Email Interview with Ed Hooks

   Whilst Rosy has passed on the videos and recordings she had made for her CoP2 project (Which I still hope to make good use of for my research), I still found it necessary to personally email Ed Hooks on a particular section of his book, that being his chapter on animation in video games. Seeing as the book was written in 2011, I wanted to know whether his opinion had changed since then, especially after the release of critically acclaimed titles such as "The Last of Us", and even "Beyond: Two Souls", which I believe focus on a more interactive form of storytelling (Along with many other recent games) as compared to older games that had originally focused solely on gameplay.

  Needless to say, I was absolutely nervous as I wrote this email, fearing that my questions would be nothing but nonsensical to the father of acting in animation. But, taking a deep breath, I decided to go right ahead and ask him the first few questions that came to mind. It was through his site that I was able to find his email, and thanks to Rosy (Again), we were able to properly speak to one another from there.

This was the message that I had sent him through his site, when he attempted
to contact me, there were once again issues with my Yahoo email. But fortunately,
by mentioning Rosy, he went on to contact her about me so that I could share with
him another one of emails for contact.

My first email:

'Hello Sir!

Rosy forwarded me your email!

I am terribly sorry about the email issues, for some reason my Yahoo email has been having a lot of issues as of late. But I am sure we will be able to communicate through this email instead (If not, my professional email is wholahayola@gmail.com)

Thank you so, so much for the incredibly fast response!

I would like to start off by saying that I absolutely enjoyed reading your book "Acting for Animators", out of all the books I have been reading for my research, your book has given me so much to think and write about (I especially find the aspect of empathy to be an incredibly interesting topic and issue to look into when it comes to acting in animation). I however do have a few questions to ask about your Video Games chapter.

I was wondering whether your opinion has changed since then? About whether video game acting has actually improved since then?

Your chapter on empathy especially got me curious about whether you have tried any other games aside from "Ico". I was wondering what your thoughts on games such as "The Last of Us" might be, especially? And whether you have managed to find games that have more humour to them as compared to "Call of Duty"?

I am still listing down some more questions to ask, but for now, I am absolutely dying to know about your thoughts on the progression of video games so far.

Thank you kindly!

Yours Sincerely,

Rebecca Wong Si-Lin'

His response (About an hour later):

'Hey Rebecca,

I'm glad you found me. <g> I often have difficulty with e-mail addresses in the far east. The company that hosts my domain name, edhooks.com, is Earthlink, and it blocks many addresses over there, presumably because of piracy issues. It is a hassle.

In answer to your question, my answer will probably surprise you: I do not play video games. I teach for all of the major studios -- most recently for Valve and Warner Brothers Games -- and I understand the acting issues the studios encounter, but I do not personally play games. Well, Monument Valley on my iPad now and then, but that's about it. Having said that, I do make it a practice to study the walk-throughs now and then. When I know I am going to be teaching at a particular studio, I will always review their most recent games to see what I might be dealing with.

"The Last of Us" is basically a game-length cinematic, IMO, and it has much stronger performance than the typical game. It also has a very clever design, putting a child in a lead roll. That - all by itself - is going to evoke an emotional response in the player because it triggers an evolutionary impulse to protect our children. Very smart.

"Ico" was the first game I saw that did anything special with empathy, which is why I mentioned it in the book. An essential element of empathy is distance. You cannot empathize with yourself and, since the player is imposing himself or herself on his or her avatar, the player cannot empathize with his own avatar. At least not to the extent that the avatar is responsive to direct instruction. (Go left, shoot gun, turn 360 degrees….)

My impression is that cinematics in general are being phased out. The smaller the platform, the less well the cinematics function. That evolution has caused the studio job of Level Designer to be the hot ticket, career wise. Especially the Level Designer who has some understanding of acting, emotion and empathy. When I first started teaching at the game companies, it was really difficult to get Designers to take the class. They considered that anything and everything having to do with acting was something for the animators to worry about. They were thinking of themselves mainly as programmers, and so there was a systemic division in most studios -- programmers on one side, animators on the other. Mocap was somewhere in the middle but, in the beginning, I also rarely had mocap directors in the class. Today, it is different. Wherever I teach, the classes have representatives of all divisions, and I expect that trend to continue.

Ed'

   I will surely be sending more questions his way as I progress in my dissertation, until then, I do believe that I have gotten quite a bit of useful information from this response alone. I am glad that I had finally taken the chance to contact him. Hopefully I will be a lot less awkward in my next email to him.