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Treading The Boards: Game Characters Vs. Movie Actors
Prince Of Persia Filming In Morocco
Denver, 10:17 AM
Tue Dec 22
65 posts in the last 24 hours
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Treading The Boards: Game Characters Vs. Movie Actors |
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12/13/09
I believe you meant the dawn of theater in ancient Greece, or is it a joke? Actors and audiences have been around a long time ...
But, I do like the point about how a gamer identifies with a character differently than an audience. Playing someone/thing versus seeing them are definitely very different experiences. Yet both can be memorable - most recall the Solid Snake of cut scenes, while many mostly remember the Mario we play.
12/10/09
It's been argued that symbolic representations of human beings can create a stronger bond with their audience than actual human beings (or realistic representations of them).
This is because we spend most of our lives looking at other people, but, except for when we look in the mirror, we only know our own appearance as a set of abstract characteristics and features. That means we have an easier time connecting and putting ourselves in the shoes of Batman in a comic book than we do connecting with the George Clooney film Batman (not that we'd want to do that anyway). The simplified features that symbolically represent a human face in a comic book (or videogame) are something we can place ourselves into.
12/10/09
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12/09/09
This article isn't simply a stab at video game story telling and connection, but animation or any other art form that tries to tell a character-driven story without real-life actors.
The worst part is the comparison she does with Casablanca. There are an infinite number of ways to tell a story through a video game, yet she uses the generic shooting-sequence then cutscene routine to say how the game would play out. She recreates the scene where Humphrey is grabbing Ingrid, telling her to get on the plane, but describing it as a cinematic! Games can convey messages, stories or (even) love scenes through action; that is the foundation of the medium.
"Obviously, in the end, video games are supposed to be a form of entertainment! I mean, who really cares about emotion when we can have infinite rocket launchers? Anyone?"
After reading these final lines I want to believe that this whole article is a joke. But her reflections on acting near the beginning of the article added this level of seriousness that I can't quite shake off. Maybe there's a reason why she's a Nickelodeon "Golden Girl" and not a Broadway theater or Hollywood movie actor.
12/11/09
Casablanca: the Game:
Talk Sam "Play it again, Sam"
"Pirates stole my sheet music!"
Talk Pirates
"Arr, we took his sheet music, but only because we thought it would get our parrot down from the ceiling. If you can get our parrot, you can have the music"
look parrot
A colorful parrot is sitting in the rafters. If only you had some sort of Peter Lorre to help you get it down.
12/09/09
On one side, I think Lisa is simplifying the case a bit to say that animated characters can cannot connect as well with the audience as real actors can. Certainly we can all think of cases where animated characters have evoked more of an emotional response from us than real ones.
BUT there are several things to consider about the difficulties there:
*A voice actor is not in control of an animated character's appearance in the same way that a real actor is in control of their own appearance. That's the animator's job, and no matter how good the animator, there's going to be some disconnect.
An animated character (speaking of 3D CGI, now) really cannot do some of the things that real actors can do - conveying emotion with the eyes, with tiny shifts of expression and weight and body movement and the way those things work together. The tech simply isn't there yet.
*I think a lot of people are not understanding what she means when she speaks of actors being real characters with real pasts -- she's not talking about your KNOWLEDGE that they're real. She's saying that their years of experience in acting, in living life, in just HAVING life experiences and experiencing emotion and practicing the art of performing those emotions give them an ability to convey those emotions in a way that you can recognize as real, and you simply cannot get that out of a 3D model right now.
*For many games, the comparison simply doesn't apply - there's no story in Burnout Revenge (except the one in my head about how it's a city full of robot-controlled cars all guided by a cyborg Top 50 DJ who is the last remaining human survivor, but that's another story...) and it doesn't matter, because story is not what makes that game fun. You interact with games in all kinds of different ways, so it can be hard to talk about the good and bad parts of storytelling in "games" as a whole, when what works for one game wouldn't work for another.
Uh-oh ... wall of text alert. tldr version; Kotaku features are cool, storytelling is hard, and cheers to all actresses who played all the way through Odin Sphere.
12/09/09
12/09/09
I completely disagree with this. Even before voice acting took off in video games I found myself more emotionally attached to digital characters than any actor or actress in a film. I didn't cry when Aeris died for the hell of it and I didn't tear up in Metal Gear Solid for no reason. The reason I felt those emotions was because I had become emotionally invested in the characters I had been seeing throughout those games.
12/09/09
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12/09/09
For example:
spoiler
when I chose not to side with Bhelen, despite him marrying my sister and therefore making my family noble, I thought that she would see him for the monster he was, and come to my side. When she just uttered "I have no brother..." it really hit home. Granted, it could have been better- dialogue choices to try and convince her, or even a real dialogue window would have made this better- or at least give me "screw you" response when she suddenly loves me again at the end of the game.
12/09/09
Well, I dunno about animators expressing the emotion from scratch, but what gaming should do is animate and even model the way Disney movies did: have general ideas for the character design, but have the voice actor do the lines before rendering and animating and have them put their own emotion on the scene, then make the scene. While it may take longer to show progress, the emotion and character of any particular scene would be a million times better.
And maybe some games do it this way, I dunno. It would also help to have great voice actors.
12/09/09
So before we start comparing game characters to movie actors, I think we should start comparing the writing in games to the writing in other media.
Personally, games don't hit the same way as movies (with rare exception, and even then the best of gaming doesn't compare to the best of film). Ignoring things like quality of a character model, quality of animation, quality of lighting, etc, the biggest disconnect for me and games is that the actual stories are often contrived and poorly told. The dialogue (ignoring the delivery on the part of the voice actors) is often atrocious, and pacing is almost always an issue.
And if you compare your typical "emotional" game to a movie like Up or Wall-E, as others have mentioned, you can really see that the problem isn't the fact that games are a digital representation of human beings. Both of those films are far more moving than the vast majority of games, and they both last at most 1/4th as long as your average game. And compared to RPG's (a genre that focuses on characters and story far more than others), it's like what, 1/10th the length?
12/09/09
12/09/09
The cutscenes looked amazing and the voice actors sounded okay at first, but the dialog they spoke was awful.
12/09/09
@octaslash: RE5 is a good example, although I do cut the Resident Evil series as I've always seen (or at least hoped) that the poor dialogue was intentionally campy and bad in the vein of classic zombie movies.
12/09/09
12/09/09
12/09/09
That was well written, and most of all very entertaining. Something that is painfully absent from most games "journalism".
I do believe you just made a new fan. I shall go read more.
12/09/09
But then again, a lot of times, text won't have the same effect as if someone actually says the words. Lots of games I've cried over were from a spoken line of text. But then again, Lost Odyssey has tons of text-only stories, and each one made me absolutely DIE with sobbing.
It's weird, I guess. I could go either way. But it is unfortunate when voice acting is poor- something that doesn't happen with text only. Or with an alternate language choice- if you don't know Japanese, any japanese VO is going to sound good to you. :p So if the english is bad just switch over to that! :D
And I know someone probably said it already, I'm not gonna look for it, But the damn laughing scene was crappy on purpose. It's two people devastated and in a terrible place in their lives and in the universe trying to force themselves to laugh through that. It is not bad acting. It is that way in every language. e_e
12/09/09
Kaim's daughter dies.
The most I have cried from a movie, I can't really remember to much, so off the top of my head I'll say the ending to Dragon Heart, and Harry Potter and the Half Blood prince.
I have also cried much more at animes, rather then movies. For very much the same reason, being with them longer.
The funeral scene in Naruto: Shippuden had me in tears, When my favorite character of Full Metal Alchemist died, not only I but also my friend grieved for him for days on end, the same goes for the Naruto character that died. And my god, Code Geass is a plain depression trip.
12/09/09
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12/09/09
I've cried at SO MANY games that I can't even begin to count. However one game that really got me was Klonoa on the PS1. My god, that ending...
Hell, I think I cried at more games then any movie.
But it's a testament to great writers and animators to capture the human element and bring the scene to life. Games like SotC with its limited voice work and lack of sparkly shiny CG. Still managed to pull at your soul...
I don't really see it as games evolving but rather, they're getting more attention.
12/09/09
I said earlier that FFX and at least 2 different parts of MGS4 got me going, I forgot to mention MGS3 in that too, and that one *I WON'T RUIN IT* in Uncharted 2 as well, those of you who've seen it know what I mean. I really don't think I'd have been set off there if they were movies instead of games.
12/09/09
really... care to explain how it got *there*?
12/09/09
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