I love gaming stories where...

[Pococurante]

Her kneecaps look friggin' enormous, and her legs are far too long.  Her face looks like it was severely beaten by the ugly stick.

Tha's what immediately leaped out at me.  Exaggerating leg length is a tactic used by porn artists to make images of children press our "old enough" button.  Polar Express definitely was about the creepiest thing I'd ever seen and does a fantastic job recapitulating the Uncanny Valley threshold.  The concept was stripmined in A.I. as well.  I thought STNG's backstory on Data/Lor was an interesting take.

But that was the same series that gave us a holodeck and humanity went on to evolve past thinking it was nothing more than a cheap way to go to Disneyland.  I'm of the common opinion a holodeck of that sort of realism would be humanity's last invention...

[schild]

the Uncanny Valley threshold

There it is.

Uncanny Valley at Wikipedia - Mark my words, it will happen in video games.

Edit: I don't know how I missed Bunk's post earlier. Apologies. I'm a douchetard.

[Bunk]

Can I quote you on that in the future?  :P

[Kail]

Once they get too close to looking like humans themselves, it will break immersion.

I've heard that claim before and don't buy it.  On the one hand, 8-bit graphics are less immersive than what we have now.  On the other hand, perfect photorealism would be less immersive than what we have now, or so the argument goes.  Clearly, then, there is some sort of "immersion curve" relative to graphic realism, with its peak somewhere in between. 

I may be off on a tangent here, but this sounds like something I read by comic book guru Scott McCloud.

Basically, he was looking at the idea of icons, and why do iconic characters (like Mickey Mouse or Homer Simpson or Tintin or Monkey D. Luffy) carry as much or more emotional involvement than more realistically drawn characters (like Bruce Wayne or Peter Parker).  

The idea he puts forth is that when we're interacting with someone else, you see their face in (basically) perfect realism, but you see your own face only in vague, indistinct form.  You maintain a rough mental picture of your own face (am I smiling, am I frowning, do I look like I'm reacting inappropriately to what this person is saying) in order to plan your responses and gauge how effective they are, but you don't really keep the complete details of how you look in your mind.

The upshot of this is that when you look at a super-realistic drawing, you see it the way you see someone else, but when you look at a more vague, iconic drawing, you see it the way you see yourself.

Applying this to video games, most main characters are somewhat "generic," their features fairly nondescript, and average.  The NPCs, on the other hand, are often much more visually distinct (Jade Empire is a game that comes to mind repeatedly with this example).  Adding realism to a game would help with making visually distinct characters, but the more detail you add to something, the less "average" it becomes, so it becomes progressively more difficult to make an identifiable protagonist.  This would be an especially big deal in an MMORPG like EQ2, where almost every character (with the exception of the monsters) will be a protagonist.

Anyway, that's my take on it.

[Samwise]

Is Nvidia supposed to care, or have something to do with that?  They're just making tools.

Yes, they are. I suspect it's not getting any easier to push a card to any sort of limit. If it were, no programmers would bitch and moan about the proprietary shit on consoles.

Edit: And yes, I understand it has more to do with the environment than just the graphics card. But then, I wouldn't be surprised if they aren't going out of their way to make things easier.

Laying the blame for bad art direction at the feet of the hardware manufacturer seems like a bit of a stretch, unless you're positing some sort of shadowy conspiracy between ATI and nVidia to make games look ugly.  The better graphics the cards produce, the better their cards will sell, so it's in their best interests to do anything they can to make their cards easier to produce pretty graphics on than their competition's.

A large part of the problem is that game programmers don't want to write hardware-specific graphics code, because then they either have to replicate that work for other hardware, or limit their target audience to owners of that particular hardware.  I can only think of one game off the top of my head that's that hardware-dependent, Bridge IT.  Everything else uses "neutral" APIs like OpenGL or DirectX, and those APIs don't necessarily provide direct access to everything a card can do (though I think the reason DirectX has been revving so quickly is that it's trying to catch up in that regard where OpenGL is lagging).

The original theory behind Cg was to provide an API (actually a distinct language) that made it easier to directly access the hardware, and theoretically work with ATI cards as well as nVidia ones, but I don't know if ATI is actually getting on board that bandwagon, since it sort of gives nVidia a home court advantage.

[HaemishM]

I wasn't laying the blame for bad art direction at ATI or Nvidia's feet, I was just saying they need to make sure they don't make programming for the cards incredibly difficult.

[Ookii]

I think this is a problem dealing with our generation versus the generation of kids growing up nowadays.  I mean we grew up with 8 bit Nintendo games that looked like crap, but that didn't matter, for the games were extremely fun to play.  Where are the "A Boy and His Blob" or "Bionic Commando" games nowadays, it's all the same shit, and when everything is the same the only defining aspect would be to make the game more realistic than the others out there.

We complain about innovation in games while it seems others (not just the kiddies) have grown accustomed to the same gameplay over and over, and even more have no idea that such innovative gameplay could exist.  All they want is the coolest looking game out there, and if the majority wants that they shall receive it. 

There also is that pesky little human trait of wanting to create and understand the world around us, it also takes much less creativity to create what you see rather than what you imagine.

Sorry if this doesn't make sense, work is over and I have to book, hence no reread.

[Samwise]

I wasn't laying the blame for bad art direction at ATI or Nvidia's feet, I was just saying they need to make sure they don't make programming for the cards incredibly difficult.

That's pretty much the entire reason those companies have software divisions, so I think it's safe to say they're aware it's important.   

[Trippy]

I don't know if this is covered by the Uncanny Valley theory, not having read the original research, but one of the main problems I have with "realistic" character modeling and animation is that as the models look more and more human-like, deficencies in animation and character physics become more distracting to me. In other words with hand drawn stuff I'm unconsciously cutting the animators a lot of slack but when the characters look realistic I expect them to animate realistically and the physics to be accurate and when they aren't it's very jarring to me.

[Fabricated]

I don't know if this is covered by the Uncanny Valley theory, not having read the original research, but one of the main problems I have with "realistic" character modeling and animation is that as the models look more and more human-like, deficencies in animation and character physics become more distracting to me. In other words with hand drawn stuff I'm unconsciously cutting the animators a lot of slack but when the characters look realistic I expect them to animate realistically and the physics to be accurate and when they aren't it's very jarring to me.

I second that. The more perfect the graphics become the more nitpicky things I notice wrong. It seems to just be a part of human nature to only really be jarred by things that're "slightly off". Seeing something flat out unusual will draw raised eyebrows or stares, but when something nearly intangible is different enough to be noticed people seem to get MUCH more uncomfortable.

I don't think it's too good of an analogy, but imagine coming home and finding your place wrecked. You'd be upset right? Now imagine coming home and noticing that all your stuff has been moved very slightly. For some reason that would creep me out much more than finding my house ransacked.

[schild]

One time my mom lowered a painting and moved a flowerpot. I thought they changed the entire room.

They got a new TV once and switched a whole mess of picture frames. I didn't notice for 3 months.

[Roac]

I was just saying they need to make sure they don't make programming for the cards incredibly difficult.

You don't normally program for the cards anyway, so not sure what the complaint is.

[Murgos]

I was just saying they need to make sure they don't make programming for the cards incredibly difficult.

You don't normally program for the cards anyway, so not sure what the complaint is.

Theoretically you don't program for the cards, the reality tends to be different.

[Roac]

Theoretically you don't program for the cards, the reality tends to be different.

Not if you have any desire to use a card beyond just that one, it isn't.  Sometimes people try to bypass abstraction layers, but it often comes back to bite them.  Maybe you can get away with it if you're targeting a single console, and that one only, but beyond that you'd be asking for trouble.

[Murgos]

Things may not be written card specific but they are certainly written feature specific and often features are not available on cards of even the same family much less between competing products.  This is one of the reasons many games require a driver update to function properly.  Non-standard calls to resources are done for various reasons (mostly speed optimizations though) the cutting edge games rarely stay entirely within the DirectX or OpenGL libraries.