Very interesting article. Yes those games with the humanoid faces that are so wooden are very creepy to me. Now I know why.

However multiplayer online games, which also have "people" in them, like yes, World of Warcraft, do not bother me nearly so much. As another writer already pointed out, most of the time you are seeing the back of the toon's head.

But the emotions in game are just like real life. And for whoever already wrote that games can't frustrate you, players annoy you or help you, and game "guilds" have power struggles and fall apart, and people 'falling in love' with other players online and stuff happens that the player has no control over, gee just like real life. You are not a multi-player online gamer.

The problem is worse than the article describes: we not only learn to recognize faces and emotions, we're literally built to recognize faces and emotions. Coming up with a character who can satisfy the requirements of all the pieces of our brains that are looking for details in human forms will require such a level of depth that it will be probably at least a couple generations of hardware before we can even get somewhat close.

"The Casting" was pretty good, but it's easy to find the things that were wrong, and a lot of people have mentioned them already. One that jumped out at me, was the area under Mary Smith's browline. Mary's eyelids operate, and her brow moves, but the flesh in between is completely immobile. The orbits were completely static and rigid, like they were made of wax or plastic.

When humans change their facial expressions, the skin on the face pulls on itself. So a furrowing of the brow pushes on the orbits, making them fuller, and conversely, raising your brow in surprise pulls on them, making them more hollow. That's the level of detail that will have to be replicated.

"The Casting" shows the most realistic CG face I've seen yet... and it's still nowhere close to convincing. The eyes work well, but the lower part of the face is oddly stiff and the movements are jerky. The overall effect is that the character appears to have a touch of the ol' trisomy-21. Keep trying, guys.

I'm sick of this. I don't more "realism." I want less. I want to see and otherwise experience things I cannot see and would never have dreamt of or seen in that way. There's less imagination in all this crap than in one panel of Crumb or Bode or even Bisley. Only real artists could make these games interesting again.

This is all great tech wise, but one of the things a lot of companies forget about is the voice acting. A bad voice actor can ruin the experience no matter how realistic his character looks. Bioware gets my vote for hiring the best voice actors for their characters. Good acting (and writing!) helps the game immersion process considerably.

The realism of a character is not the main barrier to emotional engagement with a game; it's the other mechanics, most particularly the story and writing (in the case where such is the supposed main focus of a game), all too often bolt-ons to gameplay.

And yes, "The Casting" is an incremental step and not much of one. If you've been playing any recent releases in the last 6 months, this technology in real time is not new.

I'm surprised there was no mention of a recent release for the 360, Mass Effect, that was released about four months ago. I don't see much in "The Casting" that's done as well if not better by Mass Effect. Although it suffers from many of the same not-quite-there-yet minor problems, there's no denying that the designers did an insane job of character animation.

Particularly amazing is that the character you play, which can be male or female, can have an entirely custom face, beyond just simple variants or a list of preset choices. And no matter what face you created, it still expresses the same range of facial motions and lip-synchs to the dialogue as well as the default face did, thanks to whatever real-time facial animation system they came up with there.

And yet, of course, none of that is what makes it a good game. Had the characters been half as realistic looking, it'd still stand for the story and writing, and the voice-acted delivery.

Consider how difficult it is for an actual human being -- say, a bad actor -- to simulate an emotion, and then you realize what a hurdle these creators are facing. It's the on-demand expressiveness of good actors that makes them so rare and treasured.

But I do wonder if the limited emotional range of the characters in games isn't part of their appeal. After all, to someone like me, who's tried and failed several times to get caught up in various games, their drawback is their monotony. In most cases, there's little else to do but fight, and that doesn't interest me for long. However, I'm also bored by sports for the same reason: the limited options. And many people like sports for the about the same reason that I dislike them: the intense focus created by a highly limited range of behavioral options and goals.

Video games offer something similar, and perhaps what many gamers like is the fact that they aren't complicated by the full spectrum of emotion that so often baffles us in everyday life. What you need to do in any game (shoot zombies, collect treasure) is usually pretty clear, or even if it's not immediately so, will ultimately boil down to a limited set of alternatives. Games offer a possibility of mastery you're rarely going to get in romantic relationships and office politics. One reason for the difference is human emotion, so unpredictable, unmanageable and nuanced. Maybe what gamers want is an escape from all that.

Interesting article. I don't game so I am no expert. I thought "The Casting" was kind of stupid. I guess its nice CGI but the character is not particularly human. Strange that is considered a big advancement. The body still moves in that stilted robot way and the mouth doesn't look realistic, at all.