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Marc Laidlaw of Valve Software:
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

Playing Dead.

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.

"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.

Even the smallest, least significant gesture has to be painstakingly animated.

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
January 29, 2000

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Programming Languages, Past Present and Future:


  Programming Focus Modularity Data Representation Major Advancements
Digital Circuits circuit design pin connectivity the digital abstraction mainstream consumer electronics; industrial control; first video games
Assembly Language instructions and registers shared raw procedure calls with no type checking global variables programs; first operating systems; first computer and home games
C functions and modules functions, data structures records portable programs; large-scale software applications
C++, Java, UnrealScript objects and their relationships objects objects with inheritance; parametric polymorphism (C++ templates) graphical user interfaces; binary platform independence (Java,UnrealScript)
Next Generation frameworks of objects and their relationships frameworks, objects frameworks with virtual and parametric polymorphism large-scale engines; persistence; introspection; metaprogramming


© 1999, 2000 Gamespy Industries
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