Half-Life 2 & the Science of Facial Emotions

I generally discount Gamespot.com as a greedy ad-overfilled website, but they do sometimes write exceptional journalism that surpasses most printed magazines. For example, their Final Hours of Half-Life 2 is a fascinating write up about the making of HL2, and along with the rest of the Final Hours of series is my favorite journalism series in game media. HL2 particularly has a colored past, with a release date that is over a year later and the reasons for are finally revealed (the developer was overzealous) and then a bigger issue, the code theft. There is also Valve's experiment in direct online sales and match-making, Steam, which I'll talk about in a future post.

My favorite thing, though, is Valve's use of Dr. Paul Ekman & Dr. Ken Perlin's work in facial emotions (the story even references Perlin's fascinating website which lets visitors experiment with facial expressions). Basically, Ekman discovered that humans only really have a limited number of facial expressions, and Valve used his theories to create an animation system that is the most lifelike of any we've ever seen. It kicks the snot out of Final Fantasy and Polar Express.