Talking Corpses – Uncharted 2′s Uncanny Valley

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves has been garnering a lot of praise lately for its production values. Purportedly developer Naughty Dog has pushed the Playstation 3 to its limits, offloading some rendering processes to the Cell SPUs offering more rendering bandwidth to the GPU. There’s no denying it’s a beautiful game, maybe one of the most vibrant, detailed games to come out this year. Additionally, the voice acting and motion capture work is top notch. The characters feature lip-synced, emotive animations both in-game and during cut scenes. With all of these points being more or less factual with little embellishment, why do I get the creeps when watching these “realistic” cut scenes?

The Uncanny Valley theory is a very well documented and discussed topic in gaming and digital media. As it relates to games, the theory goes that the closer we get to reproducing photo-realistic characters, the harder it is for us to believe or be comfortable with our digital creations as “real people”. The better these digital models look and sound, the more obvious and numerous their flaws become that interferes with our suspension of disbelief. We start to notice the lack of movement in the eyes or a rigid posture. Small details tend to jump out to the viewer which reminds us that we’re watching a digital creation and not a real person.

Enter Uncharted 2; more specifically, Uncharted 2‘s cut scenes.

From the first pair of cut scenes I wasn’t sure how to feel about this beautiful, lavish game. Review upon review has praised the graphics specifically, but all I could focus on for the first hour of the game were the horrid details like the character’s plastic hair or a solid brown beer bottle. Drake’s former love interest, Chloe, looks at him suggestively, humorously and threateningly, but none of these expressions feel right or emotionally honest while watching the scenes. I can’t help but feel we’re still watching high-poly ventriloquist’s dummies. There’s just something unsettling and disconnected to the game’s most cinematic dramatic scenes.

Chloe delivers some of the game’s most disturbing moments. Her eyes look like glass spheres that have been over-lit by some hidden light source. Their movements were somewhat realistic, but they looked so shiny and colorful it completely diverted my attention from the scene at hand. The character, Harry Flynn (spoiler: he’s a villain), looks like a full-size animatronic Surf’s-up Ken doll. When he grimaces or scowls I end up laughing with the absurdity of what’s coming across on-screen. When two characters start to get it on in one scene it was like watching  mannequins making out.

In contrast, here’s one point of high praise for the “digital performances”, when you’re playing the game and the characters are moving under your control, with the camera panned out the UV effect completely dissolves. I get pulled into the game’s story, character and reality every time I’m playing as Drake and hearing the characters’ banter back and forth, seemingly organically. They’ve created a masterpiece here. If only they could pull off the same feeling during the cut scenes I might get through the game sans nausea. We may get to a place in the next 10-15 years where digital actors will be able to fool our eyes and minds and it will be creative artists like the fine folks at Naughty Dog that get us there. My point is, we’re not there yet.