The studios are pushing hard on this. In order to get actors on the performance capture bandwagon, they have to convince the Academy to give an Oscar to a person for a virtual performance.

You see this in every frickin' video of Avatar where Cameron or the actors talk about the production. It's almost akin to a Bush-era media blitz how they parrot the same sentences again and again.. "This is not an animation --it was me!"

We cannot give an Oscar for best performance to a virtual actor.

This is a slippery slope. One of the entire reasons to use performance capture is to leverage the fact that it's all data. In a split second you can take the smile from take 6 and blend it into the nice squinting eyes from take 8.

Even the mere 'mapping' of a performance onto a character of different proportions alters it.

We shall see if their millions in marketing pay off, but I hope that there is no best actor or supporting nominee that didn't actually show up in a single frame of a film.

And I have worked on performance capture films.

I had 20k of stolen tech. The thieves played my xbox on xbox live for weeks. The SFPD only had to fax a single sheet of paper to Microsoft to get the ISP/IP addy of the people, they refused.

I used to feel the same way: Orwellian bullshit.

I know a dev who made a PC only title last year, who also thought tech like this was intrusive and heavy-handed; they did not use it.

They were cracked 6 days before release, and have held a top 3 spot (number of dlers/seeds) on bit torrent sites for games across all platforms for the past 6 months.

Epic has also said a week or so ago that within weeks of UT3 launching, there were 40 million attempts to connect online to play with pirated keys. (I'm sure they weren't all unique)

PC piracy is a serious issue. People say WoW shows us that you can make a buck and piracy is not an out to blame for your low sales, but let's all be honest, WoW is completely Orwellian, you play it online so they get away with server checks of course, but people have complained about their EULA before, it checks everything on your PC, has the right to delve into any file, any process, etc. People ignore this because they like WoW, and they don't want people cheating to ruin the experience.

So many gamers throw their arms up at these oncoming security measures, but they are only necessary because so many gamers pirate PC games. At FMX last week, I heard a guy from MS at the 'Game Maker's Round Table' say that the Gears and Halo 2 PC versions did not even make back the money they cost to port. This is an interesting paradox that I think no one really comments on. Gamers need to understand that because of piracy, unless a game can connect to a server and make sure you paid for it (like WoW), PC games are not going to exist much longer. Except for quick ports of console titles, and maybe Peggle.