The Ant Nest

As a level designer with a strong interest in single player experiences with strong narrative threads, I’ve recently been giving some thought to characters in the context of games.

Valve’s PR for the Source engine frequently refers to its character animation capabilities as “the ability to create expressive digital actors” [1] [2], but to what extent is it true to call a digital character an ‘actor’?

This is an area of special relevance to my present, amateur, work: creating a whole new cast of characters when it might be possible to reuse existing ones is a waste of resources that I can’t afford, in projects of the scale that I can undertake by myself. So I need to know, if I drop the Alyx model, for example, into my story but make her a different person, how will players respond to that? Will they accept the character, or reject her? Will it break their immersion in the world I’m creating, and will that rupture be temporary or permanent? If I make the character similar to the Alyx of Half-Life 2, will that help smooth over any of those problems? I doubt these are just my problems, too - episodic content is this month’s future of gaming, but what happens when someone wants to make the gaming equivalent of, say, The Outer Limits? Is it really efficient to create a whole new cast of characters (models, animations and all) for each of those hypothetical episodes?

Valve’s stance on this balance of actor versus character seems to me pretty clear cut. Their PR strategy paid relatively little attention to the voice actors in the game (compared to the fanfare often heard for other games) and, despite basing the physical model of Alyx on a particular person, her credit was “thanks for the use of your face”, not anything involving the term “actress”. Admittedly, this is at least in part because a different person provided Alyx’s voice, but the fact remains that ‘actor’ seems missing from Valve’s vocabulary in the context of their games rather than their engines. By contrast, Electronic Arts, true to their “our competition is film and television” mantra, has experimented directly with the Hollywood model of actors. As well as following the pattern established by Enter The Matrix of licensing the likenesses of the actors of their movie adaptations, they have gone as far as “casting” actors in their games.

Obviously the thing to note here is that there’s really nothing digital about these actors. They’re still human beings, and that makes a lot of sense: we’re still some way from having people put up posters of their favourite digital characters in their bedrooms and all that, despite the occasional piece of evidence to the contrary. By using human actors, you can tap into all the benefits that they give movies (even if surveys suggest that doesn’t have anything like the effect on player buying decisions as it does on movie attendance) for really minimal effort - they’re already doing voice acting for you and you’ve got reference material for your character within relatively close reach.

Some brief thought about how actors vs characters is traditionally handled suggests to me that there are roughly three categories that these things fall into. Some actors can happily take on any role thrown at them: they maintain a good separation of character and actor. With some actors, their role as actor and their role(s) as character(s) seem to bleed together. I’ve heard plenty of people argue, for instance, that Keanu Reeves never acts, he merely plays himself/the same character in all his movies. When Tom Cruise recently branched out from his normal roles as the lovable hero into a character really quite hard to like, was it entirely a coincidence that his public persona also suffered? The third grouping of actors are those who are known almost entirely by their character - a facet of television series’ actors, especially. They have very little public persona as actors and their characters’ names are likely to be more widely known than their own names - something that can prove problematic, even obstructive to their careers, when they come to move on to a different role.

The surveys I mentioned above (I wish I could find a decent link, my memory tells me I read it in MCV; one such survey is referred to here) lead me to feel that the attitudes of games players, right now at least, fall towards this latter end of the spectrum. While they may be interested in characters, the concept of a ‘digital actor’ doesn’t have much meaning when you discuss it in the context of what an actor means to a typical film/TV audience. (Of course, in their defence, the manner in which Valve use it in their PR material calls upon its meaning to a creator - the ability of an actor to bring a performance alive, etc.) If it does have a meaning, it’s pretty close to that third category of actors above.

For my purposes, I think this means that if I reuse a particular character model, I need to be careful to keep that character’s role fairly close to its original use. Not least, there are mise-en-scene issues to consider: the physical appearance of the characters will have been designed hand-in-hand with their role in the story. How close remains to be seen: I can’t fly too close to the sun or I’ll burn my wings. As Robin Walker points out, Alyx is “enough of a person that people have developed in their head her personality, and now they’re trying to evaluate what we build against their opinion of who Alyx is.” More flexibility should be afforded to me in lesser used characters. As Alyx becomes more and more defined in Valve’s future visits to the Half-Life 2 world, she will move further and further into that third category of actors, and my chances of defining an alternative character that players will accept, will become slimmer and slimmer.

Well, we’ll see what happens (assuming I end up going down this route at all). For now, I can only recommend to myself some further research on the matter.