Extra Lives by Tom Bissell Page A

director of art for Electronic Arts; Michael Boon, the lead artist of Infinity Ward, creators of the
Call of Duty
games; Patrick Murphy, lead character artist for Sony Computer Entertainment, creators of the
God of War
series; and Steve Preeg, an artist at Digital Domain, a Hollywood computer animation studio. The game industry is still popularly imagined as a People’s Republic of Nerds, but these men were visual representations of its diversity. LaBounta could have been (and probably was) a suburban dad. The T-shirted Boon could have passed as the bassist for Fall Out Boy. Murphy had the horn-rimmed, ineradicably disgruntled presence of a graduate student in comparative literature. As for the interloping Preeg, he would look more incandescent four nights later while accepting an Academy Award for his work on the reverse-aging drama
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
.
    LaBounta immediately admitted that “realistic humans” are “one of the most difficult things” for game designers to create. “A real challenge,” he said, “is hair.” Aside from convincing coifs, two things video-game characters generally need are what he called “model fidelity” (do they resemble real people?) and “motionfidelity” (do they move like real people?). Neither, he said, necessarily corresponded to straight realism.
Sesame Street
’s Bert and Ernie, for example, had relatively poor model fidelity but highly convincing motion fidelity. As for the Uncanny Valley Problem, LaBounta said, “just adding polygons makes it worse….The Holy Grail in video games is having a character move like an actual actor would move. We’re not quite there yet.” Getting there would be a matter of “putting a brain in the character of some intelligence.” I was about to stand up and applaud—until he went on. One thing that routinely frustrated him, LaBounta said, was when a video-game character walks into a wall and persists, stupidly, in walking. Allowing the character to react to the wall would be the result of a “recognition mechanic,” whereby the character is able to sense his surroundings with no input from the player. Of course, this would not be intelligence but
awareness
. The overall lack of video-game character awareness does lead to some singularly odd moments, such as when your character stands unfazed before the flaming remains of the jeep into which he has just launched a grenade. What that has to do with character, I was not sure. If “personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures,” as Nick Carraway says in
The Great Gatsby
, the whole question of believable characters may be beyond the capacity of what most video games can or ever will be able to do—just as it was for James Gatz.
    In Boon’s view, when talking about believable characters, one had to specify the term. Were you talking about the character the gamer controls or other, nonplayable characters within the game? A great example of the former, Boon believed, was the bearded and bespectacled Gordon Freeman from Valve’s first-person shooter
Half-Life
. Part of the game’s genius, Boon said, is how Gordon is perceived. In the game’s opening chapters “everyonetreats you as unreliable, and you feel unreliable yourself. By the end, people treat you differently, and you feel different.” Gordon’s journey thus becomes your own. (Also, throughout the game, Gordon does not say a word.) As for believable nonplayable characters, Boon brought up two of the most memorable: Andrew Ryan from
BioShock
and GLaDOS from Valve’s
Portal
. Both games are shooters, or neoshooters, in that
BioShock
has certain RPG elements and the “gun” one fires in
Portal
is not actually a weapon; both characters are villains. While the villains in most shooters exist only to serve as bullet magnets, Ryan (a sinister utopian dreamer) and GLaDOS (an evil computer) are of a different magnitude of invention. The gamer is denied the catharsis of shooting either; both