In a computer game or on-line virtual world, an “Avatar” is a representation of you. For example, Mario and Lara Croft are avatars, because they are supposed to be you in the game world – on a psychological level the idea is that they are doing what you would do if you were a mustachioed plumber or a superhero chick in each game’s respective fantasy world.
This is in contrast to a “Non-player character”, which simulates other people in the fantasy world. Like all those nice people you run over with your car (or who get out of the way just in time) in Grand Theft Auto. Or the undead fiends who run at you and try to eat you before you blow them away in Doom and its many progeny. Those are all NPC’s. You don’t control them because they are not representations of you.
Avatars – representions in a game of oneself – are powerful, but I’ve always found them to be a bit problematic. There is something uncanny about them. Yes, I understand that is supposed to be “me” in the computer, but it’s also a thing that’s clearly not alive – in some ways it’s more like the little car or thimble that you march around a Monopoly board than like a representation of self.
I got into a conversation today about what would be the perfect avatar. I mean in an ideal virtual world in which there were no technology limitations. Let’s say it’s fifty years in the future – the year 2058 – and you are playing a computer game. By then games will have moved way beyond the technical hurdles of today, such as realistic simulation of human movement, or accurate speech recognition. In this future game world, what should your game avatar be like?
I would argue that the ideal is what you’d get if you had an actual trained actor – a real human being – there in your computer. The actor could have super powers, if that’s what the game called for, but the important thing is that he/she would be able take stage directions flawlessly.
For example, if I’m racing through the city of Metropolis, in the middle of chasing after Bizarro Superman, and then I realize that it’s getting late, and that I have to get to the bank vault before it closes to retrieve my stash of purple Kryptonite, I would probably want my avatar to look at his watch with concern, and convincingly portray somebody who is genuinely worried that he might not make it to the bank on time.
Today’s avatars do nothing like this. They will do what you tell them to, but they never convincingly express an impression of humanity, a sense that “this is me in this game world, feeling all of the feelings I would feel at this point”.
I’m not suggesting that we will get to the point where avatars will become indistinguishable from real people. What I’m saying is that as a design target, as something to shoot for while we continue to develop these curious virtual creatures, the figure we should keep in mind to guide us is a real person – a trained actor – trying their best to follow our narrative direction while expressing the appropriate emotions.
When I am able to buy into my avatar’s performance – his performance as me – the way I now suspend my disbelief while watching a great actor in a movie, then I think games will start to engage us and to move us in new and far more powerful ways.
Once wetwiring becomes a reality (or some other form of direct mind control) then I think that this would be possible as you would then have the inputs to give the character the emotional bent needed to portray concern, anger, etc.
Of interest to me though is that I have never really concerned myself with how I would look (or fail to look) in Virtual Reality, but how realistic other people’s avatars are. For me only seeing what I would expect to see out of my own eyes in that situation (1st person perspective) is the most natural and remote avatar control would be an oddity.
Interesting point. I always go back to the literary analogy, where I am telling a story, and I want to see that story acted out – as though I am a screenwriter improvising a screenplay, and that person I see is the star of the movie, my surrogate in the story I’m telling.
You are coming at it from a diffeent genre entirely, much more like the idea of the Star Trek Holodeck – a first-person construct – where you feel as though you are experiencing everything first-hand through all your senses.
It’s a really interesting question which of these two ways of experiencing virtual worlds will come to dominate as time passes, or whether it will all lead to some sort of graceful hybrid between first and second person.
We see the tension in these two modes in movies. In terms of storytelling perspective: Sometimes “I” am the main character on the screen (eg: Indiana Jones), and at other times “I” am the camera (eg: Steven Spielberg).
And a similar sort of blending occurs in novels. The author’s voice shifts between protagonist and narrator to serve the needs of story and character development. Sometimes “I” am Elizabeth Bennet or Huckleberry Finn, and at other times “I” am Jane Austen or Mark Twain.
A nerdy (purely technical) addition… in narrative movies/television there is a standard menu of shot variations eg. close up, cowboy, two shot, etc., often in a predictable order zeroing in from wider to closer as the audience’s attention is drawn towards some center. A common shot which mechanically shifts the story telling from the first person to second, when this is desired, is one that often opens a scene: The actor walks into his own POV; The camera begins pushing in on the wide scene, and then the protagonist, already in motion, steps into an “over”, in front of the already moving camera. It is naturally understood by the audience, but kind of a cheat. For example, the camera moves, crouching low and stealthily through a parking garage in the first person, searching defensively past a series or cars for the dangerous bad guy; then the actor who’s POV we assume this is steps in front of the camera, only to take fire from the shadows, and then the bad guy appears… sometimes, almost comically, only the arm with the gun of our first person POV appears in front of the lens, as in Bond opening credits… cartoony, but at least that way it’s not a cheat.
Ben
Thanks Ben, this is really great and useful knowledge – it’s good to get input from someone who really does this professionally! After reading your description of how you gracefully shift POV from “characters’s view” to “looking at character”, I found myself leafing through Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” to see if I could find a passage where she does the equivalent trick with words. I’ve found a few candidates so far, but I’m going to keep reading, to see if I can find the perfect example. If anyone else can thing of a great literary equivalent of the sort of visual camera transition that Ben is describing, please post it! -Ken