David Cage: Spanning The Emotional Range

Cage centered his own talk on emotion in games. He opened his address by screening Quantic Dream' s tech demo The Casting, first shown during E3 2006 to tease the company' s upcoming PS3 game Heavy Rain.

The motion-captured actress' performance shown on the big screen was still impressive, though starting to show its age - Cage was quick to assure the crowd that the real-time 3D animation had been updated since the demo' s creation.

Cage argued that motion capture with substantial animator input, closer to the art of puppeteering, remains much more convincing in envoking emotion and empathy than the more clinical, procedural technology increasingly used in motion capture.

The designer described the range of emotions, beginning with the base, primitive human feelings of fear, excitement, frustration, and aggressiveness - these, he claims, and not the more " sophisticated" emotions, all too frequently serve as the emotional backbone for video games.

The more subtle, social emotions such as love, empathy, joy, sadness, jealousy, anger, and shame are frequently addressed in literature and cinema, Cage pointed out, but are rarely successfully tackled by games. He pointed to Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Rez, Katamari Damacy, and The Legend of Zelda as a few titles that draw from both ends of the emotional spectrum.

Of course, the gamers and video games journalists attending the event expected to get some exclusive info on the so-far mysterious Heavy Rain, and entreated Cage to offer new details. The designer noted he couldn' t speak in detail on the game, but he did indicate that the game follows in the footsteps of Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy.

Though Cage is intrigued by the possibility of real-time player-to-NPC conversation, the current impracticality of such technology means the game will, like its predecessor, use traditional dialogue trees.

It will be a heavily author-controlled story, eschewing the open world trend in favor of delivering a fuller, more directed, emotional experience.

Gamasutra


Any info on Heavy Rain is enough for me! Its good to hear the ambitions of a developer before a game. I reckon more complex emotions are what story based games are missing these days, and what sets them behind films. We' ll have to see if the final game matches the ambition however, something makes me think it' ll be harder than it seems.

Would have been cool to have the real-time AI controlled dialog, which unfortunately doesn' t sound like it' ll make it in.

Anyone play a game called Facade? It was a gaming experiment which let you type what you wanted to say, and allowed AI controlled responses from two other characters which would feel natural and make sense (mostly). It made for a much broader stage to play on than the more traditional dialog trees. Although the overall story arc would end in a few set ways, you never knew what responses you would get along the way.

Check out a couple of videos of how and how not to do it!

How

How not

You can download it free here.