Actors in Games

A few years ago, as long as ten maybe, when console and PC games entered into their CD-ROM era, videogames had actors in them. They combined film footage with gameplay, to mixed effect. You had some passably good ones, like the Wing Commander 3 and 4 stuff – which though not high drama was at least watchable – and you had some pretty awful stuff, like the interactive movie fad. And then games stopped using actors (for the most part) to tell their stories.

Obviously in some cases there was no need, like Grim Fandango, because the game was largely in the 'animated' style anyway. In many cases, games moved into the territory of trying to recreate humans for their stories using animation instead. As games increased in their technological oomph, they could get more and more realisitic characters on screen. Voice acting remained, but increasingly the action consisted of these cgi people talking and shooting and whatever.

Today, actors have all but disappeared from the visual side of games, although many are doing quite well out of the occasional voice acting work that they garner. Games like the Metal Gear series, the Grand Theft Auto series, Max Payne, Resident Evil, Halo and many others now use exclusively animated actors to tell their stories, costing millions of dollars in animation and time.

The problem is that they don't really work.

Emotional Connections

Game directors want more emotional connection in their games. Emotional connection, it is thought, is the key to games becoming successful in the wider media. If we can enjoy games on a more-than-just-fun level, then they and we are the better for it. This I broadly agree with (although not with the idea that the emotional connection is therefore a heroic one).

Cinematics and the emotional connection idea of are often closely tied. In the last few years, some of the most powerful games have featured a variety of cinematic moments. Ico and Rez, for example, use sparing but well-judged scenes to maximise impact. Grim Fandango is far more famous for its characters and story than its puzzles.

What these games, and many other like them, have in common is that the characters in them are not realistic humans. Grim Fandango's characters are all skull-dolls and big demons. Ico and Yorda are very ethereal versions of a boy and girl. Go further afield from videogames to CG animation in films and you see a similar trend. Sully, Gollum, Woody and Buzz and, yes, even Jar Jar Binks are all successful 3D animated characters who are not realistic humans.

Compare the emotional connection of those creations with any realistic human. There is a noticeable difference. Re-created humans look weird. Their lips don't quite fit, their eyes aren't quite right, their hair doesn't feel real, their body weight seems floaty. They get more and more detailed, yet still all we can seem to notice is that they're not quite correct. It bothers us.

Even today, we have the upcoming release of the Godfather game, with that picture of the CGI Marlon Brando. He doesn't look quite right, but why exactly? We watch the extraordinary lip-syncing and such in Half Life 2, and yet it doesn't quite work. It seems a little spooky, and we can't quite get into the story as we might because of it. When watching the demo video for 'Dawn of War', does anyone else find it odd that the orcs seem more real than the humans?

And yet, when we look at Monsters Inc the lip syncing of Sully with John Goodman is just as imperfect. The hair is very impressive but also seems a bit floaty. Criucially, it doesn't really bother us. We can get on and laugh and enjoy the film immensely. The same is true of The Incredibles. Whereas Final Fantasy the movie just seems very odd for reasons that we can't quite place.

Frankenstein

An animator friend of mine told me that the reason for this weirdness is nothing to do with the animation skills or technology problems. He calls it the 'Frankenstein Effect'. It's a psychological problem.

Our brains devote a lot of effort to visual processing, and of that a significant proportion is given over specifically to recognising human faces. We instincively understand faces as patterns pretty much from birth, and we associate feelings with them. Our recognition routines are very sophisticated and are what allow us to read subtle expressions, recognise people from afar, and so on. And we are able to recognise when something's not right about a face. That's how we know when people are lying to us. Wrong faces make us instinctively suspicious.

My friend's explanation is that because we are looking at realistic characters on screen, our minds instinctively move into 'human face recognition' mode, especially for close-ups etc. And because we have a lot of our mind devoted to that specific task, we are hyper aware of imperfections. The more realistic the character becomes, the more we become aware of the imperfections.

That's why The Incredibles doesn't bother us. The characters are exaggerated and their expressions are suggestive rather than simulacrum. Pretty much every successful animated character works on the basis of an exaggeraed aspect of humans. Things like huge eyes, spindly limbs and very wonky teeth etc produce exaggerated expressions, and these we emotionally respond to (Gollum, for example). Caricature artists tend to find that their customers usually recognise exaggerated versions of, say, politicians than realistic versions of same. It would seem that exaggeration and animation go hand in hand, something Disney figured out a long time ago. It gets around the Frankenstein effect. That's why the orcs look more real than the humans in that Dawn of War video.

We instinctively know the difference between art and reality. With a realistic character, our brains are all the time flagging that something is not right, and because we are in a suspicious mode, we aren't really able to emote with the character. It's hard to feel empathy for a liar.

So, the obvious question is, if you want to make game stories involving realistic people, why not do what the film industry does. Why not use actors? The usual first answer is 'transitions'.

Transitions

It was common when playing a game circa 1995-98 to have FMV (full motion video) sequences between gameplay sections of a game. You would be playing a shooting game, for example, and in between each level you'd have someone like Christopher Walken or Mark Hamill or some rent-a-day actor do their bit, followed by a long loading screen, where'd you'd go back to your character who didn't really look a lot like Walken or Hamill or rent-a-day. So it was thought that those were disassociative.

This didn't really stop Square producing Final Fantasy VII with clear differences between the animated cut-scenes and the gameplay sections. Plenty of noticeable transitions, and yet no-one was bothered. So perhaps the problem with FMV was not the mechanic of disassociation, but the material. Back in the FMV days, most game stories were just plain awful. However, the idea that the whole FMV mechanic was bad took hold because of 'transitions'.

EA's The Two Towers shows that transition issues were not that big of an issue any more. Using shots from the film of the same name, the game would then overlay the action with an animated sequence of lower quality using the same moves, and then the player would be in control. It worked very well and made for quite a fun and epic game which captured the spirit of the film. You watch Legolas fighting, you see the change into animated Legolas, and bang, you're in the action without having the time to think about loading screens.

So if transitions can now be done well and actors can be placed inside fully CG backgrounds (Sin City), then why not use actors? Why are Konami continuing to create more and realistic Solid Snakes, at greater cost, with increasing Frankenstein problems, when they could hire a half-decent action star and film their sequences to much better effect? Control.

Control

The second counter-actors argument is the idea of control. I.e. if you can fully control every aspect of the production of cut scenes, from the movement of the camera to the expressions on the characters faces, then you can get exactly what you want. You get the exact emotional impact.

There are two problems with this approach. One is that the Frankenstein effect is still present, no matter how much control you have. The second is that this much control deprives material of spontaneity, and if you want an emotional connection, then spontaneity is vital. For example, both “The Phantom Menace” and “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” are very unemotional films to watch, but the reason why is not clear.

The scripts in both films are not great by any means, but then this never stopped many an 80s action comedy from being basically entertaining. These films should be more entertaining than they actually are, and yet they fall very flat. I'm not the first one to suggest that the reason for this is the controlled way in which they were made. Both films are almost wholly made in blue-screen, with an actor mostly delivering lines to empty air. They were both made in very controlled circumstances, in otherwords, and they lack spontaneity.

Contrast this with Sin City, also shot largely in CGI but, crucially, with a lot of group acting scenes and with some amount of sets. It was also directed in a very informal and specific way, between Rodriguez and Miller, whereas George Lucas's creation was very much “It want this. More intense. More intense. More intense” sort of direction. Sin City gave its actors enough room to breathe, and made for an excellent film as a result. Phantom Menace treated them like dolls, in much the same way as the hypothetical 'total control' argument for game cut scenes. Why would we expect any different results?

I think, secretly, we all know that we wouldn't, but that there is a larger issue that this actor issue is masking, and that is to do with control over a whole project.

Hollywood

It's easy to live in denial and say that things like the Frankenstein effect are just temporary problems, to be overcome by technology. There is no evidence of that. Games remain on the cultural margins, game stories are far less emotionally engaging now than they were in the Lucasarts adventure game days. As the technology develops to make more realistic skin tones, eyes and lips, the situation is getting worse, not better.

A good example is the promo video for Fight Night (I think) for PS3 (I think) which I saw again recently at an EA party. There's a lot of shots of fighters getting hit slowly in the face, and a speaker talking about how this is making the emotional connection more visceral and real etc. When in fact it just looks weird.

Denial is covering the real reason: The deeply held fear, especially on the part of developers, of Hollywood. In short, nobody wants the games industry to turn into the movie industry. Nobody wants movie stars calling the shots.

This is just hugely irrational. Game developers are, apparently, quite a conservative lot. They fear change. Even the indie side of the industry is largely devoted to trying to re-create the past. Game developers really don't like the idea that a Brad Pitt or a Tom Cruise might come in a make all sorts of unreasonable demands, charge a giant fee and then ride off into the sunset.

The answer to this is very simple. If you're terrified of movie stars, don't use them. There are scads of TV actors, stage actors and so on out there who'd kill for a break in a big game and they'll do what you want for reasonable fees.

It's more a reflection of our lack of experience and practicality issues as an industry that we'd think it better to spend 2 million making freakish movie sequences with not-quite humans than to just hire a few actors and facilities for a week and shoot what we need for 250K. It reflects our continuing problem with getting in touch with reality, a problem that is rife across the games industry. It also reflects a deep trust issue, also an industry staple.

The Cost

Costs more than anything else are the convincing reason to start using actors again. They are cheaper and far more 'real' than any CG Solid Snake is ever going to be. What studios need to do is get their heads around the fact that there are better and cheaper ways to do the same things, and that now that we don't really have transition problems any more, what we are doing with all of our money is essentially inefficient and unworkable.

Why go through the heartbreak and failure of trying to recreate reality for the game's story when you could simply hire a writer, a director, an editor, a blue-screen facility and some actors and just work professionally instead. And that, more than anything is why we need the actors back. The current method of realistic game storytelling does not work because the principle element is suspiciously unreal.

It's time to let the past be the past and move on from these destructive denial issues that cost so much and pay off so little.

A Game By...

It is an accepted wisdom in the games industry that franchises are what matter. A franchise, in case you don't know, is a line of games which are held together by a common brand. Usually that brand is either a name or an identifying character, or both. Some great examples are games like the FIFA series, the various games that Nintendo have attached Mario to, the Championship Manager series and so on.

And of course, it works. When people in the industry talk about the need to control and own Intellectual Property (IP) and how the business is an IP-centric business, it's brands and franchises that they're talking about. Licenses are an extension of this, where a brand from another medium (usually a movie) is borrowed to fill the gap, create customer recognition and so on. Customer recognition is key to the whole franchise idea.

However entertainment franchises are only at their most effective in younger markets, most especially the teenage and early twenties market (the "immature market"). The immature are especially open to the kind of unreasoned love that franchises thrive in, possibly because young minds haven't developed critical faculties to the extent that a fully grown adult has (somewhere between the ages of 25 and 30).

As a result, the more widely broadcast a franchise is, the greater the chance of its success, because the core customer, doesn't really know any better. They have disposable income and they are far more likely to herd around what they are told has quality rather than what they determine for themselves has quality. The franchise business therefore works best for larger companies rather than smaller ones because they have deeper pockets.

Pop music is an excellent example of this. As is the wargame market and Games Workshop's near total domination of it in Britain. As is EA's strategy, and that of the comics industry. The strategy of these companies is pretty simple:

1. Create a core brand and branch products off it.
2. Promote the hell out of those products.
3. Don't worry about the long life of those products or the physical quality of them (as opposed to the perceived quality).
4. Realise that your customer will grow out of your product, so don't try to retain them more than a few key years.
5. Instead, focus on recycling the product for a new generation, because there is always a new generation.

The franchise entertainment business is built on the idea that there are always new customers and that it is far more important to capture new customers than to retain old ones. Old customers mature and move on. They always do. 98%* of Games Workshop customers don't play Warhammer after they turn 21. A lot of people grow out of eating fast food by their mid-twenties (or at least of relishing the prospect).

(*educated guess)

The result of the franchise business is that the products themselves stand still. FIFA has been the same game for years. Marvel Comics are never going to let Spiderman permanently die. The Big Mac is immortal. Pop groups may die, but the formula remains intact (and the songs recycle).

So what? You may regard it as evil or bad or whatever, but it's simply a reality. You sell to the young, you do it with recycling unchanging franchises. That's what works.


The problem lies for those of us who don't want to make games for the immature. If you're interested at all in evolving the medium of games, if you're interested in getting the hell away from an eternal cycle of sweaty teenagers and increasingly dreary E3 graphics-athons, tediously 'exciting' console releases and more 10/10 reviews than you can shake a stick at, what do you do? Hell, even if you're just interested in opening up a new market, what do you do?

I believe that the answer is authors.
Or, to put it another way, people.
Or, to put it another way, the phrase "a game by"

You see, as the immature market responds to franchises (and the small amount of adult gamers who can live with them), the mature market sees through them very quickly. As a quick example, how may cynical thirty-something gamers do you know? Mature adults value film directors, they value novelists and they value musicians. They are far more interested in who wrote, directed or composed a piece rather than what its name is. Why?

The mature entertainment consumer is wise enough to know when they're seeing the same thing repeated. They have perspective, and look for genuinely new ideas. They start to search out who or what is behind the brand. When you get to a certain age, you start to look for signs of intelligence out there. You start to look for art and soul, and you come to realise that you find that by following the artist. It's more 'real'.

But who is the artist of a videogame? That is the industry's real problem, as it applies to addressing the mature market. (For the immature market it doesn't really matter).


It used to be the case ten or fifteen years ago, before money became seriously involved, that some development teams were distinctive. As a music band can be identified as having an artistic voice (Pink Floyd, for example), so too you could really derive a sense of individuality about a developer's output. You knew a Sensible game or a Bullfrog game or an id game when you saw it. However, unlike a band, the actual members of the developer often went anonymous bar one or two figures. A band performs on stage. They can be seen. A game development team, on the other hand, is essentially an anonymous company.

This meant that development teams were vulnerable. They could be bought. They could be dismembered. Members of the teams could be fired without the public ever knowing, and figureheads could arise who may or may not have been worth such celebrity. As the game media found out, it was increasingly difficult to pinpoint what the celebrities did exactly, and so
you got a profusion of ludicrous claims, outright lies and increasingly non-specific 'rockstar designers'.

The teams also grew. The bands went from being four guys with guitars and a drum to ten guys with guitars and a drum, to twenty guys with guitars, drums, violins and sound board. Now it's a hundred guys with a variety of instruments, organised into departments with contract arrangements, and management committees. The scenario is well-understood, but the upshot of it is that greater numbers lead to a diffusion of distinctiveness, and everything becomes faceless. Modern developers are essentially mini-corporations. Rather than bands, they have become orchestras.

The real survivors in the indsutry are and continue to be personalities. In Britain alone you have Peter Molyneux, Archer Maclean, David Braben, Jeff Minter. In the US you have Will Wright, Warren Spector, John Carmack etc. In Japan you have Miyamoto, Kojima, Suzuki etc. What these people have managed to do is become individuals who are recognised. They are the ones who have been able, as a result, to pull teams together, to collect long-term fans, to give consistent interviews over a number of years and, essentially, to build public trust around them as, for the want of a better word, authors. Whether they count as conductors in the modern world is another issue, but the key point here is that they have a durable presence and that is worth far more to their respective companies than just an IP.

It's very easy to think that a game designer is the natural person to turn to as the 'artist' of the game, but I think that this is misleading unless that person is also the one that drives the project to completion. Often, game designers do no such thing. They do a lot of document writing, they do a lot of preparation and figuring-out, but often it stops at the documents. They are often involved also in the testing and implementation supervision, but at an equal level with folks from other departments. Game designers, like scriptwriters, are often imagining and designing based on the briefs of others, and they usually do not have overall control. Many of them lack the personal skills necessary to lead a team anyway.

This is where the notion of a game director comes in. This is seen more in Japan than in the West, at the moment, as western studios are often as not wary of putting someone creative in charge of everything. I think this has much to do with a fear of egotism, a lack of respect for ideas, and an assumption that a director is essentially just going to be some bossy fellow who teaches everyone how to suck eggs. Not so.

A game director, like a film director or a stage director or a chief archictect, directs people. It's cheap and easy to say "they look after the vision" like some monk in a cell, but in reality what this means is mastering an understanding of all the disciplines involved in a modern game, understanding how the game is going to be put together, and then figuring out what to get people to do and how to do it. It's an incredibly responsible and time-consuming position, and an absolutely vital one.

Someone who sits in their office all day long and holds the odd meeting with team leads to see how things are going is not a game director. Someone who is up and about with the team all the time, always watching what is being done, always keeping people focussed, directing teams as to what he wants to see in detail and providing feedback and real decisions is a game director. It's a very demanding job, but an absolutely vital one.

In film, direction is everything. You need a great script, but a script is just words on a page without someone to bring it to life. In games, you need a great design, but you need someone to steward it into a brilliant prototype, to bring that through pre-production and production, and to be involved every step of the way. Not a producer, a director.

The director is the artist of the videogame. We should have no shame in pushing this, as by doing so, we push our creativity out there. The old argument goes that the game development process is reliant on so many people that it is unfair to single out one person as the creator, but this is both unrealistic and a straw man. You never hear who the editor of the Harry Potter books is, you never find out who the studio producers of Sting's latest album are. You never really pay attention to million-and-one people that go into making a Spielberg film happen. You don't know how many people make John Rocca's outfits.

Yet in all these media we have no problem identifying the creative force. In games, we do, but purely because of old habits which died hard. This used to be a medium for bands. It isn't any more. It's time to recognise that.


There is no issue with the continuation of the immature franchises. They are what keep the industry going. But if the medium is to broaden both commercially and creatively, it's going to take some vision on the part of a publisher or a developer to realise that the mature market is different. If you want find a new business angle, then you have to innovate in business.

The comics industry moguls did not realise this and as a result its franchises were the very thing that marginalised them. Games Workshop nows exists largely as a marginalised hobby and company, where they turn a profit but they have run out of avenues for true growth.

The same could very easily happen to video games unless a second front is opened. Keep the franchises coming boys, but we need to be looking outward as well. Artists, unlike franchises, have the capacity for change. They have the capacity for real reinvention. Artists have the capacity to generate real penetration in a way that no franchise can. You could never see the Master Chief on Letterman, but you could see a game director there. A game director has the possibility of turning a customer for life. No franchise can ever hope to do that.


A Post By Tadhg Kelly