JoannaDark

yeah, it's cool to think about how much creepier its gonna get! fmri is slowly improving, our scanner breaks down about every couple of weeks and its one of the best available! its interesting cos its really more applicable to games than anything else, one of the major problems with fmris is getting participants to stay still for an hour being subject to 120dB droning, and its been shown that participants playing games in the scanner dont even notice the time go by (sounds about right). the valence issue in emotion is something that beatrice de gelder would focus on to a degree, but its not that hot a topic right now. (btw de gelder is a rare kind academic who has put all of her publications as pdfs on her site, beatricedegelder.com) its just accepted that there is a continuum of facial expressions and the exemplars of each are the most recognisable across the board, and lie in the middle of each expression's range in the continuum, if you get me. thats where categorical perception comes in, that they are discrete categories. its a really cool area to write about, i hope u dont think i was criticising you! just really interested!

more just about games that you're nostalgically attached to but are shit. one of my friends here is after offering toejam & earl, for instance.

I really liked reading that article, I find the whole concept of the uncanny valley and its theoretical basis really interesting. I just want to clarify the below point you made; A lot of what we intuitively know about people remains immeasurable because of limitations on our technology and knowledge. For instance, the positive and negative valence of emotional states in others is obvious to most people through facial expression, voice intonation, posture, and so forth, yet none of these constitute an impossible to fake, objectively reliable measure, and magnetic resonance imaging has not yet reached a fine enough resolution to allow sufficient neurological observation. I totally agree that solving the uncanny valley is going to need recourse to psychology. I work in experimental psychology and am currently researching the area about which you write. I work with computer scientists, AI guys and developers and if psychology didn't inform, wasn't necessary for, furthering video games I wouldn't have a job. Moreover, exp psychology has looked into emotional valency a great deal, concluding that the most important thing in evolutionary terms is to differentiate the emotion, and from thereon in categorical perception determines the valency. See Beatrice de Gelder for more on this. (she's great). This type of research like everything in exp psychology is empirical in nature, using functional MRIs, skin conductance, reaction times etc, validated over the course of years of testing and eradicating anomalous findings, and statistically controlling for error stringently (if the research is any good, that is). The uncanny valley, when it is reached, will be an academic issue, as all things are theoretical before they can be applied to VR.I don't think it's first and foremost a developer's issue. I for one definitely believe that it can be crossed, and I can't wait, because once developers achieve photorealism they can go back to focusing on style more. I don't think it's quite been reached yet, and I think that the revulsion experienced at something like heavy rain is more an approximation of it rather than the real thing.

it's a great area. i'm involved in research very like this at the moment. are you a big psych nerd too dan?

there are already tons of scales, questionnaires etc for measuring this, e.g. beck which has been validated over thousands of cases.

ha, my entire lab room have had a little giggle at that. Pokemon pearl released ireland 22nd july! i hate this country!

This is the best news I've heard all week. Btw, deus ex trivia: jc denton is voiced by none other than jay anthony franke, who played jake sommers in california dreams. he is now bald and chubbing and works for activision.

I don't know if you can call it repression. Even if you had a certain fantasy, not being able to download it in action isn't really gonna do you much harm. Unless you're totally Freudian and think that it'll lead to a neurosis of some sort. Can't find violent porn? Just type in something else instead! Who knows, it may broaden these otherwise "perverse" minds!

plus its a lot easier to sound clever when you criticise something:mock:

i refuse to accept that border collies are THAT amazing. 3 or 4 is going a bit far. I know they're smart but the whole acceleration of learning thing that goes on around age 3...collies are totally left in the dust. They are brilliant though. Great, now I want a puppy.

i remember coming across a paper that said that border collies are the most intelligent dogs. still in the grand scheme of things they're functionally equivalent to a 2 year old child. my friend has a border collie who occasionally wees with excitement in the kitchen, and she licks it up or soaks it up with her paws. Guess she's smart enough to develop a neurosis. Still, cats have more dignity.

haha check out the muscles in her neck! 'roids much?

if they had served cooked goat canapes at the launch would anyone have noticed? if it had been a sonic launch would they have crucified a small hedgehog dyed blue and had people eat cocktail sausages off its spikes? this has raised some serious issues! i can see some sony guy chuckling to himself that all the forums are talking about the launch. but seriously, whos actually gonna buy god of war off the back of this story?

ok animal crossing - 309336237325. ALL my other games are un-wiry. which is a pity. my farm in harvest moon deserves to be shown off. name - jo. town - cuteypie. gay gay gay!

hah, yeah i hate when you turn it on for the first time in ages and its just weeds and letters from your mom and everyone saying wow where have you been! I'm currnetly having trouble disabling the security on my router but as soon as i do im putting up my code! add me im sick of oranges!

I never would have thought Pokemon divided opinions so vociferously...I had red. my boyfriend gave it to me before my leaving cert (irish sats/a levels) and to this day i remember sweating with panic in my irish oral when all i could think about was "squirtle, squirtle" Anyway point being maybe this kinda game just appeals to a certain type of person. that is all. i really liked wrestlevania's explanation of its appeal.

Cute!

at what?

Non-Nutcase - Violent Games = SADNESS AT ONLY BEING ABLE TO PLAY PONY GAMES heheh, pony games! He might be okay with us playing animal crossing too. although the whole character moving away if you don't pay em enough attention bit might be construed as encouraging social isolation.

OF COURSE its different! its the french word "objection" as opposed to the english word "objection". ive played both and they're totally different. so there. Jesus, I've out-pedantic-ed myself.

haha, we bought phoenix wright in paris last year and you can set it so it goes objection! in french. its pretty funny. French game shops are weird. its the same chains as anywhere else, i.e. GAME, but its full of men in their forties and fifties. Here it's just twelve year olds buying gta. Sigh.

uuurrrrgh, grindhouse better come out NOW! how are the shorts in it? in ireland transformers is out the same day as the simpsons. which has nothing to do with anything but there you go.

can i clarify that i hate filmmaker george lucas? i just like lucasarts. there's a world of difference. and dan, to be fair i was actually joking about the "NOOOOOO" thing. i forgot that sarcasm doesn't do too well in times new roman or whatever the hell this is. as for the double post, my finger slipped.

"Majority feeling"? what is this, the playground? to be perfectly honest I can't see the point of a forum where one person deems it necessary to shoot down counter-opinions with an expression like that. More to the point, obviously he has fallen from grace. That's why I called them transgressions. Get it?

"Majority feeling"? what is this, the playground? to be perfectly honest I can't see the point of a forum where one person deems it necessary to shoot down counter-opinions with an expression like that. More to the point, obviously he has fallen from grace. That's why I called them transgressions. Get it?