Video Games/Motion Capture = Animation? ft. Detroit: Become Human!
Okay, so some of you have probably heard of this game before, but I just finished playing Detroit: Become Human for the first time this weekend. Long story short, it's a very cinematic, motion capture performance, story-heavy, choice based game set in the year 2038 where the player gets to guide three androids on their paths to "becoming human." It's less what you might think of as a traditional video game and more of an interactive movie.
This might be a minor spoiler - it doesn't affect the story, it's more like a mechanic or an Easter egg in the game - but if you're playing it yourself and you're concerned about spoilers, just skip this paragraph. There's a recurring bit in the game where you can have the characters look at themselves in mirrors (it doesn't affect the story at all, it's just a little thing you can have them do for a while if you want), which I thought was a nice subtle detail in a game that was, admittedly, pretty heavy handed nearly all the time. But more to the point, when the idea of cinema as a mirror came up in class, I immediately thought about the mirrors in Detroit. I have been thinking about where motion-capture fits into animation (and film as a whole), and I feel like maybe this motion-capture thing that's happening recently in media might be an extension of that mirror idea, of wanting to see ourselves. This is definitely the least uncanny-valley photoreal game that I've ever played.
I wanted to ask whether or not we consider this kind of CGI to still be animation? And more broadly, do we consider video games to be a form of animation? Especially since the majority of AAA games in the last decade or so have been trying to achieve photorealism. I personally do, but I don't hear it talked about a lot, except in terms of people worrying that CGI actors will replace real ones. Which I think is ridiculous, but that's just me - the line between the actor's performance and the animator's/artist's decisions is blurred in these cases, but one can't work without the other. The mo-cap info from the actors provides the artists with an invaluable organic base to work with, but they still have to go in by hand and reference photos and videos of the actor's performance to get every detail just right, so that you end up with characters that actually look and feel alive. Not to mention the environments they design and create from scratch to put the characters in.
(the table in the bottom left hand corner of the screen cap above is the table pictured below)
That's a whole other question and this already got way longer than I thought it would, but I really enjoyed the game! I like the kind of grey area that mo-cap occupies in terms of animation and I'm excited about it as a tool for storytelling. 🙌
Detroit does have a really polished look, doesn't it?
ReplyDeleteThe way animation and the question of realism relates specifically to video games is really interesting. There does seem to be more of a trend of video games trying to be as close to reality as possible, even more so than most "realistic" animated movies I can think of. Not true of all games, obviously, but when they go for realism, they seem to go more all in on that concept.
Last night I was watching some footage of old arcade games. They actually had live action video of actors performing out the game, and your commands just picked which video clips were going to be shown. It looked really strange to my modern eye, but somehow it seems like we're getting closer and closer to that style nowadays with things like mocap.
Mocap certainly messes with the definition of animation as requiring individual frames. Fascinating stuff.
This is a really fascinating grey area in terms of what we've been discussing as the "technical" definition of animation specifically relating to drawing and frames, but especially when it comes to the broader more abstract definitions that we've also brushed on, I think this definitely counts.
ReplyDeleteDespite mocap using the actions of live actors, that motion is just a tool to give live to artificially created characters in artificially created worlds. In Detroit/Heavy Rain style games, it gets extra-interesting because of their interactive-movie style of gameplay. Also, in any game really, you can start then factoring in the player's agency over the character and how that contributes to the playing out of the story. The player is also helping to give the created character life. Since there are a finite number of ways that the story can play out and it's all created in advance for them, it's hard to consider the player a component of the actual animation. Although, its almost as if within their specific scope, they do contribute, specifically in that they shape the way they experience the story that has been set up for them. Now I'm sort of wandering off on a tangent, but cool stuff!