Why did you stop buying games?

[bbmike]

MengJiao, can you define those terms?  Your explanation seems... uncanny.

;)

  In 1970 a Japanese guy working on robots postulated that as robots became more humanoid there would be a stage where they were not-quite human and this would cause people to find them more disturbing than machine-like robots or perfectly human robots.  This notion has been codified as the "uncanny valley" and in neurobiology the theory is that the human brain automatically and subliminally models bodily motions (of its own body and others) and robots tend to violate the brain's predictive models of body motion. -- triggering the uncanny feeling of disgust or disturbance. 
  The assumption has been that as robots or game models of human forms improve, the uncanny valley response will go away, but recently academic researchers on games have proposed that there is an uncanny wall and as games get better at modeling people the subliminal feeling of disturbance just gets worse.  It seems like this would be especially true of all the human drama heavy stuff that AAA games work at so hard with the result that they burn out their players with subliminal disgust based on violations of the predictive models in player's brains.

Interesting, I kind of got that feeling when "Peter Cushing" was on screen during Star Wars Rouge One.

[Rayfer]

MengJiao, can you define those terms?  Your explanation seems... uncanny.

;)

  In 1970 a Japanese guy working on robots postulated that as robots became more humanoid there would be a stage where they were not-quite human and this would cause people to find them more disturbing than machine-like robots or perfectly human robots.  This notion has been codified as the "uncanny valley" and in neurobiology the theory is that the human brain automatically and subliminally models bodily motions (of its own body and others) and robots tend to violate the brain's predictive models of body motion. -- triggering the uncanny feeling of disgust or disturbance. 
  The assumption has been that as robots or game models of human forms improve, the uncanny valley response will go away, but recently academic researchers on games have proposed that there is an uncanny wall and as games get better at modeling people the subliminal feeling of disturbance just gets worse.  It seems like this would be especially true of all the human drama heavy stuff that AAA games work at so hard with the result that they burn out their players with subliminal disgust based on violations of the predictive models in player's brains.

Interesting, I kind of got that feeling when "Peter Cushing" was on screen during Star Wars Rouge One.

Well played bbmike....you nailed it!

[Gusington]

^Me too, but I think that's maybe because we knew what was going on. I did not get that feeling when Princess Leia appears at the end.

[mirth]

I thought CGI Leia was creepier than CGI Tarkin.

[Gusington]

I thought that Leia was spliced together from old actual footage, I did not know she was CGI until afterwards...so maybe some of the points above are valid [for me]. If we don't know about the CGI or whatever perhaps we are better off, in movies anyway.

I kept thinking of Sid Meier's Civilization leaders while watching Tarkin. Tarkin was a few steps up but truly not that much different.

[mirth]

They were in the Uncanny Valley with both characters. I wish they had just recast Tarkin. I thought Wayne Pygram was fine as Tarkin at the end of Revenge of the Sith.

[Gusington]

^I agree but I think we're both old-fashioned.

[FarAway Sooner]

I thought CGI Leia was creepier than CGI Tarkin.

Me too.  I hadn't heard anything about either of them before seeing the film for the first time.  I knew Cushing was no longer alive, but didn't know the replacement was CGI.  I knew Leia was CGI the moment I saw her, but it may have been heightened because Carrie Fisher had died just a few days before.

[Father Ted]

Well, I came in here to post about my game-buying habits, but  *tears up Rogue One cinema tickets* :'(

[undercovergeek]

Because this is the place for on topic discussion?

[mirth]

Because this is the place for on topic discussion?

On what now?

[MengJiao]

Because this is the place for on topic discussion?

On what now?

  How to use the theme of the wall on the other side of the now-no-longer-uncanny-enough valley to interpret games and other computer-generated imagery.  I realize now that I already used the uncanny valley thing to explain why people hated Rome II so much, but in that case it was the entire game world that I thought was giving people the subliminal creeps.  Anyway, theoretically there are ways around the little problem the brain has with such things.  For example, if you interpret the game objects as being manipulated by something else and not directly trying to enact its own actions.  So that would explain why multiplayer is favored more and more these days.