Fandom & the Uncanny Valley

[dlgood]

Acutally, this isn't a post about how swell it is that Joe Paterno got Penn State back to National prominence and a Big Bowl. I hate Penn State. Besides which, that's "Happy Valley".

I was more interested to see the "Uncanny Valley" concept come up on ESPN's page 2, in a column initially about Madden 06 for the XBox 360.

Reality Bytes by Patrick Hruby

I feel like an ingrate. A decade ago, football games didn't have players with faces, let alone moving lips. The first time I saw the "Madden 92" ambulance roll onto the field to pick up the fuzzy blob of pixels that was my injured quarterback -- running over a half-dozen other players en route, of course -- I nearly wet myself in quivering awe. OMG! It doesn't get any more true to the actual NFL! That was then. Today, there's something about the new, vastly improved Vick that leaves me cold. Unsatisfied. Drives me nuts, really. And it's the same general principal that explains why, as a sports fan, the only thing worse than rooting for a lousy team is pulling for a good team that isn't quite good enough.

The term for this, from robotics, is the Uncanny Valley. Basically - the idea is this - that as a robot gets more and more "humanlike", the more positive an emotional response it elicits. Up until some point, where emotional response suddenly becomes strongly negative - whereas before we celebrated the humanlike qualities in what we thought was a robot, we now start nitpicking the imperfections that seperate the increasingly human robot from a true human. Or at least until some hypothetical point of verisimilitude where the robot has attained near perfection in "human-ness" and we can't tell the difference.

of course, this is all very much an unscientific way to look at our emotions. Hruby's column goes on about the specific case of the video game, but also the experience of a fan, and of perfectionism... particularly the way high expectations and hopes correlate with negative emotions related to the frustrations of those expectations and hopes. Exhibit A - See Boston Red Sox fans...

Or, as another case - the difference between how I feel about the Maryland Basketball teams and Football teams. And it's quite different. Maryland has had some very good football teams, although I was pretty young for the Bobby Ross era. For most of my fandom experience, Maryland has been a second-rate (at best) team in a second-rate conference. Even now, having experienced three straight ten win seasons in the not-too-distant past, I'm fairly positive even about the possiblity of playing in that dopey bowl in Boise on their dopey blue field.

But the basketball team... I grew up watching Len Bias play against Michael Jordan. I grew up with Lefty Driesell bemoaning Carolina Refs. (ACC Motto: Team in Blue Gets all the Calls...) I grew up with a premier team in a premier conference. Hearing stories about playing in one of the greatest basketball games of all time, and losing. Of having the second-best team in the country and not even making the NCAA tournament. Of being a team that was supposed to be the UCLA of the East... Of being the Best Team to ever not be ranked #1, get a #1 seed, or Make the Final Four. (Until 2001-2) yada yada. Suffice to say, there are expectations.

When the Football team loses to Clemson, blows a win it should have had... that sucks and I'm bummed for a day. When the Basketball team loses to Clemson, it's another matter. I've been to enough great wins and losses for both teams. But for all the pain that every football loss ever had... even adding them all up, it doesn't come close to how much it sucked when Maryland blew that 10-point lead in the last minute against Duke in 2001. It was like the suckiest fandom suck that ever sucked.

So how is this related to fandom. I have no idea. But it reminds me of the folks who felts "traumatized" when some story hadn't worked out to match their expectations. It reminds me of how little Spike's "bad deeds" of S2-4 looked to me when he was just being a monster (eh. it doesn't suck so much when the football team loses to Ohio U at home) compared to how much Spike's poor behavior in S5-7 bugged me when he was aiming to be seen as a man. (Gah... how can the Basketball team lose to Virginia Tech and not even make the tourney!!!)

Or how harshly some folks will judge one character while exculpating another character engaging in the same behavior. Our expectations. Our hopes. Our biases. The insane negativity of Maryland Basketball and Red Sox fans. Because, virulence of 'shipper wars, I still think I've seen worse from the crowds at the Duke games...

So. Anyone have any thoughts or random comments to share? Crazy fandom. The Iron-Bowl. Michigan-Ohio State. Character X vs. Y debates? Video games that left you cold, despite the technical advances. (Says the guy more likely to play Tecmo Bowl than Madden 06) Floor's open...

Comments

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

I think the same thing happens when any (perceived) potential is not realized.

Coming at it originally from BtVS fandoms, I really saw this with S6. Fans who were expecting certain things out of the Buffy/Spike storyline, thought the show was going there, and then going nuts when it didn't.

Or, in my case, massive government-major-based frustration with S7 because of how it had the whole "it's about power" opening, and then didn't actually deal with "power" issues in any manner recognizable to a Poly-Sci major who studied a lot of Sun-Tzu/Machiavelli/etc...

We're going through that transition right now in Cal fandom

Despite the three 10-win seasons, I don't think that's happened at Maryland. Winning the conference in 2001 still feels like a fluke - even if Maryland once did that regularly as recent as the 1980s. Heck, even making a bowl would make us happy. With basketball... it's more like the baseline expectation is top four in the conference and a sweet sixteen. In years when we have 'better teams', then yeah we want a Final Four. The Steve Francis team. The two Final Four teams - and let me tell you how pissed we were about that loss to Duke in the FF...

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

I think the big problem with fannish behaviour is how much it encourages people to commit themselves to speculative things about the future, whether it's specific plot lines coming out a certain way or the reputation of creative individuals being built up to the point that nothing they do could match people's expectations for quality.

I suspect that half the reason why Potter fandom gets so notoriously wank-prone is the length of the gap between books, and the consequent potential for such expectations to get built up.

[thelastgoodname.livejournal.com]

I suppose fandom also owes a debt to the intelligence of the fan base: with HP, or Buffy, or even sports, the more expert the fans are, the more detailed their expectations, and the more those expectations diverge from the outcome, the more irate the fans will be. Fans who aren't at all committed to the outcome (such that they don't know the starting lineup, much less any spoilers or how episode x relates to character development y) are probably also less committed to their version of the narrative.

[thelastgoodname.livejournal.com]

To really put things in perspective, check out this grand old statistic, on what Cal fans are now looking forward to:

"Over the past 50 years (1955-2004) number of winning seasons (more wins than losses) for each current Pac-10 team:

USC 39
ASU 39
Washington 37
UCLA 35
Arizona 24
Stanford 22
Oregon 22
WSU 18
OSU 17
Cal 15 (just 12 before Tedford arrived)"

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

What you look forward to? Is Tedford leaving already?

Maryland was great in the 50's (1953 National Champs!) and in the 70s and mid 80s, but we were awful from 1991-2000 so our expectations aren't hugely high.