Cage, who is fond of saying he is in the business of "creating emotion," is best known as a video game designer. A few years ago, his studio, Quantic Dream, released its first major title, "Indigo Prophecy"; it went on to sell more than 700,000 copies.

The success, Cage recently explained, was spurred by the game's open-endedness: in "Indigo," plotlines spill, amorphously, in several directions, none exactly wrong and none exactly right. Audiences are forced to view each level dynamically. But shortly after "Indigo" was launched, Cage began to receive complaints about the game's aesthetic realism, which one reviewer labeled, disparagingly, "atmospheric, but not stellar." The most significant flaw was the face of Lucas Kane, the hero of "Indigo Prophecy." In some scenes, Kane's face looked wooden; in others, the muscles around his mouth moved too much, giving him an eerie, reptilian quality.

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