Blog 1: Gesture and the Uncanny Valley

Payton Grady

Professor Heagney

GAM-3432-01

29 August 2021

   Blog 1: Gesture and the Uncanny Valley

Gesture

    This week in class, we discussed drawing gesture, which is "the movement that connects the contours, the forms, and the tones" (Proko). In this assignment we sketched basic gestures taken off of the QuickPoses website in the form of a line and scribbled mass afterward to show what it would look like on a different type of character. My sketches are not perfect, but I feel like they show the concept well enough. Out of these three poses, the first one was meant to look almost seductive, the second was meant to be a character holding a gun, and the third was somebody holding a sword. By drawing their gesture and scribble in mass, the poses were the same but the appearance was different and there was less context to the pose, almost changing its meaning. I learned that so many complex character poses are all built on a simple flowing line, and that the character's physical appearance is only secondary to this in terms of character design importance.

The Uncanny Valley and Imagining Characters

    Throughout this first week of class, I have been searching for real-world objects that could be characters and decided to use one of the computer screens in the game lab. These screens have four different speakers on the sides and I immediately imagined them as a set of four eyes, with the screen being a mouth. Initially I thought that the keyboard could act as a body, but I wanted to incorporate more objects. I ended up drawing the CPU as its body, with a shield made out of keyboards and a melee weapon made out of a mouse. This design would avoid the uncanny valley because it has a humanoid shape and human-inspired features, but it is all abstracted and is not intended to directly resemble a human. Using the examples of Diego-San and Geminoid HI, I have realized that the Uncanny Valley is most present when nonhuman things have human parts like a fish with human teeth. But it makes sense to give these characters parts that humans have like a skeleton, limbs, eyes, etc. as long as it is not an overly human version of these features.