Jimquisition: Emotions, Polygons, and Ellen Page

[Lunar Templar]

fun fact, never played this guys 'games', why? well *points to video* that's why, any dev that starts banging on about how graphics at the most important part of the game i start ignoring out right on the grounds they are clearly incompetent.

 

[Jimothy Sterling]

The fake accent made me laugh really hard...

But I felt this video lacked emotions...

 

[Brainwreck]

Funny, but I feel it is somewhat unfair to make fun of those suffering from mental illness.
Even if they deserve it.

 

[MrBaskerville]

That's actually why anime characters have the faces they do. So emotion can be shown a lot more clearly. They don't look realistic, but to me this:

Spoiler

expresses a hell of a lot more emotion than this:

Spoiler

This is a great point, it's why I sort of wish games would go back to a more cartoony/animated feel, rather than trying to just cram more polygons into everything to try and make it look more true to life, because it never really works. Personally I loved the Wind Waker because of the way it was able to convey emotion. OoT and the other games were decent at that as well, but WW really nailed it. One of the reasons I fell in love with Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is because of the quality of the art and facial expressions.

Instead we get uncanny valley crap like this and Bioware-face which is just amusing at times, but it still breaks immersion. I mean, it's not all that bad but 'realistic' graphics almost never seems true to life or truly emotional.

And it doesn´t even have to look cartoonish, you can do it in a somewhat realistic style and still characterize it a bit. Just look at a game like Final Fantasy XIII or Yakuza 3-4, heck even Metal Gear Solid 3.

 

[Manji187]

"Just look at the startling range of emotion in his face. We have?general apathy, not being bothered by anything, and slight confusion tempered with a general lack of motivation to do much about it."

Priceless.

 

[cynicalsaint1]

Oh there are few things better than watching someone take the piss out of David Cage.
The man is a hack who thinks he's a genius.

Really he should worry about figuring out how to write a cohesive narrative more than how many polygons he has.

 

[Brainplant]

So according to David Cage, the cars from Need For Speed have more emotions than the entire main cast of heavy rain? Disney, Pixar, put on your coat and GTFO, these cars deserve to be on the silver screen. That's over 270,000 emotions per car.

I'm pretty sure Pixar are making a Cars 3

Emotion

 

[HeavenSmile]

I rather enjoy David Cage's game. I remember being 15 when Indigo Prophecy came out and I loved every moment of it. I felt like I was playing something new, and it was new for me. Then he releases Heavy Rain, all gamer's opinions aside, which I also really enjoyed. It was an engaging experience I had while playing and I actually had many friends and family, for once, sit next to me and watch this game unfold.

Now all that aside, Jim, I do thank god, jesus, Mary, and even the stepfather Joseph for you! I think you are a wonderful man with the right voice for this game industry. And I will agree, no one enjoys the snobbery of a developer, creator, director, etc... Especially when they believe that them and only themselves can present and cover such realistic and, yes, emotional ground. David Cage's idea of artistic emotion is completely different than others. Not saying he is right or wrong; rather he feels everyone should be on his mental level. I won't knock the guy because at least his company's list of games isn't full of cookie cutters every year. However, for him to say there's not a diversity in the game industry is incorrect. Just because majority of the media air wave is full of triple A listers and marketing towards the cash crops of games, does not mean everything else in between does not get made.

Case and Point:

The games that I felt emotions from:

ICO
The Walking Dead
Lost Odyssey
Heavy Rain (not because of the writing, facial expression but rather my first ending had Madison dead, Hayden OD, Ethan got shot to death after finding his son, and the killer got away. I was pissed because there went X amount of hours thrown right into my face)

 

[Mike the Bard]

ahh, some good old fashion reductio ad absurdum.

 

[Pat Hulse]

Ugh.

You know, there's an actual argument to be had here. You know, an argument that we might be having if this video wasn't a complete waste of time.

This video seems to imply that David Cage's argument is that the only way we can convey real emotions in video games is with moar polygons.

David Cage's REAL argument (at least the argument that I got out of his little presentation) was that the ability to render an enormous level of detail will allow for a real-life actor's performance to be rendered in a high enough definition to break through the uncanny valley and bring that advantageous aspect of visual storytelling that film has monopolized to video games.

No, we don't NEED real actors and high polygon counts in order to have believable characters with emotions that feel genuine -- animation has been doing it for generations -- but the ability to do that is not something that should just be dismissed as gimmicky and pointless.

A game that strives for realism can't really take advantage of the tricks that animation uses to convey emotion, and the biggest problem motion-capture has run into when it comes to video games is the uncanny valley, where the characters appear wooden and lifeless and emotion can only be conveyed through exceptional writing, atmosphere, and voice acting, all of which need to compensate for the often jarring animation. But the ability to have a rendered CG character mirror a real life actor with the kind of precision he's talking about could not only break through the uncanny valley, but it could also start attracting more real life actors (yes, like Ellen Page) into the realm of video games.

Is David Cage pretentious and single-minded? Definitely. But that doesn't mean we can just completely dismiss and mischaracterize everything he says in order to feel clever.

I would have liked a video where Jim talked about why he thinks that putting stock into this kind of technology is a wasted effort rather than just taking it for granted and wasting 7 minutes making the same joke one thousand times.

 

[SimGrave]

While being technically impressive, the more graphics allow close to real-life facial animations, the more I wonder if it wouldn't be less expensive to return the to the FMV era with real actors. Night Trap, Sewer Shark... anyone?

 

[Tanakh]

Very polished episode, hilarious and formative. Great work Jim.

 

[gamefreakbsp]

Good attempt at something new. Didn't quite work for me. It might be that I am just too big a fan of the normal style Jimquisition videos, but you got your point accross, so I guess it wasn't all that bad. Just got stale after a few minutes. I found myself hoping the next thing Jim said after that point, whenever he paused, would be in his normal voice.

 

[wolfyrik]

Hmm, I liked the subject matter, and it was a good parody, but I think it'd have worked better if perhaps the David Cage mockery was done for maybe the first minute or so, then the rest as normal.

It was good, I just felt the joke was wearing a little thin by the end.

It´s always been fun how you could play a game like Yakuza or Catherine, where the characters looks like humans and actually expresses emotions, but when you play one of Cages brilliant games, it´s nothing but a freak show where you are starring into the uncanny valley. He uses so much money to try and recreate reality, though it might be quite impossible, while smarter companies characterises the faces slightly and achieves a lot better results using less effort.

That's actually why anime characters have the faces they do. So emotion can be shown a lot more clearly. They don't look realistic, but to me this:

Spoiler

expresses a hell of a lot more emotion than this:

Spoiler

This ^^
I've never been more moved by a film than Perfect Blue by Satoshi Kon and Sadayuki murai. An anime. This film achieves incredibled swings of emotion, from tension, to fear to pain and confusion. It's not just in the animation, which isn't even on a great budget, but the story and direction.
No other film has held me in awe through it's entirity.

To claim that increasing sophisticaton of hardware is required is bogus in the extreme.

 

[DigitalAtlas]

Ugh.

You know, there's an actual argument to be had here. You know, an argument that we might be having if this video wasn't a complete waste of time.

This video seems to imply that David Cage's argument is that the only way we can convey real emotions in video games is with moar polygons.

David Cage's REAL argument (at least the argument that I got out of his little presentation) was that the ability to render an enormous level of detail will allow for a real-life actor's performance to be rendered in a high enough definition to break through the uncanny valley and bring that advantageous aspect of visual storytelling that film has monopolized to video games.

No, we don't NEED real actors and high polygon counts in order to have believable characters with emotions that feel genuine -- animation has been doing it for generations -- but the ability to do that is not something that should just be dismissed as gimmicky and pointless.

A game that strives for realism can't really take advantage of the tricks that animation uses to convey emotion, and the biggest problem motion-capture has run into when it comes to video games is the uncanny valley, where the characters appear wooden and lifeless and emotion can only be conveyed through exceptional writing, atmosphere, and voice acting, all of which need to compensate for the often jarring animation. But the ability to have a rendered CG character mirror a real life actor with the kind of precision he's talking about could not only break through the uncanny valley, but it could also start attracting more real life actors (yes, like Ellen Page) into the realm of video games.

Is David Cage pretentious and single-minded? Definitely. But that doesn't mean we can just completely dismiss and mischaracterize everything he says in order to feel clever.

I would have liked a video where Jim talked about why he thinks that putting stock into this kind of technology is a wasted effort rather than just taking it for granted and wasting 7 minutes making the same joke one thousand times.

I can't believe it took four pages for this post to appear.

 

[felixader]

As someone who's never played any of David Cage's work, is his writing really that bad, or does he just get an exceptionally bad rep because he thinks he's some sort of transcendent genius but in reality isn't?

It is even worse. His games begin interesting and then suddenly at some point any sense gets out of the window and everything goes so batshit insane and so senseless and stupid that its comical. X-P

It doesn't help that he isn't aware of and thinks himself a master.

It doesn't help that The Walking Dead appeared last year and kicked everything into dust that he had ever made achieving the very goal that he had aimed for constantly overshooting his target.

 

[carnex]

Was this suposed to be funny?
With every episode you sink lower and lower in pondering to certain fans of yours. Or I hope that you are doing exactly taht, because you looked like quite a inteligent person for a while.

 

[hickwarrior]

Ugh.

You know, there's an actual argument to be had here. You know, an argument that we might be having if this video wasn't a complete waste of time.

This video seems to imply that David Cage's argument is that the only way we can convey real emotions in video games is with moar polygons.

David Cage's REAL argument (at least the argument that I got out of his little presentation) was that the ability to render an enormous level of detail will allow for a real-life actor's performance to be rendered in a high enough definition to break through the uncanny valley and bring that advantageous aspect of visual storytelling that film has monopolized to video games.

No, we don't NEED real actors and high polygon counts in order to have believable characters with emotions that feel genuine -- animation has been doing it for generations -- but the ability to do that is not something that should just be dismissed as gimmicky and pointless.

A game that strives for realism can't really take advantage of the tricks that animation uses to convey emotion, and the biggest problem motion-capture has run into when it comes to video games is the uncanny valley, where the characters appear wooden and lifeless and emotion can only be conveyed through exceptional writing, atmosphere, and voice acting, all of which need to compensate for the often jarring animation. But the ability to have a rendered CG character mirror a real life actor with the kind of precision he's talking about could not only break through the uncanny valley, but it could also start attracting more real life actors (yes, like Ellen Page) into the realm of video games.

Is David Cage pretentious and single-minded? Definitely. But that doesn't mean we can just completely dismiss and mischaracterize everything he says in order to feel clever.

I would have liked a video where Jim talked about why he thinks that putting stock into this kind of technology is a wasted effort rather than just taking it for granted and wasting 7 minutes making the same joke one thousand times.

I can't believe it took four pages for this post to appear.

Agreed with this. There wasn't much substance ot this video other than 'I hated the PS4 David Cage speech'. And skimmed at that. I would love to hear what he actually thinks about this.

 

[zacharyk88]

well that could have been said in quick bumper at the start, and we could have had something interesting to watch. I agree with Jim, I didn't need 7 minuets to get his point.

yeah I agree. This was kind of annoying. I'd rather he make a note of it and then move on and rant about that, but with a less annoying voice and in his actual opinion instead of being really sarcastic for 7 minutes.

 

[wakeup]

people cant deny that the walking dead would of been better and more emotional if it had more than 10 facial expressions. that's david cage's point. He's saying emotional games can be even better if the characters look and act like real people would and not robots. for the record i loved heavy rain and believe its a truly great game and anyone who says its shit i will debate otherwise.