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![]() ![]() Strength of Character All this week GameSpy is opening the doors and lending an open microphone to some of the brains behind our favorite games. Find out what they have to say about the current state of gaming and its future. Edited By - Dave "Fargo" Kosak
How easy it is to hire an actor, put them in front of a camera, and let them do what they do best--entertain. We respond instantly to another human being. We can read the emotions in their eyes, we empathize, we laugh at them, or with them. A good human actor will come to understand his role; he will draw on his craft to express the personality of the character he plays. But there is no equivalent "actor" waiting to take on roles in a computer game, no matter how large your budget. Each and every character in a game such as Half-Life must be started from scratch, built up grain by grain, even the smallest, least significant gesture painstakingly animated. It was an accomplishment when the characters in Half-Life actually opened their mouths to speak. I find it hard at this point to appreciate games where the characters talk through closed lips and clenched teeth, less animated than a ventriloquist's manikin. But every advance seems to draw attention to a deficiency. Mouths move, but eyes don't blink. Heads turn, but hands look like oven mitts. Creating real characters, strong enough to compete with the memorable figures in film and literature, may be the biggest challenge facing us if we are to truly entertain a wide new audience.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said something to the effect that if you try to create a "real" person, you'll be lucky to end up with a character. But if you try only to create a character, you'll end up with a caricature…something two-dimensional at best. We must aim high. It's a challenge that many of us take seriously.
It's odd to think of "character" as a new frontier, when it is at the core of a craft as ancient as storytelling. But the newest technologies have a way of reintroducing us to our oldest concerns. There was nothing but dark, unexplored territory ahead of us when we began developing Half-Life, and about all we managed in the end was to barely scramble beyond the zone our headlamps had first illumined. As the development cycle came to an end, we stood in a huge, wide-open chamber, with the mouths of about a dozen other passages waiting in the shadows just ahead. Then the lights went out. But darkness is full of possibilities. Dizzying possibilities. -Marc Laidlaw Feedback!
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Thanks to all the participants in Developer Week!
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