Beyond the Photoreal: Motion Capture, Performance, and Identification in Video Games
Presentation for 2014 SCMS conference in Seattle, March 2014
The growing sophistication of photorealistic animation, along with advanced motion- and performance-capture technologies, has created a novel entertainment landscape in which prominent actors and celebrities appear in video games as playable characters. While this has long been true in sports or music games, in which you swing a club as Tiger Woods or play the guitar like Metallica, the population of photorealistic narrative games with known celebrities is something new. When many players turned on L.A. Noire (2011), they recognized the major playable character from his role on Mad Men and wondered, “What is Ken Cosgrove doing in my video game?” Other well-known actors now take starring roles in video games: Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe will star in the new game Beyond: Two Souls; Kiefer Sutherland will provide voice and motion capture data for protagonist Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid V.
This paper contends that the increased use of motion capture and photorealistic animation to create video game characters has implications for how we conceive of the relationship between the player and the game, particularly as it concerns notions of performance and identification. In a formative essay of video game theory, Eskelinen and Tronstad discuss the “configurative performance” of the video game player; now, the ascendance of motion capture returns the notion of performance to a past-tense portrayal, challenging the centrality of player agency in favor of the character’s expressivity. In another founding essay of the field, James Newman theorizes the relationship between players and characters as one of “vehicular embodiment” rather than psychoanalytic identification. However, characters performed by familiar actors may invite empathetic and personal identification in ways that previous games did not.
By analyzing the graphical style and strategies of address and immersion in games like Beyond: Two Souls, L.A. Noire, The Last of Us, and Heavy Rain, I aim to retrieve and reconsider the visual style that is deemed “photorealistic” animation, particularly as it is coupled with motion-capture technology, in order to fully describe and analyze its form and function, rather than treating it as a transparent medium that allows human performances to come through unaltered.
The growing sophistication of photorealistic animation, along with advanced motion- and performance-capture technologies, has created a novel entertainment landscape in which prominent actors and celebrities appear in video games as playable characters. While this has long been true in sports or music games, in which you swing a club as Tiger Woods or play the guitar like Metallica, the population of photorealistic narrative games with known celebrities is something new. When many players turned on L.A. Noire (2011), they recognized the major playable character from his role on Mad Men and wondered, “What is Ken Cosgrove doing in my video game?” Other well-known actors now take starring roles in video games: Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe will star in the new game Beyond: Two Souls; Kiefer Sutherland will provide voice and motion capture data for protagonist Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid V.
This paper contends that the increased use of motion capture and photorealistic animation to create video game characters has implications for how we conceive of the relationship between the player and the game, particularly as it concerns notions of performance and identification. In a formative essay of video game theory, Eskelinen and Tronstad discuss the “configurative performance” of the video game player; now, the ascendance of motion capture returns the notion of performance to a past-tense portrayal, challenging the centrality of player agency in favor of the character’s expressivity. In another founding essay of the field, James Newman theorizes the relationship between players and characters as one of “vehicular embodiment” rather than psychoanalytic identification. However, characters performed by familiar actors may invite empathetic and personal identification in ways that previous games did not.
By analyzing the graphical style and strategies of address and immersion in games like Beyond: Two Souls, L.A. Noire, The Last of Us, and Heavy Rain, I aim to retrieve and reconsider the visual style that is deemed “photorealistic” animation, particularly as it is coupled with motion-capture technology, in order to fully describe and analyze its form and function, rather than treating it as a transparent medium that allows human performances to come through unaltered.
