Communcations 101 - (Un)Expressivness

When talking to another person, body language plays a key role. Even the slightest facial twitch can completely change the message your sending, whether you meant to or not. Over the phone this is lost. However, it can usually be made up enough by tone of voice. The way you say something can be as effective as a face twitch. But then we boil communication further down to just text. It can be surprisingly hard to pass on the way you're currently feeling through text alone. This is probably where emoticons came from to add mock facial expressions to text chat. In case you're unfamiliar with the term emoticon, that's adding things like :) to make a smiley face. You've probably seen those around. I use emoticons frequently in text only chat because it's very hard to convey my type of humor without them.

But what about the non-humans in games? Even in online games, there's still communication without a human on the other end. These are usually done through text only in the online sector. But, on the single player offline games, giving voices to most or all of the characters has been a standard for a long time now. How expressive these people are depends on a few things. First, the voice actor. I've gone into voice acting in great detail before, so I'll just reiterate that the person needs to be able to read expressively to give the character some depth. Second, the writing needs to be descent. If the lines are stupid, then they won't communicate well no matter how good the voice acting is. Third, and the one I'm going to go on about here, is facial expressions and body language. This is important for the same reasons it is important in real life.

My Dad recently got me thinking about Botox, and not because he got it. But it sometimes seems like many NPCs in games have gotten several Botox shots, their faces don't budge at all. One might argue that this is a minor point, and so the animators should spend their time on other areas. Fair enough, but it can sometimes really wreck the immersion in a game when you zoom way in on someones face and they stare at you all zombie like. They blink at regular intervals, their eyes move back and forth methodically, and they all have a scowl, happy, or neutral face. The only time their face changes is when it moves between these states. The rest of the time it is frozen in one of those positions. At least their mouth moves when they talk. But they're content to stare at you for hours like this until you select a response. Problem is, it's still really creepy.

I are robot BEEP BOOP. Fear my neutral expression.

Because this frozen face bit is unsettling, it breaks the player out of the game. This is something we want to never do. The player should feel like part of the game world, and throwing them out of it with zombie facial expressions (unless they are talking to a genuine zombie) is a problem. I do have to give Oblivion credit (Bethesda really) for taking the initiative to do such close facial conversations, and being the first I know of to do so with every NPC and with such detail. It had problems, but every game since has gotten better. This is a problem that will fade out as the technology improves for one, and as game developers get better at making conversation system that use this, but it is one that should not be forgotten. This is one of those simple things that can really jar a game.

Sometimes, a nice fist is what's required to stir conversation up a bit and bring out the angry face.