GAMING AND GRAPHICS Games on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: Emotional Content in Computer Games Richard Rouse III Paranoid Productions the processors for Sony's recently released PlayStation2 console - a chip-set dubbed the "emotion engine" With such a name, one might think the chip set supports sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms o r behavioral m o d e l i n g . In p o i n t of fact, however, it is a super fast graphics processor. One might conclude that the people at Sony have equated increased graphics performance with increased emotional response in garners. Is their conclusion correct? On the one hand, having graphics horsepower which allows f o r a finely detailed w o r l d does present some possibilities for expression and nuance t h a t w e r e impossible in the extremely under-powered 3D graphics of the original PlayStation. For instance, if a humanoid game character can now be 2,000 polygons instead of 200, some of those extra polygons can certainly be allocated to the character's head. Now the 2,000 poly character can have a face complete with eyes, nose and mouth made of geometry instead of the
/lp/association-for-computing-machinery/games-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown-emotional-content-in-YQFmOYHlv4