Research from 'Hamlet on the Holodeck' by Janet H. Murray

Basic Details:
MURRAY, J. H. (1997), Hamlet on the Holodeck, NY: The Free Press.

21-22.

• Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, the same fears provoked by the... advent of film and television began to be expressed against videogames, which added interactivity to the sensory allures of sight, sound and motion.
• Critics have condemned the too-easy stimulation of electronic games as a threat to the more reflective delights of print culture.
• A prominent film critic, for instance, recently lamented the fact that his sons have deserted Dickens for shoot-'em-up computer games, which "offer a kind of narrative, but one that yields without resistance to the child's desire for instant gratification."

53.

• On the other hand, some game designers are making good use of film techniques in enhancing the dramatic power of their games.
• Myst (1993) achieves much of its immersive power through its sophisticated sound design. Each of the different areas of the game is characterised by distinctive ambient sounds, like the whistling of wind through the trees of the lapping of waves on the shore, that reinforce the reality of fantasy worlds, which are really just a succession of still images.
• ... a musical motif that gets darker and more foreboding with each step and reaches an emotional peak when I uncover a severed head. 

140.

• Stories do not require us to do anything except to pay attention as they are told.
• Games always involve some kind of activity and are often focused on the mastery of skills, whether the skill involves chess strategy or joystick twitching. Games generally use language only instrumentally ("checkmate", "ball four") rather than to convey subtleties of description or to communicate complex emotions.
• ... games are goal directed and structured around turn taking and keeping score. All of this would seem to have nothing to do with stories.
• ... narrative satisfaction can be directly opposed to game satisfaction, as the endings of Myst, widely hailed as the most artistically successful story puzzle of the early 1990s, make clear.

142.

• A game is a kind of abstract storytelling that resembles the world of common experience but compresses it in order to heighten interest.
• Whatever the content of the game itself, whatever out role within it, we are always the protagonists of the symbolic action.
• Even in games in which we are at the mercy of the dice, we are still enacting a meaningful drama.

145.

• Most of the stories currently told on the computer are based on the structure of a contest of skill.
• The interactor is given the role of a fighter or detective of some sort and is pitted against an opponent in a win/lose situation.
• ... computer games have developed multiple representations of the opponent, who may be another human player (as in the first videogame, Pong), a character embedded in the story (as in Pacman), and the programmer or game designer implicit in the game (as in Zork). 
• Contest games have also developed at least three different ways of situating the player: we can watch from a spectator perspective while operating out own avatar character or spaceship (as in Mortal Kombat); watch from a situated perspective while operating a character (as in Rebel Assault, where we see the vehicle we are operating as if we are following just behind it with a movie camera); or, most immersively, watch and act form a situated first-person viewpoint, as in Doom...

146.

• ... where we see the landscape of the game and our opponents coming toward us as if we are really present in space. These gaming conventions orient the interactor and make the action coherent. They are equivalent to a novelist's care with point of view or a director's attention to staging.
• Fighting games have also developed a sure-fire way of combining agency with immersion.
• It requires very little imaginative effort to enter such a world because the sense of agency is so direct.
• ... every object in a digital narrative, no matter how sophisticated the story, should offer the interactor as clear a sense of agency and as direct a connection to the immersive world as I felt in the arcade holding a six-shooter-shaped laser gun and blasting away at the outlaws in Mad Dog McCree.

147.

• ... the moral impact of enacting an opposing role is a promising sign of the serious dramatic potential of the fighting game.
• We need to find substitutes for shooting off a gun that will offer the same immediacy of effect but allow for more complex and engaging story content.
• We need to find ways of drawing a player so deeply into the situated point of view of a character that a change of position will raise important moral questions.
• We need to take advantage of the symbolic drama of the contest format to create suspense and dramatic tension without focusing the interactor on skill mastery.

Research from 'Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game' by Graeme Kirkpatrick Pt 1

Basic Details:
KIRKPATRICK, G. (2011), Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

1.

• I argue that video games are not communications media in any standard sense but objects that furnish us with particular kinds of experience. 
• These experiences are a variety of game, or structured play, but they are also something more than this. What this 'more' is, what is consists in, is the enigma that has triggered the most heated academic debates about the video game and how we should study it and I argue that it is best understood as an historically specific instance of aesthetic form. 

2.

• It involves making the claim that video games are aesthetic objects before they are anything else, which has consequences for other parts of the discussion we want to have about them. 
• Most people agree, for example, that play or gameplay as it is referred to in connection with video games, is central to what people do with them and should inform our understanding of them in various ways. 

3.

• It is a conservative implication of ludology, for instance, that video games stand in the tradition of older games like chess or football and that it is only in light of this that we can see their true novelty. 
• Others find in them a source of cinematic innovations, with new viewing practices and new visual possibilities that extend the history of popular entertainments. An aesthetic approach finds itself in the, perhaps fortunate, position of seeming to claim that video games are art. 

11.

• Ludology is a branch of game studies centred mainly in Scandinavian universities that emphasizes the games of video games and rejects attempts to analyse them as 'narratives' or texts in which meaning plays the dominant, ordering role. 

12.

• ... the best way to understand modern video games is to focus on what they feel like to the people who play them and to reflect on what the significance of that feeling responses might be in the contemporary cultural context. 
• Taking an aesthetic approach to video games is made more complicated by the fact that everyone who writes about them already accepts that they have aesthetic properties and there is even some consensus that these properties matter and should inform our assessment of the medium as a whole as well as of individual games.

13.

• Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, for example, suggest that much gameplay is motivated simply by the search for 'visual pleasures', writing at one point that players may find aesthetic pleasures simply from 'the quality of graphical resolution alone' (King and Krzywinska 2006: 130). But what makes a visual experience pleasurable? On what basis do we separate the visual aspects of an experience that also includes other sensory components and questions concern aesthetic structure and it is in answering them that the resources of classical aesthetic theory are useful. 
• ... the concepts of play and form take us beyond a superficial characterisation of visual pleasure towards an appreciation of the whole experience of gameplay in terms of how it feels to players. 

15.

• This book argues that the relation between games and art is an important key to understanding either of them properly in the current period. Video games inherit certain of their key properties, especially form, from an art world that has to some extent absented itself from important areas of experience. 

17.

• Video games go not have to 'mean' anything to be popular and their popularity can be intelligible without reference to interpretation. This does not mean we should ignore the contents of on-screen imagery or what that imagery might represent or signify in some contexts. 

19.

• The term 'gameplay' is often used by rarely defined. As commonly employed it refers to the game dynamics, or more simply, 'how it feels to play a game'. Although this feeling is influenced by a game's audio and visual aspects, gameplay is usually considered a consequence of the game's rules rather than its representation. 
• Using this definition, we can say that the gameplay of chess is deliberative and [sic] while the gameplay of Burnout 3 is frantic and easily accessible. 

23.

• Aesthetic experience occurs when we find that something is pleasing to us by virtue of its form. Such an object stimulates us in the sense that it provokes and incites a feeling response, but it does so in a way that goes beyond merely being pleasing to the eye. 
• In aesthetic experience, which for Kant is almost exclusively about natural beauty, we find our imagination is pitched against our understanding- we can't discern 'order and finality' in the object but not its purpose. 

24.

• ... the human disposition to play is at the heart of the human creative response to being cast adrift in a meaningless universe. It it is not meaningful in itself, play is the activity that makes meaning possible by spinning forms out of the darkness. 
• ... play has intrinsic rhythm and harmony (1950: 10) and it is present as a kind of beating pulse in the sciences as well as the arts. 
• ... play is associated with contests and with representation, sometimes taking the form of role play. Play always goes on within what Huizinga calls a 'magic circle'; a specifically delineated zone where the normal conversations of social life are placed on hold and the rules of play (however minimal) are given free reign. 

25.

• The importance of play here lies in its foundational role for our ontological security and subsequently personal identity, because it is here that we first gain a sense of ourselves as agents who can act on the world and who must, in turn, adapt ourselves to its reality. 

26.

• ... the video game can be seen as a kind of stand-in for the parent, later the friend, with whom the subject constructs this precarious sense of a self grounded in transitional phenomena. Play here is based on a kid of formlessness that precedes both ego development and a secure sense of reality. This pre-ontological domain is one that we have to play our way out of in order to secure a sense of ourselves and to learn about the world. 
• Fantasy is an excess of imagination. Eve n short of delusion it can impede our ability to process external reality properly and inhibit the development of our inner personality. 

32.

• Aesthetic theory is concerned with understanding how it is that human beings find some situations, objects or artefacts attractive, or even beautiful. 
• Video games merit the concern that has been reserved for such items not because they are beautiful or 'art' but rather because they exist in a very specific tension with beauty and art, editing into the field of tensions that define the artwork and position it in relation to other social elements, and this incursion is essential to understanding them. 

48.

• ... ludology correctly identifies what is essential to the video games as a cultural object, namely, its character as a form of structured play. At the same time, however, the discussion here acknowledges the importance of meaning-oriented video game analyses, which have forced ludology to reflect on the differences between traditional games and their modern, digital variant. 
• Video games are more than games in the traditional sense. However, scholars who emphasise the story element in games jump the gun when they assert that attention to meaning and to the story-telling dimension of video games is the correct way to address the deficit in ludology's approach. 

50.

• Scholars who understand well how film works, for example, find that video games seem a lot like films except that the audience participate in determining what happens in the on-screen drama. 
• This active role for audiences can be called interactivity since it seems to reflect a new responsiveness on the part of the medium and implies a degree of complexity that makes the media object more like an interlocutor or co-participant and less like a finished work to be apprehended contemplatively.

54.

• ... Jesper Juul repudiated narrative theory's application to video games on the grounds that this theory introduces a temporal discrepancy that is essential to all reading but not present when playing video games. In narrative theory it is the difference between the time of narrating and that of the events narrated that is all-important. 
• According to Gerard Genette, for example, the temporality of a written text always involves a 'metonymic displacement' (Genette 1980: 34) whereby we, as readers, allow the false time of the story to stand in for the true time it takes us to read it. 
• This discrepancy between the time of reading and that of the events narrated is essential to the process of meaning-interpretation as it constitutes a kind of space where the reader interrogates and reflects on what she is reading. 
• The idea that games 'tell stories' is simply compatible with the reality that they are played in a singular time:
• In a verbal narrative, the grammatical tense will necessarily present a temporal relation between the time of the narration (narrative time) and the events told (story time). Additionally, it is possible to talk of a third time, the reading or viewing time...
• ... the game constructs the story time as synchronous with narrative time and reading/viewing time: the story time is now. Now, not just in the sense that the viewer witnesses events now... 

55.

• ... but in the sense that events are happening now, and that what comes next is not determined. (Juul 2001: 13-14) 

61.

• ... Kucklich presumes a strong role here for interpretative meaning in these processes, especially fictional meaning. The problem he raises it that sustained activity applied to a game seems to require a narrative or meaning element to explain why players seek to effect the relevant state transitions. 
• ... identification with character and immersion in some kind of storyline seem to be needed, to mediate, or explain the extra-ludic player activities- the things they do that do not fall under the lusory attitude. 
• Meaning based explanations would situate their play in a larger, fictional or social setting and would explain their involvement in all of its aspects. 
• Kucklick's point is that player activities, including... 

62.

• ... perhaps even subversion of the game's projected or advertised narrative context, must be meaningful for peopel and these meanings must play some explanatory role. 
• The fact that video games commonly include filmic and textual elements counts strongly in favour of such an analysis. 
• In the move between game states players' attention does move to extra-ludic reflection but their activities involve actions need to be understood as integral to the video game form as whole. Alexander Galloway usefully characterises non-story related actions as 'form playing with other forms... a play within the various layers of the video game' (Galloway 2006: 36). In this multi-layered play the human element must switch between discrete... 

63.

• ... sets of rules, each bearing different kinds of relation to meaning, including some movements and activities that have no significance at all, captured nicely in Galloway's phrase, 'multiple vectors of agitation' (2006: 38). 

75.

• Max Payne is an object with a distinctive feel, or aesthetic and this determines its character as an experience for players. At the centre of this is a feeling of expectation or anticipation that is worked and reworked by the tensions and releases of play- exactly what, for Ranciere (2007), connects the various experiences of form in the aesthetic regime of art. 
• The element of repetition is the clearest illustration of the importance of rhythm to the medium. Distinct types of action repeat and recur throughout the course of Max Payne. 
• When it happens you can assume a different attitude, namely, that of poking around, exploring the game situation to see what you are supposed to do next. Exploring, righting and watching correspond to feelings of tension, excitement and relaxation in the body of the player. 
• They define the rhythm of incorporation specific to Max Payne- different games have different rhythms. 

77.

• In video games the action and the intensities of experience are much more like music in being relatively detached from these elements, to such an extent that we often need cut-scenes to remind us where we (our characters) are supposed to be in the game's overall 'story'. 
• Such is the extent to which we are concentrated on play, its 'feel' and dynamics, and such is the narrowing of our focus onto game elements as signs not in a narrative story, but of the need to perform this move or that. 

79.

• Diderot's paradox, is a much discussed idea from theatre studies and concerns the actor's assumption of a role to which they must appear to be thoroughly committed if they want to carry the sentiments of the audience. The paradox is that they can only achieve this appearance through concentrated attention to something else (namely, the performance itself). 
• While an actor must know feelings intimately and express them sincerely to produce them in an audience, he cannot achieve this goal by sincerely expressing those feelings on stage but must have recourse to artifice. 
• The best actors are not the ones who actually feel what their character is supposed to be feeling. 
• This applies very much to games, who cannot identify too strongly with their characters, since they have to master the playing of the game. It illustrates a fundamental aesthetic problem with the idea of a straightforward (tension and paradox free) immersion in virtual space and fictional role play.

Research from 'Human Motion Based on Actor Physique Using Motion Capture' by Jong Sze Joon

Basic Details:

JONG, S. J. (2008), Human Motion Based on Actor Physique Using Motion Capture, Germany: VDM Publishing.

2.

• Motion Capture (Mocap) has some very useful applications for many types of users. Its purpose is not simply to duplicate the movements of an actor, as some people have naively stated (Trager, 1994). By employing specific Mocap application, this research studies realistic human motion of various subject with different physical attributes.
• Every individual has his/her own pattern of movement based on the nature of his/her physique, and yet every repetitive movement is always different in a slightly distinct manner.
• If a repetitive motion cycle of a particular individual can be sampled, it is clear that every time the cycle is repeated, the exact same algorithm of movement will not be achieved. For instance, when a person swings his hand from up to down and repeats the motion for a few times, the duration, velocity, angle, distance and level of the each swing are different.
• These subtle nuances in every biological motion serve as the essence to define realistic motion. It illuminates the identity of the person's behavioural pattern thus providing ideal characteristics that distinguishes every other individual.
• According to Pullen (2002), the term 'Motion Capture' generally refers to any method for obtaining data that describes the motion of a human or animal. 
• As the availability of Mocap data has increased, there has been more and more interest in using it as a basis  for creating computer animations where life-like motion is required.
• There are still various difficulties that arise based on its application, such as the question of the accuracy of the capture data and how much artificial data is filled in during the "clean up" process.

2-3.

• There are other cases whereby human motion data is not suitable to be applied to a non-human character. As a result, the art of keyframe animation is still being practiced.

3.

• Mocap is perhaps the most widely used technique for acquiring realistic motion. Recent production of feature films such as King Kong, The Matrix trilogy, Star Wars, The Polar Express and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, to name a few, employ Mocap techniques.
• Hyper-realistic virtual Computer-generated (CG) characters will be an element of the future of digital storytelling.
• One of the highest demands of Mocap is the gaming industry.
• Mocap is used to create 3D character animation and natural simulations in a performance oriented way.
• Mocap is also known as "Performance Animation".
• Its sole purpose is not simply to duplicate the movements of an actor or animator, but also as a process of taking and recording a human's emotion.

4.

• According to White (1986) and Ratner (2003), a similar technique, which is commonly used in animation production, called "Rotoscoping", was later invented in 1915 by Max Fleischer, a cartoonist; in an attempt to automate the production of animated cartoons by painstakingly traced the image of the live-action movement and captured film frame by frame onto paper in his series "Out of the Inkwell".
• In the early 20th century, this technique was used in traditional 2D cell animation by animators who traced individual frames of film to create individual frames of drawn animation.
• Later in 1930's Walt Disney and his animators employed it carefully and very effectively in 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs', 'Sleeping Beauty' and other animated feature-films. The technique has since developed into automated tracking functions, mostly within compositing softwares.
• In the mid 1980's, the type of Mocap used was really an extension of rotoscoping where an actor's movements were filmed from more than one view.
• Markers were attached to the subject and visible on the film, and were then manually encoded as corresponding points on the 3D representation of the character in the computer. This process is called 'Photogammetry'.
• Even though rotoscoping and Mocap are based on the same principles, the execution of the two is different. In the case of rotoscoping, artists trace human motion but interpret it with the model of the animated character.
• In the case of Mocap, human motion is copied and the data is directly applied to the animated character.

4-5.

• The temptation to use this captured motion and call it "animation" has led computer animators who practiced the art of traditional animation to regard Mocap as "Satan's Rotoscope" or "Devil's Rotoscope" (a term widely used by many though attributed to Steph Greenberg, 2000)

5.

• Mocap is now globally projected more into Computer Generated character animation. Basically, the Mocap system enables the animator to record the precise movement of a human subject in time and space for immediate or delayed analysis and playback, which can later be modified and applied to an existing 3D character model in any 3D platform.
• However, no matter how advanced the technology, the most important thing about Mocap is the actor's ability to act.
• This is supported by Grifter's (2000) statement that animation is not only about the timing, weight and 'character' of the motion; it is about acting and performance. This is one of the main reasons Mocap is regarded as 'Performance Animation'.
• From a more subjective point of view, White (1986) and Williams (2001) remarked that the goal of animation is not to create human-like motion, but to impart unique personalities to animated characters, to give them the "illusion of life".
• Both rotoscope and Mocap impose human motion on animated characters, which make them seem subtle and lifeless in comparison to those animated or hand-keyframed by skilled artists.
• This is because actors cannot break the law of reality and physics to fill in the Principles of Animation applied in a keyframe animation.

6.

• Mocap is used for games production, television, film production and education.
• Industry is increasingly depending on Mocap to produce fast yet realistic animation for their characters.
• The demand on gaming and feature-films enabled animation companies to allocate sufficient budget to apply Motion Capture application into their production.
• Mocap technology is frequently used in digital puppetry systems to aid in the performance of Computer-Generated characters in real-time.

7.

• In spite of the limitations, Mocap seems to have a positive response in the local animation industry and most likely the usage of Mocap will increase in the near future. This theory is subject to change based on the job market of the industry.

8.

• Most animators are often particularly concerned about the subtle detail such as slight nuances within a character's motion. This is because the nuances often define the level of realism in animation.
• Most key-frame methods practiced are difficult to achieve realistic motion due to the interpolation variables of tweening between keys.
• Realistic motions performed by human do not translate by those type of curves in animation.

9.

• Increased interest in using the information in Mocap data to assist animators in the creation of a character's base motion. If the animator required additional predefined movements for the character sets, the base data can be reduced or retargeted using a standard 3D application.

10.

• When adapting data to virtual characters, the animation will look more realistic in the sense that proper weight allocation manages the movements of the character.

39.

• The prominent twelve Principles of Animation by animators Thomas and Johnston (1981) serve as a fundamental guideline to most of animators, traditional cell animators, computer animators, or even Mocap animators.
• The Mocap animators, however, use these principles at different occasions throughout the animation process and in different ways than the other animators.
• A Mocap animator should consider the methods of application upon certain principles within the animation process. There are three distinct points within the process, the preparation stage, the capture session itself, and the post processing stage.
• Squash and Stretch: This is the first principle that cannot be achieved by a performer. Some people have attempted to add this property to captured motion data either by hand or procedurally, but the results have not been promising.

40.

• Timing: The performance, whether animated or acted, has to have the right timing to convey the necessary perception.
• Anticipation: A good performer can show anticipation to a certain degree, but is limited by the law of physics.
• Staging: A principle of filmmaking in general, the layout of the scene and positioning of the camera and characters are equally important in animation and live action performance.
• Follow-through and overlapping action: The opposite of anticipation.
• Straight-ahead action and pose-to-pose action: In computer animation, most of the characters' motions are created using a variation of the pose-to-pose action method, creating key poses for different parts instead of posing the whole character at a particular frame. This is done by creating keyframes and letting the software produce the in-between frames by some kind of interpolation defined by the animator.

41.

• Motion Capture is completely straight-ahead action; as such, it generates keyframes at every frame. This makes it very difficult to modify. Pose-to-pose action can be achieved through Motion Capture by selecting significant keyframes, deleting the rest, and allowing the computer to do the in-between as before.
• Ease-in and ease-out: Principles are based on real-world physics, so they can easily be achieved by capturing the motion of a live performance.
• Arcs: Another principle aimed at emulating realistic movement, which can be represented as a set of different types of arcs. When using keyframe animation, these curves are usually smooth between keyframes. With motion data, however, they are coarse and noisy, representing the natural nuances of realistic motion.
• Secondary motion: Secondary motion represents a lot of extra work with keyframe animation, whereas with Mocap it is a part of the performance. One has to be able to collect it, however, which may not be captured by an Optical system if markers are added to the clothes, but an electromagnetic tracker or electromechanical suit would not be able to collect that kind of data easily.

42.

• Exaggeration: The principle of exaggeration implies approaching or crossing the boundaries of physical reality in order to enhance or dramatise the character's performance. We must decide if capturing a live performance would be acceptable, or even feasible, for the level of exaggeration needed.
• Appeal: This principle applies for both live action and animation.
• Personality: When using Mocap, this is the number one reason to use a talented performer, as opposed to just anybody who can move.

Research from 'Animated Performance' by Nancy Beiman

Basic Details:

BEIMAN, N. (2010), Animated Performance, Switzerland: AVA Publishing SA.

Extracted from the pages of 14 to 26 "Design for Living"

14.

• Introduction to thumbnails
  Thumbnails (n.) the first ideas or sketches of a designer noted down for future reference 
• Since characters are developed in the storyboard phase of an animated film, can storyboards be used for animation thumbnails? Answer: No
• Is there a difference between acting on a storyboard and acting for animation? Answer: Yes
• Storyboards are not the animated performance; they are the script. Storyboard is mainly concerned with the WHY of a film (telling the story). Animation (along with layout, art direction, and backgrounds) is concerned with HOW the story points are put across.
• An animator uses storyboards in the same way an actor uses scripts and director's notes. The storyboard sketches show the character's basic attitudes and give the animated film-maker a simple and inexpensive method of exploring character interactions and story development in a film. Storyboards do no exist in the singular. They are always part of a larger project.

26.

• A good voice actor can create 50 per cent of the animated performance. This is particularly evident when an animated character is designed as a caricature of the actor who provides the voice.
• It is a relatively simple matter to analyse the actor's characteristic movements and incorporate a caricatured version in the animated character's performance. Many excellent animated characters have done this very thing.
• The drawback to this system is that the caricatured references may not remain relevant as the film ages. If the original performance is good, this should not create a problem.
• The caricature of Rowan Atkinson as Zazu the Horbill is amusing, but the caricature is not essential to the performance; Zazu will remain amusing even if the audience is not familiar with the actor's other work.

28.

• When sound film became the standard in the late 1920s there was a lengthy period of trial and error where animators attempted different methods of portraying mouth movement for dialogue scenes.
• Mouth movement was seen as primary, or the most important action in a dialogue scene and drawn in laborious detail. As a result every mouth shape was emphasised equally and handled independently from the body action, which led to grotesque facial distortions.
• Animated performance took a quantum leap forward when animators at the Walt Disney Studio discovered that dialogue animation was in fact secondary action, and that dialogue delivery was 'put over' by body movement and attitudes rather than over-analysed mouth shapes.
• In The Delivery Boy (1931), the body action is used to create the character performances. The mouth shapes are underplayed and were clearly added after the action was blocked in.

29.

• The Disney animators began to animate body action first in dialogue scenes, using the soundtrack as a rough timing aid. Mouths would be added later after the character acting was improved.
• This approach eliminated the over-animated 1920s mouths and made the performances more believable and naturalistic.
• Fleischer Studios animator Shamus Culhane retrained at Disney to learn the new animation techniques.
• "...discovered at Disney's that there was a definite need for Body English. The louder the volume, the more violent the effort of the body to produce it. The size of the mouth was a very minor contribution to the end result..." -- Shamus Culhane, Animation: From Script to Screen

34.

• Remember that animation acting is movement with a purpose.
• A common animation error is to have the character changing body attitudes so often that there is literally a new pose for each new word.
• Over-animated action is every word and pose in this scene is equally emphasised resulting in frantic and over-animated action that confuses and tires the viewer.
• Animated dialogue is best performed by using key poses for dialogue phrases, rather than for individual words. This is why the system of blocking body system of blocking body action first and adding the mouths laters works so well. Fewer, well chosen poses lead to clearer action.
• Phrasing the action means that key poses will change in relation to a sentence, or partial sentence, rather than to individual words. Two basic attitudes might be all that is needed for a scene; body action moves between them, and secondary action on head, arms, and mouth combines with facial expression to vary the timing and minimise the chance of 'floating animation'. A 'moving hold' also keeps the animation form popping abruptly between key poses.

200.

• Animator/director Jamaal Bradley directed the Meet the Demoman short and co-directed the Meet the Spy short with Andrew Burke and Aaron Halifax for Valve Studios' Team Fortress 2 video game (2007). Here Jamaal describes how he uses a combination of writing, thumbnailing, and live-action reference to block the acting:
• "Once I have an understanding of the characters' behaviour and am fully aware of the context of the sequence I can start to plan my animation."
• "Not only do I take note of what is being said, but I also track where the breaths are taking place in the dialogue as well as pauses for thought... I feel this is important because your body reacts in different ways when you are speaking and breathing. I study this until I know it verbatim."
• "... thumbnailing the key poses that I want to hit. I usually have a broad idea of how I want the acting to be so these poses let me visualise what the character will be doing before I shoot my reference. It is kind of like jotting down notes before writing a story."
• "... third step before I start pushing pixels around is shooting my reference. This is just a loose blueprint of my acting choices. I shoot reference for a good amount of time so that I can get different choices that may go beyond my thumbnails or reinforce them."
• "The key word is "reference"... My animation may take a different shape because there will be several ideas that sprout form the footage. This may seem like a lot of planning but I have found that when you can work in production you have to cut down on the amount of time you spend reworking ideas because your vision wasn't clear and completely off base from what the director and supervisor were expecting. Seventy per cent of planning will make your animation go smoother in my experience."

226.

• Video game characters work within a time frame that is set by the player rather than the animator. The player is an unscripted additional character in the scenario; video games are interactive by nature.
• Video games once featured mostly simple repeat cycle animation. Games have more recently been incorporating more and more narrative into their structure.
• This is a challenging prospect since character powers and the pace of the game are directly related to the skills of the player, and scenes cannot be planned to run identically each time as in a linear story.
• Cutscenes or in-game cinematics reward the player for completing tasks and build character and story development. 
• Do games animators need the same acting skills as a feature or television animator?
  "... I would recommend ANY animator to learn acting skills to enhance their understanding of human movement. There will be 'go to' people for certain acting and action shots because not everyone has the same level of skill in every venue of animation, but there will be times that you have to step up and do various animation styles. With that being said the lines are becoming more and more blurred as technology advances. Some game studios have the same number of people working on a project as the award-winning feature houses... Good animation is good animation no matter the industry."

227.

• What is your opinion of games stories? Do you see them becoming sufficiently complex to develop strong characters, similar to those in a film? Has this already happened?
  "Video games have come a long way and the stories have become deeper. The hardest thing for game storytelling is incorporating a good story into an interactive world without taking the player out or disrupting the experience. The characters are complex, but how do you really show the depth of this simulated human and push that into the player's mind; actually making the player believe they are that person? Some games have done this with success and some have failed. Telling stories outside of the game and keeping it within the realm of the product opens an entire new experience for the players and even lets people who do not play games enjoy the world and characters.
  
  Storytelling is definitely getting better in games and most studious are trying to push the envelope in this area. Many feature houses are trying to incorporate making games and films simultaneously. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I see bigger signs of most production houses working together and building bigger projects that will be story heavy. Many games designers approach their development as an interactive cinema experience and have created some fantastic results. In due time games and film will have the same quality of character and animation."
• "We never thought of the characters as drawings. We thought of them as living creatures." - Chuck Jones, 1976

Note to self: Perhaps make an attempt to contact and interview Jamaal Bradley and ask him a few questions on topic.