Appealing To The Wrong People

On my final day in Winnipeg last month, a friend and I were having a conversation with my Mother, inquiring about why they're not into Animation, like Cowboy Bebop, Arcane, or Spirited Away. We asked if it had to do with growing up with things like The Jetsons, Flintstones, and Looney Tunes, my Mother denied this… while then constantly talking about how she already grew up with Cartoons like The Jetsons, Flintstones, and Looney Tunes.

Now, that's not the topic relevant to this article.

Instead, it's what came later in this discussion. After my Mother cited things like lack of mouth expressions, overdramatic angsty drama, and bad voice acting as for her reasons of not being into Animation, we then asked about Video Games, what are things that prevent her getting into them, beyond just the obvious barrier of requiring inputs.

She then mentioned they suffer even more from the things that prevent her from getting into animation, particularly when they aim for realism. The friend brought up Tomb Raider, how she read about the technical difficulty Crystal Dynamics had devoted purely to Lara's hair physics…

And it hit me.

The whole point of this effort we put in towards realistic character models, accurate facial expressions, believable voice acting, and capturing real movement, despite their expense, time, and commitment, is to appeal to people who aren't initially sold on gameplay.

In short, we're doing all of this to appeal to people like my Mother, who, after all this incredible talent, resources, and time… doesn't go for it.

Seriously.

What the hell are we doing?

You know why movies have immense action spectacles despite their difficulty in all areas? Despite being the opposite of what's the easiest project to film?

It makes a shitload of money.

Meanwhile, those immense action spectacles come to video-games far more naturally. We've got tools advanced enough where even indie developers can make online multiplayer warzones with enough chaos to make Saving Private Ryan look like a tourist guide. We can make players recreate film's most intense action scenes themselves, on the fly, for hours rather than minutes, dynamically, and…

It makes a shitload of money.

Yet we pour so many of those resources back into the most expensive, time consuming, and unnatural thing a game can do; show two realistic character models talking.

That cheap indie film doing this becomes a massively expensive endeavor in a Triple A game, sometimes sacrificing the risk of experimental gameplay to cover up the cost of these sequences.

Now, I am not my Mother.

One of my favorite things about Cyberpunk 2077 were the animations and expressive characters. It seemed to me a like a massive step up for a genre of games where we typically expect stiff animations and awkward lip syncing due to the amount and variety of content the player can partake in.

The AI tech (JALI) that CDProjektred used as a baseline worked superbly and it's a piece of technology I hope gets utilized in more video-games rather than auctioned off or bought as an exclusive by one party, but that's the thing…

This investment CD made has the potential to do more than just make a character model for an audience that still doesn't believe it to be believable. It has the potential to cut down costs, add more content, make characters more unique and memorable, advance a line of research, etc.

It's not making hair physics for a Lara Croft I don't care about to begin with.

It's not David Cage pushing for more polygons of characters so he can map their nipples while ranting about emotions and artistic merit.

It's not Anthem focusing on not making itself a meme and completely failing in the process.

It's not replicating Giancarlo Esposito as the thing he's already known for.

I really appreciate and respect the technical advancements and details we have in modern games, I just don't want them to be the end all be all, not because they don't work for me, but because I don't believe they work for the people they're meant most of all to appeal to.