Crusty Old Men now in Video Games

Most game designers don’t worry about wrinkles. Casey Hudson does, which is one reason Mass Effect, which he spent the last three years directing, is a landmark of interactive storytelling.

It is the best rebuttal yet to the notion that games are inherently inferior to linear media like television and film in their ability to envelop an audience in a world that is both fantastic and a lens on the complexities of real human emotion — in short, to be an art.

In Mass Effect, however, most of the story is shaped through conversations between the player’s character and other denizens of the game’s galaxy. And those interactive conversations have been “filmed” more like a movie than a game. In other words, they have been shot as close-ups from the characters’ fronts, so you can actually see them talking and reacting to one another.

 
It’s an innovation that has been unthinkable until now because it had always seemed almost impossible to render speaking digital faces that would seem natural to the human eye and ear. It is perhaps Mass Effect’s greatest strength that its characters do just that.

 
It may be the first game in which the term “digital acting” isn’t an oxymoron. Even the game’s alien races have been animated with a generous anthropomorphism that imbues them with plausibly human emotions. And parsing emotion often comes down to the wrinkles.

“We wanted to create a video game that had the potential to rival live-action movies in terms of cinematic, dramatic power,” Mr. Hudson said in a recent telephone interview from Edmonton. “We wanted our characters to be able to just raise an eyebrow and have it convey a thought or emotion just as it could in a film.”

 
“If the action in our game is exciting, it’s because you care about the story situation,” he added. “And what makes the story exciting is emotion. And what makes emotion is wrinkles. When you take the wrinkles away, you just have parts of the face moving around like a cartoon, and it really takes away a lot of the subtlety we intuit in human emotion.”