Cecropia presents: The Act, an interactive comedy

Emotion trumps violence in new game; Former Disney staffers developing hybrid video game/film

By Chris Cobbs - Originally published in the Orlando Sentinel

Many popular video games involve a player in a bloody, shoot-'em-up encounter with terrorists, monsters or other frightening, heavily armed life forms.

Rare is the game like the hybrid video-game/interactive film under development by a local group of former Walt Disney Feature Animation staffers. They now work for a Boston-area firm that hopes to draw a whole new group of gamers -- players of both genders who would use their social skills to catch the eye of the opposite sex.

The new game, with the working title of "The Act," is scheduled for release later this year. It relies on a simple twist of a knob to control the interactions of Edgar and Sylvia, a man and woman flirting and possibly interested in a relationship. In the present version, only Edgar is controlled by the player, with Sylvia reacting to what Edgar does. In possible future versions, Sylvia may be controlled by a twist of the knob.

The project is the brainstorm of Cecropia Inc., a Lexington, Mass., company named after a moth and founded by Omar Khudari, a veteran of the software industry with a longing to produce a new kind of interactive entertainment that's based on an emotion other than the desire to kill or maim.

About 35 ex-Disney animators, working in a studio near SeaWorld Orlando, are producing old-fashioned, hand-drawn illustrations that will eventually number about 40,000. They are scanned into a computer, transmitted to Massachusetts, and then entered into a database controlled by a software program that makes the whole thing come to life on a computer or arcade-game screen.

"Our target audience is people who love character and story," said Ann-Marie Bland, Cecropia's president and chief executive officer.

"The game is sort of a G-rated, romantic comedy in which the characters, Edgar and Sylvia, interact with each other," she said. "They don't speak, but use body language to communicate: Edgar could dance, cross his hands and look up at her, or be bold and try to touch her shoulder. Sylvia may giggle, wave her hand, or look happy, like she's enjoying the scene."

Human interaction is never simple, and underlying the Edgar-Sylvia fling is a complex computer project with hundreds of pages of flow charts depicting how thousands of illustrations are linked to allow boy and girl to move toward a romance, or not.

Edgar is pretty much a hopeless nerd struggling to catch the eye of the sexy Sylvia, in a fantasy sequence reminiscent of Rick and Ilsa in the movie classic Casablanca. The game player, operating a simple knob-controller, can embolden Edgar by turning the knob to the right or slow down his advances by turning the knob left.

Among the Orlando staff at work on the project are animators Broose Johnson and David Nethery, who rely on their traditional drawing skills to invest the characters' expressions and movements with emotions, ranging from pathos to sympathy, that the player can see at a glance.

"We impart the illusion of life, so that the player doesn't think of Edgar or Sylvia as a drawing, but as a character," Nethery said.

In this cartoonish game of relationships, as Edgar tries to win a smile and a dance from Sylvia, the real goal is to get the player emotionally involved.

"That's sort of the Holy Grail of the gaming world," Johnson said. "We want the player to be emotionally involved with Edgar, who is cool in his own mind but really knows nothing about women."

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