emotional realism!?

I haven't posted in a couple of days, Sunday I was busy writing our essay (What I posted on Sunday was all prepared the night before!) then yesterday we had our hand-ins, game FMV and essay. Then a group of us from the course plus a few others all went to the pub! being the weak person I am, I ended up pretty drunk, but had a great time!

So I haven't actually got any work to post up today! I think this is only the second post with no pictures of things I've been working on!

What I did want to talk about is the essay, as I've not mentioned that here at all. The question was:

“While photorealistic animation and gaming visuals offer a graphic realism, in what ways have contemporary titles such as Half Life 2 (Valve, 2004) succeeded or failed in expressing an emotional realism?”

So I chose to speak about how emotions are conveyed in game and how people identify with characters in narrative and empathise with them. Kathrine Isbister's, Better Game Characters by design, a physiological approach, that I got for Christmas really helped with this as it talks a lot about how characters give different messages in games.

One thing that I hadn't heard of before was the "uncanny-valley" theory which talks about how as graphics get more photorealistic people automatically expect true to life expressions and movements from the characters, and it becomes easier for the character to look unnatural to the viewer and once this happens people find it difficult to identify with the character. I thought this was really interesting and something that will potentially help me in my own work.

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