Uncanny Valley of the Rag Dolls

Valley of the Rag Dolls by Geek Woman This year I have spent a great deal of time talking to women about gaming. I have gone out there with an open mind. I made discoveries that busted some myths, and I found that there were new ones. I uncovered some controversies. I read some psychologically written articles with elaborate hunter- gather theories in relation to gaming that sounded plausible, but they had no more relevance than a Rorsach blot interpretation. What I found out is that : gaming is about people. If you try to make a sweeping generalization about women, then you would be wrong. There are women that enjoy every aspect and style of gaming.There are two universal truths about girl gamers. The first is: girls just want to have fun. “Is it fun?” Is the most important question. Everyone has overdone and explored the anatomical arguments about why women weren’t so attracted to video games at first. I found that there were just as many women that liked the sexy looking characters. Truth did turn out to be stranger than fiction.There may be another factor at work. It’s a universal turn off. It is called “The Uncanny Valley” theory of robotics. In the beginning, hardware limited representations of people to simplistic abstractions. Those pixelated sprites of early game design are the equivalent of cave paintings. For the most part, until Lara Croft, women gamers were a territory unheard from.

In previous articles here at Twitch I have talked about how there is a disparity in what depiction’s of the female body that women find acceptable. Advertising for women’s products have an abundance of images of females in revealing clothing. Yet many women have complained loudly that they find images of women in video games wearing similar outfits unacceptable. What is it that makes this distinction?

Maybe they aren’t just too jiggly. It could be another factor. Maybe those images are creepy too. Back in the 1970’s a Japanese roboticist named Masahiro Mori postulated that there were several factors that go into the perception of an image as acceptably realistic, or as he put it “repulsive”. His criterion were that

if an entity is sufficiently non-human-like, then the human-like characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is “almost human”, then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of “strangeness”.

This clever “viral” marketing campaign is for the new game Infected It is a new run-and-gun shooter that allows players’ avatars to invade opponents’ PSP systems and literally spread their virus. This picture however triggers that reaction on purpose, the same way that George Romero flicks make people hurl in the aisles. A person’s attitude changes depending on when avatars become human - looking. We enjoy those characters to a degree and up until we come to Masahiro Mori’s valley. When there is no longer a sense of being able to relate to a character it becomes uncanny.

Even laughing can look unnatural. Slight variations in movement can cause a robot, puppet, or prosthetic hand can appear in the uncanny valley. The eye apparently considers motion more important than just the appearance alone. Chatty Cathy dolls unintentionally evoke chilling feelings, while Chucky, and the undead, all create calculated uneasy feelings with characters that are “too human”.

Rag Doll physics may make the death of non player (NPC) characters more fun to watch as they bouncy- bounce to their death. However Rag Doll physics in lead characters makes them ungainly and marionette like. Games designers have to avoid making playable characters dance along like puppets the way that they did with The Major in Ghost in the Shell and Blood Rayne.

Last year when many movie critics talked about The Incredibles and The Polar Express CGI movies, they contended that Polar Express entered that “uncanny valley” where the realism went too far and became creepy. Although film makers may deliberately go there for gory thrills the game developers have a harder time skirting the divide. The CG animation in “Final Flight of the Osiris” in the Animatrix has also been mentioned widely as having erotic scenes that seem so alien because they confuse human responses to what is attracting while being repulsive at the same time.

The final of the two universal truths about girl gamers? Another simple sentiment that you may remember from the school yard. “Eewww!”. The “Eeww” factor has to be conquored. Even though the magazine ad with the photo of the broken robot girl in the bra did get me to go to the web page, I don’t know if that would convince me to look futhur at the game. It just came out so we will have to see if it is a big hit or not.

In designing beyond the Uncanny Valley it still remains to be discovered what exactly triggers that response. Realistic imagery and animation can be created with motion capture like in Indigo Prophecy or the X-Files. Or ful motion video (FMV) such as in the Myst<,/i> series. Using live actors does put constraints on how far violence and super human powers can go. Every aspect going forward presents a challenge. It is going to be exciting to see where the next generation of game hardware takes us. The potential is there to create player characters and artificial intellegence AI that can look almost human and have reactions that are independently directed. Playing “against the computer” is going to take on new meaning in the future of gaming.

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Uncanny Valley of the Rag Dolls

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