Apologies for the long-winded title; it’s actually quite hard to find a subject that gets right to the point. This isn’t about triggering a particular emotion in gamers — not directly, at least. It’s also not about how ‘emotional’ gaming can be — we already know that playing games can be an intense experience that can warrant a massive gamut of emotions.

This entry’s about your avatar — your character, the model that represents you — and the emotions that it can, or as the case may be, cannot display.

Emotions have long played a vital role in communication and human interaction. We smile and raise our shoulders a little when we’re happy; we frown and slump when we’re sad — these emotional keys are a form of communication in their own right: body language!

Beyond subtle muscle shifts we also have emotive reactions that we’re less aware of: we blush when we’re embarrassed or caught lying; we raise our voice in anger or petulance. Most importantly though are the muscles groups on our face: the flaring or contraction of our lips and eyes, the furrowing or raising of the brow — each of these actions, or reactions, are ‘programmed in’ genetically and almost impossible to alter. It’s these same minute movements that we’re (often unconsciously) reading in the face of whoever we’re talking to. It’s these tiny twitches in someone else’s face or body language that can trigger our own involuntary responses: that momentary curl of the lip might be all the indication you need to run away quickly.

This ‘hunt for emotion’ as we communicate with other people is so ingrained that online communication has always felt a little… distant. Internet veterans are cautious, aware that without body language their words can easily be misconstrued. Newbies often blunder, forgetting that no one can see the ironic smile on their face. There’s a reason emoticons , *asterisks*, CAPSLOCK and _underscores_ exist: to convey emotion! It’s clunky and slow compared to body language or facial expressions but it’s the best that we have.

Why, twenty years after the first text-based world, are we still communicating with such basic tools? Some early games like LegendMUD had ways to inflect mood into your conversation through expansion of the verb sets (’say alts’) but since then… nothing. In graphical virtual worlds a couple of games have tried to incorporate moods (notably Star Wars: Galaxies and EverQuest2) but still they were still primarily low-tech text-only executions, toggles: /angry, /sad, /afraid, or parsing exclamations and queries.

Why are we still running around in virtual worlds with emotionless, gormless avatars? In single-player games it’s almost the state of the art, the bleeding edge! ‘More realistic than ever before!’ the developers cry. What makes the games more realistic? Interaction with the game world: physics and realistic NPCs, or in the case of virtual worlds, other player avatars. You only need to look at the success of LittleBigPlanet — a very simple platformer with oodles of delicious detail and bucket loads of charm and a very diverse emotion system.

For a market segment that generates almost all of its appeal (and revenue) from the immersive quality of virtual worlds it’s amazing that there isn’t yet a virtual world that has the power to model emotions through various facial expressions and body poses. You could even go one step further from the toggle system and parse complex emotions like sadness, apprehension and lust out of chat. Then there’s the character state itself: in battle your avatar would grimace upon being hit; a healer would smile upon saving a party member.

Are we simply being held back by World of Warcraft’s ancient graphics engine? Surely it’s time for realistic, immersive emotions in virtual worlds.

Further Reading

• Some work into avatar puppeteering in Second Life which, unlike WoW, actually has some built-in facial expressions
• Bob Moore’s presentation from the Austin GDC 2008 has a more-scientific, sociological look at it under the header ‘Challenges in Avatar-Mediated Interaction’

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Would you rather be an artist or engineer?

This is a question I often ask myself on trains and planes or as I lay in the still solitude of my bed. Do I want to create art so beautiful, so inspirational that people actually enjoy life a little bit more? Do I want to develop infrastructure and technology that provides clean drinking water for the billions without?

In this crafted and cultured world, this world without boundaries that we have persisted in creating and destroying over ten long, illustrious millennia, which is more important: art or engineering?

Which was more instrumental: myth and wisdom — or creating fire?

The Bible — or the Roman Empire?

Michaelangelo’s David – or Kodak’s film camera?

Band Aid’s Feed The World — or a network of satellites that enable global communication?

Lennon’s Imagine – or Apple’s iTunes?

Art or engineering?

Do I want to be the person that enables and improves the lives of millions through advancing technology? Should I be the one that converts magic, wished-for technologies into the accessibly mundane?

Or should I be the culmination, the end point, the person that uses contemporary technologies to create art? Art that resonates within and amplifies emotions; art that triggers further explosions of creativity until we have a more beautiful world.

I keep trying to be both an artist and an engineer but I fear that it’s time to choose just one.

Michelangelo or Edison.

Einstein or Plato.

Immersion is the act of being plunged, sometimes without us fully realising, into another place; another world. Be it via book, film, video game or any other form of media, our imagination lends itself readily, eagerly, to immersion in other worlds. It can be a very visceral experience, the new world plucking you from your present reality and sucking you through some kind of warping wormhole with a pop. Or it can be less obvious, the new world’s tendrils slowly creeping up and wrapping themselves around you until, before you know it, it feels like you’ve always been there — only you’re not quite sure how you got there.

And it’s healthy. Immersion is healthy. With immersion comes understanding and with that, eventually wisdom. When we’re immersed in a subject matter, be it vampires or the history of British monarchs (or the overlap of both!), we become dedicated to that cause. In reading a good book we often find ourselves identifying with a character and championing their thoughts and emotions. Hell, many people attribute entire shifts in viewpoint and way of life to books! The same can be said of films and video games too — if a book can be life-changing, so can a game!

‘Life-changing’ is the key phrase with immersion. When we enter into another person’s world — for that’s what we’re doing — we are assuming a new role, a new point of view; in essence, a new body. We glance around with the steady, fresh gaze of the newly birthed, curious and forever analysing. We’re actually granted a fresh set of senses which, depending on the story might vary in purpose or intensity — free, wild; sad, caged — but they are new! New, never-before-experienced senses! Just like that, the senses and experiences we carry with us in life can be dropped: prejudice, fear, pain, stress — gone. At least for a little while. Without leaving the library or even rolling out of bed we are able to live through a gamut of emotions and sensory experiences that might, were it not for immersion in a new world, go unused.

The problem, if there is one, is that that the virtual frontiers to which we are exposed are entirely governed by the author of the book, film or game. If the artist wants us to feel scared or fascinated or mystified, we will be. The author or director takes us on a journey, a tour of their imagination. We see and smell and hear their fears and torments, we feel their passions. We experience the joy, elation and pain of their first love, kiss and heart break.

It seems that, irrespective of how wild or terrifying or unreal a world is to us, we want to immerse ourselves. We want to be deeply involved. We want to be an important part of the world. We want, dare I say it, a world that can revolve around us — even if that world only exists in our own head, on loan from the creator and decorated by imagination for our own needs and wants.

You can be under your duvet with a good book and grinning like a fool or sweating and torturously scared — but entirely unable to put it down because that world — your world — would cease to exist, and you’re never quite ready for that to happen. And this is just single-player immersion! Some people aren’t content with being alone in these fleeting, imaginary worlds that disappear when we turn the last page or finish the film.  Just as sitting in your room reading a book or playing a game can get a little lonely: sometimes it’s better to stomp around a virtual, imaginary world with other immersed people in tow, with companions, with comrades… with friends!

And that is when you log into an Internet forum and find fellow Twilight fans. Or, if you have a penis, install World of Warcraft.

* * *

More tomorrow on immersion for Thoughtful Tuesday!

If you’re reading this after midday, UK time, go and check out week 4 of ‘52 Weeks’ — it’s a good one.

Many years ago, I used to rant. Before this blog, and a few years before my stint on LiveJournal, I used to write rants. In fact, that was all I would write, for some reason. I don’t remember being a particularly angst-ridden teenager; I think it was more about being smart. ‘Ooh, he has such passionate and informed opinions!’ — who cares if I swore a lot and used viscerally-tinged analogy like a foamingly rabid dog, eh?

Somewhere along the line, probably at university, I learnt how to vocalize my thoughts in a more intelligent fashion. I think it’s because I was suddenly surrounded by thousands of people that I’d never argued with. That’s not to say I was particularly challenged at university, but after 16 years of same-old-same-old it was refreshing. The main thing, for me, is differing view points and opinions. Part of me (the scientist) hopes that ‘absolute knowledge’ is attainable; but the realist knows that there is just the world – and myriad interpretations thereof. We all see the world differently, and machines and measuring devices see the world in yet other unfathomable ways.

It has become my job (or purpose) to gather up all of those views and opinions to create a valid representation or model of the world we live in. After all, what good is science if human nature doesn’t agree with it? There might be some joyous, divine apotheosis of science and the amalgamation of views in the future — but that’s the future. For now, I will try to understand humankind’s interpretation of the universe we occupy. It’ll take a while, and it’ll involve a lot of travel, but fortunately I’m a patient man that likes taking photos — that’s three birds with one stone!

But back to the topic at hand. Somehow, somewhere, somewhen, I lost my anger. I have buckets of aggression, but no anger. Unbridled passion, but no anger. I haven’t a clue where it’s gone. Most of you have never experienced me when I ‘get going’ in real life — it’s pretty odd, I get louder, I speak faster and with more intent… but I smile as I do it! Get this: I can’t grimace or frown. I’ve tried to frown many times, but it just doesn’t work. I don’t actually have the muscles for it.

I wonder if this is what the Buddhist idea of Nirvana feels like. (I’m not going to flesh that idea out any further… at least not today…)

I don’t know where this is going. It was meant to be something about why I’m so calm, and seemingly rather wise. I think this post stems from the fact that someone recently misconstrued my aggression for anger, which irked me because they’re very different emotions. I’ve never hit anyone, for example; nor have I ever been in a fight. You only need to look at the differing derivations: anger comes from Ancient Greek ‘to choke or squeeze’; aggression comes from Latin ‘to approach, address, attack’. Anger is all about sadness, sorrow and a rage that doesn’t abate. Aggression is about meeting the world head on, sometimes with a resounding clash.

Why strangle someone when you can just address the situation instead?

That makes me sound rather boring and sensible.