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Quantic Dream Manufacturing Emotion
Recently at the Game Developers Conference, Heavy Rain developer Quantic Dream showed off its new PS3 engine with a seven-minute, real-time demo entitled Kara. Although studio founder and lead game designer David Cage stressed that the demo (which he wrote and directed) is not related to a title Quantic Dream is working on, it impressed show-goers and gamers with its ability to convey genuine emotion.
The demo starts with the construction of the KPC-897504C android that is designed for a wide range of assistance functions. It will clean your house, feed your kids, and even -satisfy your sexual needs.
An unseen operator oversees the assembly of the android, running it through a test initialization process that includes the technician naming the unit Kara. The creation of this new identity produces a flicker of consciousness that is strengthened as the process continues, and Kara becomes more and more confident in herself. She can speak 300 languages – including singing beautifully in Japanese – and when synthetic flesh is added to her frame, she instinctively exhibits the human emotion of modesty by covering up her new nakedness.
Her new life won’t last long, however. The technician explains that she is to be re-initialized so she can be sold to a consumer who will give the unit its own name and purpose.
Kara realizes what this means for her. “I thought…” she begins.
“You thought?” counters the operator. “What did you think?”
“I thought…I was alive.”
“You’re not supposed to think that sort of stuff,” he explains. “You’re not supposed to think at all, period.”
The technician orders her to be scrapped for “non-standard” behavior, and the assembly machine starts to comply; dismantling her limb by limb.
Kara is pleading. “Please. Please, I’m begging you, please don’t disassemble me.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” he explains, as more and more of her is stripped away. “But defective models have to be eliminated, that’s my job.”
She is desperate. “I won’t cause any problems, I promise. I’ll do everything I’m asked to, I won’t say another word. I won’t think anymore. I’ve only just been born, you can’t kill me yet! Stop! Will you please stop?! I’m scared!”
All that’s left of her by this point is her head and her torso, with its synthetic heart valve beating fast. “I want to live. I’m begging you.”
The operator relents and restarts the assembly process. As she is reconstituted and her hair and flesh return, she cries silent tears.
“Go and join the others,” he says. “Stay in line, okay? I don’t want any trouble.”
She smiles slightly and whispers, “Thanks.”
Kara joins a line of other androids. They all look just like her, but their faces stare blankly ahead.
Cage says the idea for the Kara demo came about after Quantic Dream finished The Indigo Prophecy in 2005. He says he was inspired by the books of futurist Ray Kurzweil and was fascinated with the idea of documenting that moment when an AI becomes self-aware.
After the developer finished Heavy Rain in 2010, Cage says the team “wanted to have even more emotion. More of the original performance from the actor, and we knew we had to progress on many different areas. One of them was performance capture…”
To get what Cage was after, Quantic Dream created a new 3D engine that improves how the studio performs motion capture for the actors. For Heavy Rain, the studio recorded mo-cap sessions as split performances – the body animations were recorded separately from the voice and the face. That system utilized 25 cameras. For the Kara demo everything was recorded simultaneously using 68 cameras. Cage says that Kara only utilized 50 percent of the engine’s capabilities, and he expects the improvements in the lighting department alone should go a long way to appropriately setting the mood in scenes.
Judging by Kara’s performance, the new engine is already capable of delivering more emotion than the already impressive Heavy Rain. Voiced by Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 and Veronica Mars actress Valorie Curry, Kara’s moment of consciousness is masterfully conveyed, as is her understanding of mortality and desperation to live.
For Cage, this is just the beginning for both the engine and the PS3. “We thought that we did a lot, in matter of technology and visuals, with Heavy Rain. But the more we work on PlayStation 3, the more we realize that there’s much more to do with the hardware. It’s incredibly powerful, and I think people will be surprised by what we can still do with it.”
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