Idea Lawyer Blog

Video game as, ahem, "art?" Read New York Time writer Seth Schiesel's review of Mass Effect a new game for X Box released by Bioware. http://nytimes.com/2007/11/22/arts/television/22mass.html?ref=television

"What does your face look like when you're telling a lie? Or what are the visual cues when you are speaking in a beguiling, slightly flirtatious way?"
Mr. Hudson. the game creator, continues:
“We wanted to create a video game that had the potential to rival live-action movies in terms of cinematic, dramatic power. We wanted our characters to be able to just raise an eyebrow and have it convey a thought or emotion just as it could in a film.”

“If the action in our game is exciting, it’s because you care about the story situation,” he added. “And what makes the story exciting is emotion. And what makes emotion is wrinkles. When you take the wrinkles away, you just have parts of the face moving around like a cartoon, and it really takes away a lot of the subtlety we intuit in human emotion.”

I'll try the game soon. I confess this entry is a response/reaction to a review of a game I have not played. However, I expect that the voice quality (the game has 22,000 lines of spoke dialogue) will have a bigger effect on whether the story is compelling. Dolby revolutionized cinema when he insisted sound mattered in cinema. And in terms of "connecting" viscerally with "characters," sound - including that of speech or vocalizations (going out on a limb here...sure could use a research assistant) probably processed more directly/quickly/deeper in the limbic apparatus/ than visual.
Come on: am I the only one who has to turn the sound off to get through De Niro's fight scenes in "Raging Bull?" Or the only one to insist on listening to the original soundtrack in the output of Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki? The original sound palette tends to match the director's vision....the dubbed in voices often are just not evocative, or at least leave one as removed from the director's intended experience as peeling hard boiled eggs wearing mittens.

The point about anthropomophizing aliens and establishing "connections" - gee whiz, the Velveteen Rabbit and The Little Prince anthropompophized up a storm with still pictures and text. Half or more the films I see these days I cannot remember a month later, yet the classic stories are easily recalled..and why is that?
So a bigger question I will have in mind when I go to play the game: is there a story that resonates with some fundamental, primary chord of human experience?