Like many others within the gaming community, I entered (and have been spending a good deal of time in) Skyrim this month. Unlike the buzz surrounding some recent sequels, the latest Elder Scrolls game's hype was well-deserved. It's beautiful, huge, engaging, and easy to get lost inside for hours. It feels like a complete world--as a sandbox game should.

But I have to say, Bethesda's human characters have never felt, well, human. Since they started releasing rendered games, their characters have fallen into the "uncanny valley"--that weird place where a human-looking creation just barely misses the lifelike mark. The best example of the uncanny valley might be those Japanese robots with realistic moving human faces. Their proportions are all correct, but something about those dead eyes and stuttering movements just freaks everyone out. They're far more disturbing to look at than a more stylized face, like an anime character, even though the stylization departs from realistic human proportions. We're better at accepting visual metaphors for human features than hyper-realistic simulations. And even though every other aesthetic quality in Bethesda's games is nearly perfect, they can't seem to get out of the freaky place when it comes to their character design.

So what constitutes that uncanny valley in video games, and how do developers avoid it? One of the best strategies is just to avoid attempting realism altogether and just stylize the heck out of everybody. This works especially well in fantasy games, where you're already departed enough from the world that photorealism doesn't need to be a priority. Look at Final Fantasy X: it featured cinema-quality sequences, all on the PS2's graphics engine, that worked because its characters were essentially three-dimensional anime figures. Team ICO's games followed the same strategy and produced what many consider to be high art. Sometimes it helps to be painterly even when engaging with a three-dimensional medium.

But then again, there are those few games who opt for realism and succeed in their character design. I can think of no better example than the Mass Effect games. Their humans felt entirely human throughout; I never once got the sensation of piloting a mannequin. And it's not as though the games' developers have access to higher quality designers or more powerful game engines than Bethesda. But they do have their fingers on a few key points that help negate the creepy factor. For one, they make sure their characters' faces are always moving and alive, even when they're not speaking. The Elder Scrolls's characters have a tendency to only use half their faces at a time, and then only when they're actively participating in a scene. Mass Effect's characters are never frozen. They're always animated. They're also rendered matte. For some reason, so many characters in popular games show up covered with an awkward sheen. BioShock's humans look more like porcelain dolls, like the designers just couldn't get rid of the glint. (I guess that's why they show so few unmasked faces in the games.) Oblivion and Fallout also feature shiny faces (Skyrim is a little better in this regard). By removing the shine, skin textures show through more realistically. 

The way characters are displayed also has a huge impact on how they're received. Note that all of Mass Effect's dialogue scenes are shown in 3/4ths perspective, as opposed to Fallout, Oblivion, and Skyrim, where you talk to NPCs head-on. The more cinematic camera views make every interaction less accusatory, less threatening, and therefore less creepy. Forcing the player to look an NPC in the eye during a conversation may seem like a way to build a connection with the character, but when that NPC still feels a little too mechanical and soulless to be real, it only amplifies the uncanny valley. Moving the camera a few degrees may be a simple fix, but it works.

As environments and objects grow to be more detailed and breathtaking in the latest games, hopefully humans will emerge from that creepy place into a similar awe-inspiring aesthetic. Character design may be the last hurdle we face as games enter the realm of photorealism.