But I will say that when I’m having a ‘good chat’ with someone, in an RPG (like WoW, or even in a single-player game) I will often zoom in until I’m almost first-person, or at least so that I can see the other avatar clearly. I don’t know if I’m alone in that, though!

It’s definitely hard work having two places to look at: the chat and the game world. Text worlds were much better in that sense. Thing is, chat bubbles have been in for a while, but still emotes remain kind of… tacked on.

I don’t think it would be so hard to ‘figure out’ emotions accurately, given the huge body of data available for testing and parsing. Natural language processing is a very big field with a lot of research going into it.

But first, we have to get people zoomed in to see the facial expressions, that’s the important thing

Some games let you set your character’s mood, but that isn’t always accurate. If someone is having a good day and sets the character’s mood as happy, the first on their mind when someone calls their mother a whore isn’t necessarily to change their mood first, even thought their mood will probably have changed.

The alternative is to have the computer in charge of figuring out moods and emotions and handle them automatically. I don’t think that’s going to any more accurate, though, in most cases.

You also have the issue that subtle expressions do get lost in a game world. If I have my camera zoomed out to get a better tactical view of the battlefield, then I might not see facial expressions too well. Even if I have an amazingly detailed graphics engine, if a face is smaller than the size of a keyboard key on my screen, detail is going to be lost. This is definitely an area where the old text games did better than the new graphical games do.

I’m not sure what the solution is here, though.