up Blizzard and their use of cartoony characters (and worlds as well). I compare Lord of the Rings Online to WoW (I play both and yes I have no life), and I have found the WoW characters more robust and the world more visually engaging in the long term.

  This uncanny thing works for landscape and mobs as well. The cartoonish aspect allows for more artistic freedom. It is possible to achieve a greater appearance of variety while using the same basic chracter model with the cartoon figure as bold artistic embellsihment can be used with out being out of context. In Lotro, with its attempts at greater realism, it is more difficult to feel there is more variety with the pallette that is being used.

  There is a place in the Outlands where the planets in the sky call to mind the earlier works of Vallejo (I think it was his works). Such a scene in LotRo (or Dark Age of Camelot) would be jarring but here it works.

  Does the same priciple work as well in fiction? The lightly sketched character allowing more room for future growth/potential or does it translate into cliche? Does this still work for electronic games because they are still relatively new, without the centuries (milleniums?) of past works to compare them too? With advances in cgi, how long before entire game worlds are visually indistinguishable from real life? Will dialogue be the stumbling block (has someone said this earlier in the thread? there was a lot of talk of idiom)? Once the graphics are perfect will it all be characterization, plot and dialogue?

  On another note I did find Morrowind a bit too clunky in terms of gameplay. It never held my interest very long though I have given it a try on several occaisions. It may also be the solo play aspect of it that lets me down. I prefer the interactive world of a good MMORPG to a solo RPG (I have the lifetime subscription to LotRo and am a regular player of WoW (horde LLande). It may be that I am not as interested in interacting with the computer non player characters as much as real people or it may be some other aspect of game play.

• 33 kit // Feb 29, 2008 at 10:05 am

  I don’t play a lot of MMORPGs, except occasional dabbling in small-scale web based ones like KoL or Skyrates. I think actually I like the lack of interpersonal interaction — I go looking for that elsewhere, both in terms of games (I’d rather play a pen and paper RPG or a board/tile/card type game, small-scale online gaming like household LAN games of Civ4) and social interaction (where I go with in person, IM, blogs instead).

  I like some of the unrealisms of the game world in my solo play — I like being able to save and restart from a particular instance, so I can follow different paths of action and see where they lead. I like being able to stab the shop keeper and the guard (yeah my character is getting stronger) and rummage through his stuff, then maybe decide I wanted him alive after all. Similarly, games where I can realistically be taken out with one bullet tend not to be as fun. Also, I like that it is just a collection of 1s and 0s I’m interacting with, not someone’s character they’ve invested lots of time and effort into, only to have me stab them in the back for their 10 gold pieces and that pretty shirt I want to dress my avatar in.

• 34 Don // Feb 29, 2008 at 11:21 am

  Playing board, dice and paper games with real life people is much better than online games but since most of my real life friends who live near me do not play these types of games. They are great people but I need go elsewhere for my gaming fix.

  Happily I have real life friends who no longer live here but who like games so we meet on the mmorpg. The mmorpg then becomes more of a team thing where the group works to accomplish goals. We also share resources and information.

  The mmorpg tends to be dumbed down from rpgs as well so it may also be a matter of mental laziness on my part… a laziness that seems to increase since I retired from my day job.

  The better mmorpg do not allow looting of other player’s toons. Any battles with pcs tends to be in specifical designated zones where the only loss is a small amount toward repairing equipment and whatever personal esteem you give up when losing a battle.

  In WoW these can be as large as 40 people vs 40 people with a set of goals required to achive victory, or with hundreds vs hundreds (Dark Age of Camelot in its heyday) for control of zones, castles and artifacts. Sometimes raids/tactics/logistics would be planned days in advance. It was fun though perhaps a bit involved.

  For days when I do not have the time/desire to make the time commitment required for a mmorpg I play CIV4 (solo) or NFL Head Coach.

  I used to play AD&D years ago with people from the office but the group broke up when several people left the firm (and in one case left the province). It doesn’t help that my beloved doesn’t care for this type of game though we still play cribbage and used to play Eurorails and History of the World (we would take two civilizations each) all the time.

• 35 kit // Feb 29, 2008 at 11:49 am

  Don: But what if what I want is to stab the person and take his stuff, not challenge him to an honor duel?

  There are unrealistic things which happen due to bad writing or limited technology, which is what much of this thread has dealt with in regard to games. There are others which happen to further the game along, which exist for balance, fun, or game structure.

  To me the unreality of the solo computer RPG games tend to be more fun than those of the MMORPGs. Obviously many disagree, given the success of WoW.

  OTOH, if they ever made that Firefly MMORPG I’d be there in a heartbeat.

• 36 Foolster41 // Apr 11, 2008 at 5:11 pm

  As a fantasy writer (Well nothing done yet), this is something I’ve struggled with, though I’ve never thought of it as being an uncanny valley. I just still have a feeling of the world I’ve been creating as not being “done enough” though I’ve defined quite a bit in terms of religion, language and customs.

  I really hate english/alien puns and weird Idioms. two things I’ve been trying to be careful of in my own writing.

  In World of Warcraft you can just kill cows with no reactions. It’s stilly, but I let it go because I enjoy the game. (WoW is hardly submersive anyway alot of the time because of it’s very self-conciousbess of the rules/stats and things like waiting in line to kill a creature.)

  (Info on the world I’m creating is on my website link for the curious. feedback is welcome. My contact info is on the site.)

• 37 David Harmon // Apr 11, 2008 at 7:24 pm

  I just reread Piers Anthony’s Prostho Plus, and it was really bad about the idiom thing — even his blaming it all on cheap translators couldn’t cover it! Hardly the book’s only fault, though — the basic premise was Aliens kidnapping an Earth dentist into indentured (ouch) servitude, building up to a classic Earthman uber alles rhapsody….

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