Uncanny

I am certain that in this day and age everyone, that is those of us who have access to 21st century technology, has experienced the "uncanny valley". With the proliferation of cgi (computer generated imagery) in Hollywood, the ever advancing gaming industry, and the development of digital art in general, there are so many opportunities to be totally freaked out by how human and lifelike these digital images seem while knowing full well that they are not human at all. But for all their efforts, the animators of these digital likenesses can't seem to master natural movement or the windows to the soul, our eyes. As graphics technologies are more and more common, these digital representations become more familiar and thus less creepy, but the valley still exists. It is not getting any shallower, only narrower, so one miss step and down you go, avatar and all.

How then can we ever hope to achieve absolute realism in our video gaming experiences short of tuning them into live action games? I think that the Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor have the answer in their 2009 could-have-been-good-if-they-didn't-waste-such-good-ideas-on-mass-produced-garbage movie Gamer. Why bother advancing digital representations when real life stand-ins are available? “Society,” one of the two majorly popular games in the Gamer world, is a clear tribute to the Sims or Second Life type games that are so popular in real life. This new take, however, makes the game infinitely more real without hazarding a leap over the uncanny valley, it uses real people. “Slayer” the other epic game in Gamer does the same thing with the even more popular first/third person shooter games like Call of Duty and Halo. While there are obviously huge moral and ethical dilemmas with this type of development, I am interested by this approach to, and attempt at, overcoming the uncanny valley.

The approach, replacing avatars with real people, seems extreme. I know that the gaming industry is hugely lucrative, but people controlling other people purely for their own leisurely enjoyment is crazy. That there are people who are willing to be controlled in this context I am certain, and that there are people willing to pay a good price to play/control them I am also certain, but that this would be considered on a massive scale and become socially acceptable I highly doubt.

As for this attempt at crossing the uncanny valley in gaming, I am fully on board with and strongly encourage any venture that is going to enhance my gaming experience, within reason of course. Even though this approach is ridiculous at best, it shows some creative thinking when it comes to the problem of the uncanny valley. It is this type of unusual consideration that has lead, and will continue to lead, to viable solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems.

Just as an end note; I wonder what it would look like to see one of these real life game pieces lagged out, suffering a lag in its (his/her?) connection to the user. Would they be frozen on the spot twitching ceaselessly? Or would they mysteriously jumping from one spot to another as avatars often do when there is a connection problem?Would they just stop moving and pause with a distantly vacant look on their face, waiting for commands? Or, worst of all, would they be in some kind of schizophrenic state where control over the mind is jumping back and forth between the user and the person being used? This last possibility seems like it would have severe psychological repercussions on those unlucky ones who end up with a user that has a bad connection.