Zoom ENHANCE! by Gareth Martin

Welcome to Zoom ENHANCE! A fancy new blog on Ginx. I'm Gareth and I will be your Zoom-Enhancer. Whether it's taking apart game design piece by piece or looking at the back-room moves behind the news, Zoom ENHANCE! is here to give you a little more insight into games.

Why the name, you ask? I'll let my youtube linked intro do the talking:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk

Now in honour of the fine detective work going on in the above video, I'm going to kick this blog off with a look at videogames biggest detective game, L.A Noire.
 
Despite misspelling it's own name, L.A Noire is one smart game. By now, we all know about the incredible graphics, period perfect locations, awesome soundtrack and unique gameplay, but there’s one element that is in need of some further enhancement. Motion Scan is the technology that drives L.A. Noire. We may have seen motion capture before, but this takes a new approach. While motion capture is usually concerned with recording animation data from a real person and mapping it to the skeleton of a digital model, Motion Scan records the surface of an actors face in full 3D. To put it simply, Motion Scan makes a 3D model of an actors face while they are performing, and the result can be put into the game with no animation tweaks needed.

This all sounds fine and fancy, but what makes this technology unique is that for the first time in games it allows actors performances to appear in game with the same detail we would expect from regular film and video. In L.A Noire we get the full facial performance of Mad Men actor Aaron Stanton and nothing less. So how can this be implemented in games in meaningful ways? well L.A Noire gives us a couple of clues:

Cue clue finding music: http://youtu.be/KDc4z98IRNM

CLUE NUMBER ONE: INTERROGATIONS
The first clue shows us that Motion Scan be used to directly effect gameplay.  L.A Noire shows us the faces of dirty liars and honest Joes and asks us to tell them apart. With Motion Scan we can pick up on lip curls, sideways glances and facial ticks without it looking like the 123th annual gurning competition. But outside of grilling suspects, where else can this trail take us? Mario choosing to stomp on a Goomba because it looks at him funny?  It seems that few other gameplay possibilities can come from being able to see a human performance. Outside of lie detection and detective stories, we've hit a dead end.

CLUE NUMBER TWO: COLE PHELPS
Our second clue however, is more promising; It's Cole Phelps himself. For the first time in the history of games, we could describe L.A Noire as a portrait. Sure, we play as Cole Phelps, but we aren't inside his mind. What does he do after work? How does he feel about his war history? What drives him to succeed? These are all bits of information that are kept from us, things we piece together, much like in a film or T.V show. To put it another way, no one ever worries about what Link's motivations are. That's because they are the same as ours: save Princess Zelda. But in L.A Noire things are much more murky. It's a game filled with mysteries and the central puzzle is Cole himself.

This works because Motion Scan gives us a real person, with a  real face, to try to understand. Cole is a flawed and fragile character and at the end of the game, where our perspective changes, we realise this more than ever. Would we be so interested in a lump of animated polygons, as we are in Aaron Stanton’s expert performance? Motion Scan brings something simple to games, something much more human than the technology would lead us to believe. Motion Scan brings just a little bit of empathy.

That’s it for now, but it certainly isn't case closed. How do you see Motion Scan? Technology that brings a human element to games or a gimmick with no future? I'll be keeping my eagle eyes on the comments section, as well as Ginx's Twitter and Facebook, so leave your thoughts where you please, and I'll sniff them out.