Actor Machine: GDC Procedural Animation Roundtable

Notes from GDC 2008 Procedural Animation Roundtable

Procedural Animation Roundtable

Facilitator: Ken Perlin

For those of you who were not in attendance, Ken Perlin led a fantastically active roundable at GDC on Procedural Animation. This open discussion forum was attended by aproximately 80 people, with at least 20% participating participated in lively discussion, including senior engineers and designers from nearly every major game company.

Using a simple Word Pad document guide projected on the screen to facilitate the talk, Ken augmented this document throughout the talk with thoughts and important points that were being raised during the discussion. Below are those notes.

Goals?
Physics
Emotion
User creatable
Human/non-human
Other media, like movies, education
Interesting games
Interesting game engines
The Future

Ken's Notes from Participant's Points, Ideas, and Comments

Keepon robot - beat analysis - guitar hero
Lipsync - people are predictive, but we are designing reactive things. We don't know what the player will do next.
Proceduralization of MoCap. When do I start animation to make the future happen? Avatars versus NPCs. Making Avatars looking less bad, and most interactions are ok.
Animator who teaches animation: Think about motion. Uses Laban Motion Analysis. How to talk about movement.
History of games did not have the tools, or the artists. Things are changing to be more character focused - Eg: Team Fortress. What is the place of story? Opinion: We don't want traditional story, because it's interactive. Problem with stories in games - they are orthogonal to game play. Henry Jenkins spatial narrative. Expression of character and theme in a non-linear way. Video games are lagging behind in facial expression. Scott McCloud. Chris Hecker's talk on Wednesday - RomComs - formulaic but wildly successful. Stylistic defs. and content within that. What is the equivalent for interactive? Will rich engaging characters tip the balance? Yes, story/character will evolve together. Driving around a blue cube is not a game. How does interaction itself evolve as characters get richer? Characters need objectives - it's through achieving those objectives that characters reveal themselves. Convey info to players in redundant ways.
Literacy? First person shooter players learn what works - when they can look away and when they can't? "Everything I know about game animation I learned from watching Hulk Hogan".
Theatre people convey emotion via full-body better than Hollywood actors. First person shooters and seducing someone - both require you to not look away.
Learning curve for the player. Need to ramp up challenges for the player.
HalfLife II - Alyx - difficult to build characters that can sell emotion. What is the state of the tools for emotional expression?
Where do we want to go with human emotion?
Even shooters are not just shooters. There's more going on.
How do you get a player to care about a characters? It has to do with shared common experience. You and your character do something together, the character learns from that experience and you are invested in that.
Maybe too often we are beholden to film - Valve takes this to extremes with the plausible film frame. But you can't see a character cry in a book or tears on a face in the Theatre. Maybe we can distance ourselves from that.
You are trying go evoke this emotion in the player. To make the player care about the character, make the character care about the player?
"Willing suspension of disbelief."
What are games about? You look away from Alyx because you don't need to look at her.
Conventions about what the games are is still evolving. "Things you can get away with in games that you can never get away with in real life." Eg: it's not considered stealing if you take stuff from peoples' houses.
Game ideas thrown around inside EA (you heard it here first, folks!). - a game where you are one character and you're supposed to be developing a relationship with an NPC. move your health meter over to the NPC. but your partner is completely vulnerable. you win the game by keeping them alive. Like ICO?
How do we animate things in such a way that they don't break the emotional connection? With "Eliza" we are in too sparse an interaction space to be able to tell it's not real.
Anecdotal: Mass Effect - I thought I needed to protect the other one.
"Too much information:" La Jetee - just the important information. Sound is underutilized. We are obsessing over polygons.
The importance of AI is to maintain the emotional bonds with the characters.
Comment about moving the health bar: it really matters how the character behaves. "Enclave" you need to protect the merchant but he's really stupid and annoying, so it's no fun.
There is an emotional uncanny valley. The closer you get to something that's emotionally believable, the more annoying/frustrating it gets when you get things wrong. Final Fantasy doesn't even go near the valley which is why things are robust, if limited.
Regarding TimeCode:
Similar levels of fidelity is the key to getting over the uncanny valley.
"You can't emotion on a screenshot in the back of a box". - we decided that wasn't true.
Should interactive experiences be more "third person" (like movies/novels) or more "second person" (like conversation)?
Is the controller a limitation?
Given the initial investment the player puts in, is the problem building on that relationship, or not breaking it? "A cube with hearts on the side"
Attachment through emotional and emotional response.
Text adventure: Planet Fall - you pick up a robot sidekick that annoys the hell out of you. At some point you get destroyed, and you feel his absence. Even the annoying guy in text is a relationship.
All motion is generated by emotion. Words, physical action, it's the conveying emotion.
The emotion track is the real track.

Thanks and Acknowledgement

Ken Perlin and Actor Machine would like to thank all of the attendees of the talk. Due to the spontaneous nature of the way the notes were taken, it was not possible to keep track of whom said what If anyone would like their comment attributed to them or removed from this list, please Contact us and we will gladly comply