ABSTRACT
When I began teaching for game companies in the mid-1990s, my on-site classes were attended solely by animators. I would talk to them about the theatrical connections among thinking, emotion and physical action, and their eyes would light up. I told them about how a character should 100 percent of the time be playing actions in pursuit of provable objectives, and they would get excited. They could see right away how these concepts would energize the games. After class was over, I would start receiving e-mails from the animators telling me that the game designers wouldn’t let them apply the lessons I was teaching. The animator would say, for example, how exciting it would be if a character might start to run and then change his mind and purposely walk more slowly; the designer would reply, “That’s not possible. You have three walk cycles.” That was when I learned about the systemic divisions that exist in many game companies – the design side is composed of programmers, the analytical crowd; the animation side is composed of warriors of the heart. The two sides did not like to communicate with each other, and that was the problem. The designers figured that anything and everything having to do with acting was something for the animators to worry about. So, in reaction to that revelation, I began asking the Human Resources workshop coordinators at the game companies to please bring the designers into my classes. I figured that, even if “three walk cycles” was the only realistic option at the time, it would be helpful if the designers at least could fantasize about what might be wonderful in terms of acting if only the design could be made to work. This continues to this day to be my primary challenge with video game companies, although I now see increasing numbers of designers in the classes. And now that cutscenes are slowly being eliminated, level-\ designers have more incentive to learn about acting theory.
