Navigating the Uncanny Valley

For so long the holy grail of game designers, truly realistic character designs may not be what Wii, PS3, and Xbox players want after all

by Douglas MacMillan

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For the Aug. 13 launch of Madden NFL 08—the latest update to the best-selling video game franchise—Electronic Arts (ERTS) put on quite a show. Soundtrack collaborator Ozzy Osbourne belted "Crazy Train" from atop the marquee of the Hard Rock Café in New York City's Times Square. Legendary NFL quarterback Warren Moon chatted up the media. But if reps from the Redwood City (Calif.) game publisher had reason to be nervous, it was because a select group of rabid Madden afficionados were getting their first glimpse of this year's version.

Billy "Da Secret" Wolf, a 20-year-old professional video gamer from Tampa, Fla., who won the recent Madden Nation competitive reality show on ESPN, noticed one big departure for the franchise, "They haven't really even made the graphics look better this year." Indeed, in the game's 18-year run, Madden's virtual footballers have evolved from three-color stick figures on a 2-D field to lifelike clusters made of thousands of 3-D polygons. But this year EA, like many game developers now getting a handle on the strengths of the next-gen consoles, turned its focus away from creating realistic graphics and toward more compelling game play.

Since the beginning of gaming, creating realistic graphics has been the overriding purpose. And as consoles and technology have become ever more sophisticated, the possibility of achieving that quest has become ever more attainable. The first slate of games for the Microsoft (MSFT) Xbox 360—such as EA's Tiger Woods PGA Tour in 2005 and Epic Games' Gears of War in 2006—featured some of the most lifelike computer-generated, or CG, characters and environments ever rendered, and topped the sales charts for months.

Game Realism Beyond Graphics

That's proof the demand for realism is high. But what next? "It's harder and harder as a platform and as a publisher to out-graphic the other guy to a point where it's meaningful," says John Rodman, spokesperson for Microsoft Xbox. The conclusion some designers are drawing: Leave graphics where they are, and find other channels for bringing realism into the game.

Customizing this year's Madden to each of 10 different platforms (Xbox 360, Xbox, PlayStation3, PlayStation2, PSP, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, GameCube, PC, and Mac), EA got creative with features and game modes. Xbox 360 players can go into "front-office mode," where they control all the business aspects of running an NFL franchise, such as drafting, building a stadium, and hiring a coaching staff. PlayStation3 players can identify their team's "weapons," the skill sets particular to each star, like speed or precision passing. On the Nintendo (NTDOY) Wii, gamers can use the "Telestrator" in between plays. That lets them use the Wii remote to draw chalk outlines of their gameplan.

Long-time fans such as Wolf say this strategy of innovating beyond graphics will pay off. "It's all about the gameplay for me," he says.

A Robot Too Real

That's good, because as it turns out, overly realistic graphics can be a bad thing: There's a danger that characters may end up looking ghostly or uncanny. This effect was first observed in 1978—six years after Atari (ATAR) released the first version of Pong. That year, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori hypothesized that robots provoke a feeling of repulsion in humans when they look and act too real. A crudely anthropomorphic robot, like R2D2 from the film Star Wars, is cute because we can distinguish it from a person instantly. But a smarter, more fleshed-out robot like the Terminator is creepy because it causes us to focus on the cold eyes and metallic teeth—the small differences that make it inhuman.