By By Ronald Diemicke
Kyle Carey has a drinking problem. His last three movies have all been chart topping successes and he is on his way to being ranked as one of the top 10 actors in Hollywood. Now he’s in rehab and on the road to recovery. But who is Kyle Carey? You wouldn’t recognize him from any recently released movie or from any Hollywood trade magazine, because he’s not a real person.
Peter Molyneux’s latest game, The Movies, allows gamers to run a virtual movie studio and make their own movies and actors in the game’s engine. In the process, gamers have to deal with keeping actors happy and managing productions. Also, just like in real life, actors get stressed and sometimes seek ways of escape.
Yet a funny thing happens when these characters begin to suffer and have problems, like alcoholism, the players actually care.
Here I was, sitting in front of my computer, and I found myself thinking that I should really send my character, Carey, to rehab so he could get better. It didn’t cross my mind until later that Carey was not a real person. It didn’t matter if he got better, because when I left the computer it would have not had an impact on anything else I did. But was that true?
I think had I not sent him to rehab, I would have felt bad. But maybe I’m just weird, so I decided to ask others how they felt about their game characters. The answers I got confirmed my suspicions.
“[In Homeworld 1] I did feel sort of an empty feeling [when your home planet gets wiped out] because it really kind of felt like you were the only person helping this race survive,” senior Nikhil Baliga said. “I remember this because I attacked the ships, destroying the cyro-chambers [with surviving members of your race] with a fury.”
I’ve played a lot of games, but it seems gaming companies are on the cusp of something relatively new, which is really only taken shape in the last five years. Since it has been a gradual process, I don’t think many people have stopped to think about it.
Game characters are breaking virtual boundaries by looking and sounding like real people. This also became apparent to me while playing a new adventure game called Indigo Prophecy.
The game’s story revolves around a man, taken over by supernatural forces that make him kill in cold blood. When he regains his faculties, he must try to evade the police and stay free long enough to unravel the mystery. The game has a sophisticated aesthetic for today, but it’s really the careful combination of good quality graphics, realistic animation, amazing voice acting, theatrical quality music and an engrossing story that encorporates the player. Often I would forget I was playing a game and my friends wouldn’t mind watching because it played out like a movie for them.
It got to the point where one of my friends would get angry at me if I didn’t call him so he could view the next part of the game with me. He’d actually turn to me if I died and say something along the lines of “You jerk, what did Lucas [the main character] ever do to you?”
The truth is, given a character we can associate with and care about, we do grow attached.
“When a character does something that I wouldn’t consider smart, I can’t, but want to yell at the TV saying how dumb they are,” sophmore Caitlin Beards said. “If a character dies that I like, I do feel sad. It’s natural to feel sad if you were playing along side a character and they are no longer there to feel for.”
In the end, the more gaming becomes cinematic, the more it reflects the types of emotions elicited when we watch a movie. People associate with the characters and grow with them. If anything, it even works on a more personal level. Not only do we identify with the character, but we are the character and therefore identify with their personal plight. Maybe this is why games like the Sims and The Movies are so popular.
It is hard to feel bad for Mario when he is trying to save the princess in the game Donkey Kong, because he is little more than a couple colored blocks moving on the screen. It is a lot easier to feel bad for Kyle Carey who blinks and looks at me and can wave just like any person.
It still takes a lot for a game to transcend the gap of feeling artificial, but the lines are getting closer and closer everyday. Every year more and more games come out that push for more cinematic experiences, which engross the player in new worlds.
The game industry is growing in proportions and is becoming a rival for the movie industry. Halo 2, for example, made just as much as some triple A blockbuster movies.
Interactive fiction is the wave of the future and the evolution of the movie. You don’t just sit, watch and associate with the character through their similarities to reality, instead players feel their struggles by taking their journey with them.
Here I am again with Kyle Carey just getting out of rehab and excited to get him back onto a set so I can show the world how cool he his through the movies I make with him. However, I’ve just got to hope he doesn’t fall off the horse again and back into the bottle. Turns out my virtual people can be just as flawed as their real world counterparts.

Characters like Kyle Carey in virtual reality video games are becoming more advanced and are emotionally affecting players. (Ronald Diemicke/The Chronicle)