Guild Wars 2

Today I’ve been posting a lot and on a lot of different subjects. As I was doing this I started to feel very empathetic with the whole situation gaming companies seem to be in. Beyond the empires fighting empires in the corporate universe there is this issue of Aesthetics.

The term Uncanny Valley crops up a lot regarding Japanese robots. Japan has a huge elderly population and may address the caretaking of that population with robotic caretakers. While Americans have expressed hostility to the robot recently, Europe and Asia has been more ambivalent.

The Uncanny Valley is mostly discussed in this circumstance of AI. However, it really is situated around Aesthetics. That is, how comfortable and acceptable something appears to us. While much of that is subjective, some things remain constant. The first of these is appearance.

In robotic the more nearly something appears human the more likely people are uncomfortable with it. In art the more nearly something is real-to-like, like a Vermeer painting, the more people feel frustrated as to whether or not to regard it as art at all.

Vermeer paints are extremely life-like. However, as the pictures are so perfectly picturesque the question has been ask, “Is this art?” I seem something similar emerging in games.

When video games first began a ‘good game’ largely meant that there weren’t any bugs in it. Then a good game was the art, relative to all of the other art around it. ALL of the gaming art until recently has been pretty thoroughly stylized. That means in one form or another gaming art has remained either manga, anime, or comic book style art.

In the 90s this kind of gaming art became challenged. You would see attempts at ‘realistic’ portrayals of an environment, a person, etc. Today, games like Mass Effect, Second Life, Blue Mars, Titan Fall, Battlefield, Tomb Raider and practically the whole of the mainstream gaming genre has gone toward ‘realism’.

Guild Wars 2, World of Warcraft, and many other games which are attempting to supply us with a uniqueness amongst the products of the gaming industry seem to have slipped into an Uncanny Valley.

Characters in Guild Wars are wearing clothing which is from several very distinct styles. Largely these are: Classical European, Medieval European, Swashbuckler (1700s fantasy) European, Steampunk, and some curious form of Magi-tech/Cyberpunk. Mesmers get their own uniqueness of pop-queen and weirdo.

Further, the character models themselves are stylized. However, there is this left over sense from Guild Wars 1 that characters are supposed to feel ‘realistic’ or some how approaching ‘realism’.

I think what has happened is that players sense the potential to be personally self-expressive with all of the potential real life has to offer, here displayed in some game medium, but then are not allowed to do it for no discernible reason. Asura absolutely get the most adorable hair. Why can’t my sylvari have cute asian bangs? Why? Why do human’s all seem to be racially white and only one specific body build of white? I don’t weight 116 pounds (52 kg) plus in real life? This big breasted monstrosity I am given to chose barely different features from does not represent me? So I go sylvari… It’s physically more like myself.

This is just one of many examples where game chosen aesthetic direction classes with the industrial normative and sensed actualization of a potential realism.

In other words… I feel many players, myself included, keep expecting to discover we will one day look like heroes from history and mythology. Certainly, that was there in Guild Wars 1, with a bit of fantasy spice added on. Characters felt alive and radiant and unique. They felt like something plucked from an imagined Platonic Atlantis, Greece, some kind of Egyptian mythos and aesthetic, or some kind of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean (Dwarves), origin. The ‘world’ of reality was right there, all the time, just touched up, modernized in places, and stylized.

By contrast something about Guild Wars feels ‘uncanny’. I believe it is that the artistic direction swung into some blind-spot or no-longer-visited region of the social narrative. Rather like real life humans who have access to the internet have a rough common-narrative I suspect that stories, to be accessible, and whatever aesthetic of artistic expression that goes with it must also have this common-narrative: A common-consciousness.

Guild Wars 2, the rage by the player base, Anet’s many confusing actions and seeming in ability to communicate with potential subscribers, and those already subscribed I really do believe has less to do with Anet than some odd social-void in our imaginations. It my also be that the syntactical format of that common-narrative somehow is hardened against mixing certain myths / historical aesthetics together.

I don’t have much to offer in terms of a discussion, mostly because you hit the nail on the head with nearly all of your points and it was beautifully worded and entertaining to read, to boot!

You have a wonderful way with words. <soft clapping>

It’s not an Uncanny Valley effect (that is a very specific term, by the way, and you are using it completely wrong). What you describe here is just GW2 clashing with your personal aestethic expectations. With over 3 million players, it is simply impossible for it to fit everyone’s tastes.

as someone who studied the Uncanny valley during school, on 2 different occasions, I can confirm that you may be shoe-horning the term of “Uncanny valley” into somewhere where it’s pretty far off.

I mean, I can vaguely understand where you’re coming from. Like, we can relate some games to reality. (Look at how WoW’s economy is being looked at (at least in terms of studying trends) as a model for current economy, or Watch_dogs using tech that’s currently being used, has been used, or is in the process of doing so…that’s uncanny because of the context, not so much the visual or auditory feeling)

GW2 is far too stylised to be placed in the “Uncanny valley” section of anything. Even it it’s stylistic choices, they’ve been made via influences, rather than just trying to imitate life, per-say

Thank you!

There may other issues of this uncanny valley too, all within the structures above. For example: I think that Veteran gamers are very powerful forces in the gaming world and always will be. The more a person has gamed the more they are familiar with a kind of innovative quality that defines quality itself. That is, there is an emergent aesthetic which defines what is quality. It can kitten or reach some higher point of novelty, quite without anyone being informed it or from any one directive. Quality seems to be inherently democratic like that.

However, it also means it is obscure. So a veteran gamer may be well aware of MANY novel features in games ,while new blood into the gaming world may not be. The ironic thing seems to be that veterans ‘see’ a standard-in-action, but have a huge difficulty communicating it because that standard originates from so many unique places. Conversely a new player in the gaming world likely could not say what is really quality from what isn’t, but will sort of ‘feel’ the press between these two extremes as an ‘absence’.

Typically what I see happening is new players are just lost. There is so much going on with virtual space that any one aspect of it is a universe unto itself.

Video games are rarely just that anymore. UI’s are very unique. The trade system rarely has anything to do with actually trading ever since Blizzard Entertainment gave the world the idea of Bind on Pickup, forever giving people the idea that because Blizzard was successful being totally against sharing (a foreign concept to games previously) along with playing with others got thrown out the window, baby, bathwater, and the deed to the land too.

So as with World of Warcraft some aesthetics are utterly crap, but we inherit them because some people are apes and just mimic what the rest of the shrewd does. There’s nothing else much going on upstairs for those people.

Many other companies and game developers try new things, but for one reason or another find themselves in one of these Uncanny Valleys where the social normative just looks at the product saying, “What?” very derisively.

Sometimes a company can save itself by learning the common-mythos, aesthetic, and super-structure of the normative and then speak with that as a syntactical dialog. More frequently the company does completely unfathomable things that could conceivably be a mummer’s play leaving scratching our heads as they fade out of existence into bankruptcy.

I don’t know that I’m shoe-horning anything. I think I’m discussing a very different idea about what the Uncanny Valley may include.

I feel like many part of the confusion of Guild Wars 2 is that aesthetically there is so MUCH diversity a lot of players just don’t know what to do with it all. It creates a sort of quiet panic regarding, “How to fit in”. In to what? I don’t know. Maybe a common aesthetic. Is Guild Wars taking place in the Renaissance or Medieval Europe? There are hints of Arabian influence too. Well, then there is Steampunk, so okay, Victorian. No, what about that modern haircut on the Asura and why can’t I have that? See how it’s tying into real-world aesthetics? I think if our mind is an inventory then it must also be something like Access, trying to constantly bridge disassociate context into one common stream of consciousness. So then maybe players wonder if they should have the same rules applying to the aesthetics of game design as apply to the art that came through into the virtual space?

That’s one thing I am going with the Uncanny Valley idea. As the game aesthetic approach real life all of the conflicts and uncertainties push in.

Another is, why does it have to stop with things like AI? I don’t know how many times my grandparents asked me why I play games. Their argument against gaming was that the ‘things’, as they called them, I play (avatars) are really dead objects.

They appear nearly life-like, but are dead. There is no life in them nor will there ever be. To them, that was a very disturbing idea. I started connecting their disquiet of this with the disquiet people have about robots. In general, all Uncanny things my provoke this idea.

That’s where I am coming from.

Saying that I do recognize I may be pointing out exactly what you are saying. That my use of “Uncanny Valley” is too mobile or unrefined, leading to undo blending of ideas.

I would counter by saying that that is rather just what I’m trying to say may be going on. Some sort of unrefined blending is taking place in the idea-factory of our heads. It is as if the portion of our thoughts that just takes in information is saying “does this match with this”? If seems as though if it finds any means to do so it will claim “match found”.

That’s what I suspect is happening. If that process has within it some emergent mechanization to allude to a higher-order (greater consistency of matchings) that may well convince someone they have attained an aesthetic concept which to them may well be appealing or at least create disquiet when it is violated.

I use the word “syntax” as a way saying these ‘blending’ ideas may be creating some sort of common narrative not easily embraced or understood from a firm structure of thought or language. It’s a very uncomfortable idea. It would seem to say that most of the encounters we have with aestheticism is entirely circumstantial and constantly in flux; not by any prescription or participation of our own, but simply because we have become informed in any way.

In words, ideas are like a common cold or a congestion. As a book I read once said, “Don’t think of elephants!” Did you think of elephants? Well? Now what? Disturbing.

So again, I think that something like the Uncanny Valley is very firmly capable of having other forms of display or at least discussion without entering into ‘shoe-horning’ it. But then again it is like the discussion from Religious Studies going on with Americans using the term Spiritual and firmly believing there is a distinction to Spirituality that is not also Religious.

I could be marking the error as is going on with Spiritualism vs. Religiosity, but I really think that the idea of what the Uncanny Valley is could be opened up by my argument here without shoe-horning anything.

I’m going to say the same thing I always say when people make these kinds of posts; it’s a video game.

While I understand the point you’re trying to get across, this is a fantasy video game that is in no way supposed to relate to the real world. There are human beings in this video game, yes, and other aspects that can be seen in the real world, but the environment and the creatures they live around are far from familiar. There’s nothing to look more closely at here and I don’t understand why people insist on doing so by asserting things like “over-sexualization” or “un-realistic figures” etc. If you apply what you see in video games to real life you need to re-think your standards and perspectives. I don’t look at men or women in video games and think that’s how people should look and I don’t grow more shallow by looking at these people. If you want to project yourself in to a video game by having your character look or feel more like you you should be playing something less fantasy and more reality where those options are available to you.

You’re as much entitled to your opinion as the next person and I in no way think what you’ve said is bad or wrong. I just think that you, as well as all the other people who constantly make posts like this, really need to stop looking so deeply in to the game. It’s like the people who ask whether Spongebob is gay or not. The creator didn’t even take it in to account that Spongebob might be perceived that way, it was just the fanbase over-analyzing things that weren’t there.