BA3a Research Report

For my reflective research report, my first chapter will be heavily theory based with information regarding realism, the uncanny valley and mimesis within video games. Because of this I have been looking into sources I can use as well as quotes to back up my findings and ideas.

Searching with Google Scholar

(http://www.therobotsvoice.com/2011/03/7_films_that_got_stuck_in_the_uncanny_valley.php)

Androids as an Experimental Apparatus: Why Is There an Uncanny Valley and Can We Exploit It? (Karl F. MacDorman)

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Karl_Macdorman/publication/245406914_Androids_as_an_Experimental_Apparatus_Why_Is_There_an_Uncanny_Valley_and_Can_We_Exploit_It/links/543bcc2b0cf24a6ddb97a803.pdf

- "In pursuing this line of inquiry, it is essential to identify the mechanisms involved in evaluations of human likeness."

- "One apparent symptom of their potential for eliciting human-directed responses is a phenomenon Masahiro Mori identified as the uncanny valley [Mori, 1970]. Mori predicted that, as robots appear more human, they seem more familiar until a point is reached at which subtle imperfections create a sensation of strangeness."

- "Machines that appeared too lifelike would be unsettling or even frightening inasmuch as they resemble figures from nightmares or films about the living dead."

- "The uncanny valley can, however, be seen in a positive light. While many nonbiological phenomena can violate our expectations, the eerie sensation associated with the uncanny valley may be particular to the violation of (largely nonconscious) human-directed expectations. If very humanlike robots are capable of eliciting human-directed expectations, then subjects can be used to evaluate the human likeness of their behaviour to an extent that would be impossible if mechanical-looking robots were used instead."

Overcoming the Uncanny Valley (Tom Geller)

http://people.cs.luc.edu/whonig/comp-388-488-robotics/course-materials/course-reading-materials/UncannyValleyGrapicsmcg2008040011.pdf

- "Many who criticised The Polar Express pointed to a short 1970 essay by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori. The essay’s title, “Bukimi no tani,” is widely translated as “The Uncanny Valley.” In it, Mori gave examples of several types of moving and still human-like images. He posited that, when such characters approach realistic similarity to humans, they stop being likeable and instead become eerie, frightening, repulsive—“uncanny.”

- "The uncanny-valley conjecture has roots in a 1906 paper by German doctor Ernst Anton Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny” (“Über die Psychologie des Unheimlichen”). Jentsch discussed the fear engendered by “automata” (which act as though alive) and wax figures (which appear as though alive). He asserted that the essence of this unease comes from uncertainty: is the object alive or not?" - "Freud later focused on the aesthetic implications of this unease in his 1919 paper, “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimlichen”), further suggesting that the fear of death was involved, referring to the uncanny effect “in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts.” (Mori made this connection clear in his paper, saying, “When we die, we fall into the trough of the uncanny valley.” He also notably placed dead people—corpses and zombies—at its deepest point.)"

- "Artist and author Scott McCloud gives one possible reason for human identity with the nonhuman in his groundbreaking book, Understanding Comics. He says that realism shows the outside world as our eyes see it, while the vague outlines of “cartoony” characters are how we see ourselves with our inner eyes. "

-- "Take psychological research, for example: If these androids can pass a Turing test, they could be used to test subjects’ reactions to various human conditions. Yet unlike real people, their features and behaviours could be controlled for iterative experiments, and reactions to them could be tested in a consistent way."

- "Ron Fedkiw is one such naysayer. An associate professor of computer science at Stanford University and a frequent consultant to the movie industry for his work on fluid dynamics and biomechanics, he said, “The uncanny valley is usually described as [a situation where] the animations are getting better, but we have fallen into a valley where they are worse. I instead feel that we are in a multidimensional space, and that we are zigzagging all over the place.”"

- "Both Fedkiw and roboticist David Hanson (www. hansonrobotics.com) agree that part of the problem lies in how the uncanny valley is perceived. Hanson, whose filmmaking and sculpting background informs his work creating realistic human robots, said, “Mori put forth the uncanny valley as speculation, not as a true scientific theory. But he drew it as a graph, and that made it seem more scientific. It’s not a scientific hypothesis that was tested with data, though.”"

- "Sony Pictures Imageworks’ Kenn McDonald, a lead character animator on The Polar Express, pointed to the need for moviemakers to stylize their characters away from realism to make them effective, “much like putting makeup on a flesh-and-blood actor.”"

Trigger Happy - Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution (Steven Poole)

http://www.org.id.tue.nl/IFIP-TC14/documents/poole-2004.pdf

- "A casual observer would certainly note the vast improvements in graphic style and detail every year and conclude that videogames are increasingly realistic. Those cars look pretty real; those trees at the side of the racetrack, waving gently in the wind, look satisfyingly (arbo)real."

- "This turns out to be the subject of a fundamental tension in videogames, which will appear in many guises throughout this book. It’s a version of a very old question about art, concerning what Plato called mimesis (“representation”). Is it real or not? How can videogames claim to be “realistic” at all?"

- "The problem of mimesis in this context—the virtual representation of “realities”—informs the inner life of nearly every videogame. Plato allows something to be a game as long as it is not “harmful” and has no “utility.” There is an increasingly vocal charge from some sections of society that videogames are in fact morally harmful."

- "After all, God games and real-time strategy games seem to present recognisable, real-life phenomena like cities and armies, while exploration games model seemingly realistic human beings Trigger Happy 84 wandering through recognisable environments built of stone or wood." - "But how closely can certain videogames ever hope to recreate something from the real world; and how does another sort of videogame, one that is built around a purely fantastic world, persuade us that it is in some sense real? How can you simulate what doesn’t exist?" - "Generally, the world-building philosophy of videogames is one in which certain aspects of reality can be modeled in a realistic fashion, while others are deliberately skewed, their effects caricatured or dampened according to the game’s requirements."

- "The most intriguing way in which videogames are apparently becoming more “realistic” is in the arcane world of physical modeling. Laser behavior may be a fantastical paradigm, but such games nevertheless enforce very strict systems of gravity and motion."

- "..to give the player a sense of interacting with objects that behave just as they would in the real world."

- "Motioncapture techniques, based on filming human actors and digitizing the results, synthesize “realistic” movement from the outside, and so in-game possibilities are strictly limited to those that have been filmed in the development studio."

- "We are used to handling objects with mass, bounce and velocity in the real world, and we can predict their everyday interactions pretty well. You don’t have to be Paul Newman to know roughly how a pool ball is going to bounce off a cushion; you don’t have to be Glenn Gould to know that striking a piano key with force is going to produce a louder sound than if you’d caressed it."

- "Appreciation of dynamic properties is hard-wired into the species—it’s essential for survival. This, then, is one of the most basic ways in which videogames speak to us as the real world does, directly to the visceral, animal brain— even as they tease the higher imagination by building a universe that could never exist."

- "...there is a direct link between convincing videogame dynamics and gameplay pleasure. A game that is more physically realistic is thereby, Topping says, “more aesthetically pleasing,” because the properly modeled game enables us pleasurably to exercise our physical intuition. “"

- "...a videogame in important ways remains defiantly unreal. Videogames’ somewhat paradoxical fate is the ever more accurate modeling of things that don’t, and couldn’t, exist: a car that grips the road like Superglue, which bounces uncrumpled off roadside barriers; a massive spacecraft with the maneuverability of a bumblebee; a human being who can survive, bones intact, a three-hundred-foot fall into water."

- "...a critical requirement is that the game’s system remains consistent, that it is internally coherent. Crucially, it is lack of coherence rather than unrealism that ruins a gameplaying experience."

Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Kendall L. Walton)

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=fGdbxnxomNMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=mimesis&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwitrfHAzozQAhXjAsAKHR_-CGMQ6AEINzAE#v=onepage&q=mimesis&f=false

- "Much needs to be learned about the benefits of make-believe, about just what needs it serves and how it serves them. But suggestions come easily to mind: that engaging in make-believe provides practice in roles one might someday assume in real life, that it helps one to understand and sympathise with others, that it enables one to come to grips with one's own feelings, that it broadens one's perspectives."

- "Games of make-believe are one species of imaginative activity"

- "Spontaneously created imaginary worlds are like the real world in their capacity to surprise us. Imagining spontaneously can be more fun, more exciting than doing so deliberately. It is likely to be a more 'vivid' or 'realistic' experience, one which, in its independence of the will, is more like actually perceiving or otherwise interacting with the real world."

- "Prompters contribute to our imaginative lives in several ways. Most obviously, they broaden our imaginative horizons. They induce us to imagine what otherwise we might not be imaginative enough to think of."

- "One might carve a stump into an unmistakable bear "likeness" in order to make sure that it will prompt people to imagine a bear. By constructing artificial prompters, we share our imaginative thoughts with others.."

- "It may be easier to communicate precisely what one wants others to imagine by constructing a "likeness" of some sort than by issuing explicit verbal instructions/"

- "gives substance"