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\u201cTo me, these videos hearken back to the fun, silly earlier aesthetic of TikTok that many people seem eager to return to,\u201d Maddox said. It\u2019s a pushback against the once-freewheeling app\u2019s slow march toward slickness and commercialism. \u201cAt the same time,\u201d she said, \u201cthey obviously take a huge amount of skill and control.\u201d They do silliness with a dancer\u2019s finesse.<\/p>\n
It was dance, not video games, that inspired Hoff and Szymkowski, who use the handle @loczniki<\/a>, to create their first game parodies. As specialists in a style of popping called animation, which mimics the movements of characters from games, movies and cartoons, the duo has experience channeling digital avatars. Their most popular video series imagines what it would be like<\/a> to have an NPC girlfriend<\/a>, capturing the strange quirks of non-player characters from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Hoff and Szymkowski discovered the game when it appeared in their YouTube searches for video game glitches.<\/p>\n \u201cAll the mistakes \u2014 the character getting stuck somewhere, or walking in one place because there\u2019s a wall \u2014 we hadn\u2019t played Skyrim, but we knew those would be funny to imitate,\u201d Hoff said. (After their videos began to go viral, the pair did start playing Skyrim, searching for further inspiration.)<\/p>\n Why do video game avatars move so oddly? Sometimes the humor derives from the nature of gameplay. In most games, a limited animation system is trying to keep up with the input of a player mashing button after button on a control. That leads to characters doing things real people would never do: crouching suddenly, turning rapidly in different directions, continuing running motions after hitting a wall.<\/p>\n While animators can help those movements look smoother and more natural, doing so often makes playing the game harder. \u201cGameplay animation is a lot of jigsaw pieces,\u201d said Melissa Shim, a senior animator at Riot Games. \u201cIn real life, when you stop moving, you gradually come to a stop. But in a game, that gradualness would take away from responsiveness, making the player feel less in control.\u201d<\/p>\n Many video game characters also have a floaty quality to their movements, as if drifting underwater. That has partly to do with how animators use data from motion-capture sessions with human actors.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n