What is the 'Haunting Valley' phenomenon and why does Minecraft challenge contemporary video games?

The world's best-selling game does not have hyper-realistic graphics: it works with Lego-like, pixelated blocks.

John brodersen

09/04/2021 11:00

• Clarín.com

• Technology

Updated 09/04/2021 12:28 PM

The phenomenon of the

"Uncanny Valley"

is an idea according to which the more a robot or a 3D animation looks like a human being, the

more rejection it generates.

In a context in which the current generation of video games replicates reality almost perfectly, the world's best-selling game breaks this trend:

Minecraft

is made from

blocks like Lego, but pixelated.

The

graphics

of Playstation 5, Xbox Series and PC come in some cases to confuse us:

Are we watching a video game or

a real life NBA game?

What makes us see a character on the screen who looks too much like us, as well as amazement?

Why do current “Triple A” video games, like art in Ancient Greece,

try to

mime

real life

?

Minecraft, at the other end, does not try to imitate reality but quite the opposite.

And yet an update from last year adds

such realistic light effects

(called "

Ray Tracing

") that they make the world immersive to a level that

makes us forget we're in a video game.

An interesting paradox: the game that nobody expected, the one that nobody asked for, added ray tracing to a world that never tried to resemble reality.

The haunting valley

A sunset on a Minecraft RTX server.

PC Capture with EVGA GeForce RTX 3060

The name of Valle Inquietante responds to a graph that

measures the reaction of like or dislike that people present

when they are asked to tell what they feel in the presence of an artificially generated human model.

What the robotics expert

Masahiro Mori

raised

was that when faced with robots with human characteristics, participants tend to react with pleasure:

Disney's

Wall-E

, for example, generates tenderness with their facial expressions.

It is a robot with humanized features,

not an anthropomorphic creation.

However, in the face of extremely human-like models such as androids, what Mori called

Bukimi no Tani Genshō occurs

: the phenomenon of the disturbing Valley, due to the fall that is drawn in the graph:

The problem is not new: the replicant of

Blade Runner

(1982, Ridley Scott),

The series of the Robots

of Isaac Asimov (1950), the robot boy of

AI

(2001, Steven Spielberg) are some of the works that during the century XX raised the particularity of this phenomenon.

With a

generation of video games

striving to make Triple-A gaming look more and more like real life, the "Uncanny Valley" phenomenon may already be at the point where it begins to

generate some rejection

: certain games are They look (disturbingly?) real on

Playstation 5, Xbox Series X or and PC.

Minecraft, at the other end of this phenomenon, is a game that

seems to have come out of a 30-year-old console with a diffuse objective

: although it has an ending, most of its players interact in a kind of parallel universe, a kind of second nature that is

far from wanting to represent reality identically.

Under this strange idea, the game created by Swedish Markus "Notch" Persson in 2009 became the best selling game of the world, beating

Tetris

,

Super Mario Bros

and

Grand Theft Auto V

.

Minecraft fiction, with Ray Tracing

The reflections of the lights are generated by artificial intelligence.

PC Capture with EVGA GeForce RTX 3060

Minecraft is not trying to be realistic, but rather it is trying to get us to take a dip in a world that doesn't look real at all.

But one of the latest "big" updates to the game is called Minecraft RTX and it

's almost a paradox

: the game incorporated

hyper-realistic

light reflections

.

Ray Tracing technology, which simulates the effects of light by artificial intelligence, was announced a year ago in the game and aroused

all kinds of criticism and even ridicule

: "the function that nobody asked for" arrives, the memes of the moment said.

Why add light effects to a game made of pixelated blocks that seem more lego in a world where video games want us to believe that we are experiencing something

"extremely real"

?

These questions, perhaps, were asked by the developers of Nvidia and Mojang, the proprietary studio: it

was a real headache to generate these types of effects.

Water, one of the surfaces where ray tracing is most appreciated.

PC Capture with EVGA GeForce RTX 3060

While Ray Tracing is a technology that generates reflections of light by artificial intelligence, one of the main developments has to do

with how light bounces off objects

.

And the objects in Minecraft are basically

all the same: flat

six-sided

figures

(cubes) and opaque colors.

For this, Nvidia, the company that developed this version of Minecraft (and that invented Ray Tracing), had to

redraw with Mojang each texture in

the game with 4 characteristics: "

Metality

or reflectivity", "

emissivity

", which is the quantity of thermal radiation emitted by a surface according to its temperature (that is, how much an object should “shine”), roughness and a “

height map

” that indicates how many levels of reflection an object has depending on which part it is illuminated.

All this was extremely complex: new values ​​had to be assigned to each and every one of Minecraft's blocks and surfaces in order to generate reflections that looked precisely real.

Now, "the" question: Why would Minecraft need real reflections, if it is a game that explicitly wants to show us that we are inhabiting a fiction and not something that tries to pretend to be reality itself?

Why invest so much effort in making a game made of blocks look “more realistic”?

Immersion: the world is not made of blocks

The lights and reflections, generated by artificial intelligence in real time.

PC Capture with EVGA GeForce RTX 3060

It's hard to find Minecraft RTX reviews that go beyond game performance.

What can surely be said in this area is that it is very demanding on a graphical level: you need a very powerful PC to be able to run it.

But this is not the most interesting thing about Minecraft RTX:

the game challenges the way we think about

gaming 

in the 21st century.

On the one hand, because the dissonance produced by their worlds where everything is built with elements worthy of a retro console together with the spectacular reflections of light generates a unique immersion: at times we forget that

the real world is not made up of blocks.

On the other hand, seeing reflections in glass, water and other reflective surfaces, but with

“pixel perfect”

bases

gives a life to the game that, until now, it had only opaquely.

It is true that no one had asked for this technology in Minecraft.

But at the same time, it is undoubtedly one of the most surprising applications of this type of artificial intelligence so far.

Changes in weather and the day-night cycle, a phenomenon to appreciate Minecraft RTX.

PC Capture with EVGA GeForce RTX 3060

Minecraft is a huge cultural phenomenon.

It is estimated that the game will grow about

4 billion square

kilometers over the next few years, about

8 times the surface of our planet Earth.

The world probably still doesn't understand how a game with pixelated blocks is positioned as the best-selling in the world, in times when Triple-A games install a

hyper-realistic graphics

standard

.

But perhaps it is this combination of

old school

graphics

 with lights, reflections, shadows and landscapes so real that allows us to

stop the Haunting Valley before it becomes unbearable.

In a 2015 interview on a late night show, interviewer Craig Ferguson told Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson that he didn't quite understand what Minecraft was all about.

Notch smiled and, after a pause, confessed.

"I'm not sure I understand either.

Minecraft RTX, on Windows 10. PC Capture with EVGA GeForce RTX 3060

Clarín

tested Minecraft RTX on PC:

• Video Card (GPU): Nvidia EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 (DLSS 2.0 On)

  
  

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X

  
  

• Ram: 16GB

  
  

• Resolution: 2K (2560x1440)

  
  

• Kingston KC2500 SSD

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