Going Through the Motions

"You can almost see [the characters in Mass Effect] going over their stage directions in their heads: "Hello Commander Shepard (wave hand), I heard you might show up today (nod head), how 'bout those freaky aliens, eh? (shake fist, grr grr, slightly racist undercurrent)""

- Ben Yahtzee Croshaw, on Bio Ware and their abuse of this trope.

Animating Cut Scenes in a video game is not easy, and much of this is due to sheer volume. Even the shorter story-based games are longer than all but the most avant-garde of movies, and that's just for starters - depending on what the player does, they may see more cutscenes, or fewer cutscenes or different ones. It can be the equivalent of animating 4 Toy Story-length movies.

And there's another problem with animating video games - technology. Up until recently, in-engine cutscenes had to use extremely simple models, often with no moveable mouths or visible eyes. It took until about the year 2000 before motion capture technology (recording an actor's movements with sensors) began to be seriously used (and seriously affordable). And even this must be processed by hand in some cases, because the sets at mo-cap record time may have changed in-game since the mo-cap was recorded (or no sets were used at all).

Going Through the Motions is the corner-cut measure designed to avoid all this hurt and pain in the most commercially viable and time-saving way possible, thus allowing game developers to spend their time on more interesting and important pursuits such as writing, debugging, smoothing out gameplay and increasing the Third Person Seductress' cup size.

Related to Machinima, it involves small clips of gesture animation being predefined for all the characters - for instance, Bob might have a sarcastic Face Palm gesture, while Alice might have a hand-on-hip gesture, a raise-gun gesture, a stretch gesture, a hair-toss gesture and a fold-arms gesture. These can then be strung together to make a coherent scene; something like:

"Alice: Hand On Hip gesture. It looks to me that there's a foot-high wall over there in the corner. Fold-arms gesture. We'll have to find another route.

Bob: Sarcastic facepalm gesture. Can't we just climb over it like normal human beings?

Alice: Hair-toss gesture. What next? 'Alice, why don't we eat?' 'Alice, why is everything trying to kill us?' 'Alice, why don't we ever go to the toilet?' Hand-on-hip gesture. You're full of it. Points-gun gesture. Let's go!"

The practical upshot of this route is that a solid, believable scene can be patched together in no time at all for very little budget compared to the alternative.

Of course, it doesn't take long to realize that the sequences will look unnatural and stilted. The characters will have to express every Tropeular emotion known to man in only a few stock motions. Scenes will look repetitive in the extreme.

As motion capture becomes less expensive and game engines become more powerful (and as game budgets increase), the practice of Going Through the Motions for the whole game seems to be almost dead. Nowadays it's a lot more common to use stock gestures for only low-ticket, talky scenes which aren't particularly plot important - Exposition Breaks, player tutorials that break the fourth wall, things like that - and use full motion-capture for everything else. If you have enough gestures however, particularly character-specific ones, it can help establish characters when mixed with fully animated cutscenes.

Visual Novels tend to use this a lot, due to the combination of a strong focus on dialogue and a lack of actual animation.

Pretty much the only time it's completely avoided is when the director is convinced that they are not making a game, but making a movie. At that point, all they can really do is hire a large amount of motion actors and hand animators, caffeinate them, and walk up and down behind them with a large stick threatening violence to them and their extended family if they fail to portray your grand artistic vision. Hideo Kojima favors this method. That or work for Valve.

Not to be confused with stock sequences triggered by the player, as Victory Poses, spell effects, etc. They're something different. -


 * Final Fantasy IV had altogether too few of these, with often comic results -- particularly when a character spun around for lack of anything better to express their emotions with. This may be why Final Fantasy V was the first FF game to have a reasonable selection of these (The lighthearted mood that makes the exaggerated movements not break the mood also plays a part).
 * Part of FFIV's problem was the use of very small sprites. 16x16 sprites don't have nearly the expressive power of the 24x16's used in FFVI.
 * The DS remake, which used 3D models, actually gave the characters access to every other character's movements, except in the high-quality cutscenes, likely so that each character has the proper movements necessary for the various abilities given by Augments. One particularly hilarious use of this is when a Dancing Girl asks Cecil to dance with her, and he, the newly reformed, Bishounen, armor-clad Paladin, copies her movements perfectly, down to every wave, hop and hip thrust.
 * Even better, you can give Kain Porom's Cry move with an Augment, so a fully-grown armor-clad faceless badass man will weep like a little girl on command.
 * There's also the ladder climbing animation being used for dancing.
 * Final Fantasy VI used "raise arm" in so many ways it's mind-boggling. Hitting switches, saluting, head scratching, cleaning boots...
 * Final Fantasy VII had some very iconic gestures. Cloud's shrug, headscratch and hair-flip are very fondly recognized by fans, to the point of the last one being performed in a fully-animated scene in Kingdom Hearts as a Mythology Gag.
 * Final Fantasy VIII also had several iconic gestures, most notably Squall's Face Palm, which also made it into Kingdom Hearts at least once.
 * One that especially stands out is Cid peering through his glasses while giving an important speech. Oh, there's important exposition going on here? Sorry, I was mesmerized by the headmaster's ridiculous animation!
 * Final Fantasy IX does this; during scenes, each textual box is accompanied by a gesture. Played on a loop. This leads to hilarity, particularly with Steiner, since he notably shakes his fists up and down in front of him or actually jumps and has a tantrum: depending on how long you can keep laughing/bear to watch, he can stand there jumping indefinitely.
 * Similarly, Zidane will always go into his high-alert hald crouch position before a boss battle, even if there's a lengthy slab of exposition beforehand. Doesn't matter how long it takes you to read the text, he will be alert until the Fight Woosh.
 * Ditto Final Fantasy X.
 * Final Fantasy XI uses this heavily, at least in the original game and earlier expansion packs. In Treasures of Aht Urhgan and especially Wings of the Goddess, though, the cutscenes are getting much better animated (although seemingly at the cost of quantity of story-related content).
 * Dissidia Final Fantasy does this for quite a few cutscenes... and it wouldn't be all that noticeable if it weren't for the fact that Terra strikes a pose at the end of her walk cycle like some runway model.
 * There's one particularly iconic pose in the console games of Kingdom Hearts, as well as the GBA game Chain of Memories - a pose of Sora's where he crosses his legs over and puts his hands behind his head, relaxed. In a recent Birth By Sleep trailer, his Expy Ven also uses the pose. The game on the DS has to use Going Through the Motions. By the time you finish the game, Axel's headscratch and Roxas's depressed glance down probably will have been burned into your memory forever, as will their particular ways of sitting on the edge of the clock tower.
 * Chrono Trigger, widely regarded as one of the best 2D sprite RPGs, still had to resort to spinning around for certain emotes, though much more rarely than other SNES RPGs. The attentive player will find a number of emotes are reused in surprising ways, however.
 * Parts of animation loops, whether cutscene or battle, sometimes get cut out and stuck in to be dancing or flirting etc.
 * Seiken Densetsu 3 manages to get through a good many cutscenes like this while still looking believable. The only really jarring one is the "push" animation, which gets recycled as trying to shove one's way past something and even picking flowers.
 * For main characters, sure, but the vast majority of human NPCs, especially those who never fight, get no frames of animation whatsoever beyond walking in the four main directions. Every ounce of visible emotion from these characters comes in the form of jumping or spinning (made even weirder by the fact that the main characters almost never jump or spin.)
 * The Playstation RPG Legend of Legaia has gestures for happiness, sadness, excitement, anger/defiance, and what have you for the three main characters. They're thankfully unique enough to reflect that character's personality.
 * City of Heroes started including cutscenes in Issue 6, making use of the game's existing library of Emote Animations for the motions.
 * This was also used for the advertisement for the recently released Mac version, which parodied the Mac VS PC ads.
 * Tales of Symphonia is very guilty of this. From Colette's arm pump, Lloyd's wild arm gesture, Zelos waving his arm up and down as he speaks, to Kratos' quickdraw sword slashes, you see each motion SEVERAL times during the game.
 * The sequel does as well, though it is avoided during major cutscenes, which use motion-capture.
 * Guild Wars uses the built in emote system in order to make the animations in their cutscenes. Cutscenes for the later installments did have arguably better animation, and Nightfall's release did allow for basic lip-synching for all cutscenes, even those of the previous installments.
 * Grandia I, Grandia II, Grandia III and Grandia Xtreme, i.e. every single Grandia game has been full of this.
 * Golden Sun is one of the more pathetic examples of this. Yes, it's a Gameboy Advance game, but when every emotional reaction is represented by jumping up and down... There is even a scene in the first game where the two main-characters try to explain that the world is going to end and stuff by running around and jumping.
 * Luckily they still have Emotion Speechbubbles.
 * Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney is notorious for this, to the point some of Phoenix's movements have entered the wider nerd sphere. The writing is more than capable of carrying the emotions across, however, and most of the central characters have a fairly wide palette of actions. One character, Marvin Grossberg, only has two motions due to another reason for the use of this trope - they ran out of cartridge space, though this improves in the third game...
 * Gumshoe on the other hand LOST animations between the first and second game.
 * Larry lost one on his way to the third game, but it was nothing more than a slight modification to one of his other poses, so it wasn't noticeable. Plus he has a large amount of animation anyway.
 * Payne's forehead tap is such a recognisable part of the character that it is the only motion he does in his cameo in Investigations.
 * Ghost Trick combines the Phoenix Wright method with the movements of the characters' less-detailed sprites. Minor characters like the prison guards may only have one or two faces, but can have their sprites move more dramatically and uniquely.
 * A lot of early Bioware games did this, such as Knights of the Old Republic (where everyone in the game expresses misery, no matter how mild, by grabbing their head and shaking) and Neverwinter Nights. Even their otherwise incredible opus, Mass Effect, there are still generic motions, although, to be honest, they are a lot less noticeable.
 * Mass Effect has one that many characters use, a generic "I'm a little confused" animation that even Shepard does sometimes, involving a small shrug and the character awkwardly rubbing the back of their neck. This one is notable because there's a small sidequest where you have to keep an NPC talking for as long as possible, and the quest-giver tells you to press him on subjects that make him nervous so he'll try to dance around the issue and talk more. The tic to watch for? The NPC rubs the back of his neck when he's nervous.
 * Knights of the Old Republic features a standard script animation where the characters gesture with their hands. They use this extensively during conversation. Because the characters are rendered with weapons in hand, this can get unnerving. There's nothing quite like seeing Carth Onasi, Guns Akimbo fighter extraordinare, talking to you while waving a pair of blasters around wildly. Especially when he's angry at you. More amusingly, performing the 'bow' animation with a sword in hand results in the character impaling their own head.
 * Early in KOTOR 2, the Exile relinquishes her lightsaber to the Jedi Council... by apparently stabbing the guy she's giving it to. Who grabs the 'saber by the cuts-through-anything blade.
 * That depends on what you choose to have the Exile do. Most of the ways that happens will have the Exile stabbing her lightsaber into the monolith there, and then walking away.
 * Both KOTORs have lots of motions doing double- to triple-duty. The same animation is used for cheering, dancing, and being powered up.
 * Bioware's Dragon Age does this very weirdly. The characters mostly move very naturally... except that everyone loves to cross their arms while talking. And then uncross them. And then cross them again. In some longer conversations, you may see arms cross and uncross three times. Even better, rarely the game's timing gets a little too predictable, and multiple character will start doing it in sequence, which rather kills the drama.
 * There's one action in Jade Empire where the character sort of raises their right arm, as if in benediction, and wave it back and forth and up and down in front of them. This not only looks ridiculous, everybody does it at random points.
 * Every character in the Pokémon Ranger series of games has a short animation that plays for a few seconds if they're standing around for long enough. This can get rather comical when, for example, a villain is hanging around, taunting you to go stop his master from executing his plans - and all he does is stand around, pausing every five seconds to put his hands behind his head in a laid-back manner.
 * Final Fantasy Tactics, despite being sprite-based, avoided this, with sprites drawn for every conceivable situation. There was a notable scene where one character impaled another character on their sword, which was remarkable since a normal sword attack could have been used. And, at one point, a thief took off his hat and jumped on it, which is probably the only time a Final Fantasy character's clothes have actually budged.
 * He doesn't just impale the other guy, he does a perfect parry and side step first, then stabs him. That 2 seconds is the most realistic fight scene in all of Final Fantasy.
 * Orange Fluffy Sheep's LP actually notes this. He realized that Tactics had a separate sprite for grabbing a bottle of wine, pouring it into a glass, and downing the glass in one gulp, while Final Fantasy VI used the "downcast" look for nodding, looking at one's shoes, and suicidal depression.
 * Final Fantasy Tactics Advance didn't have the same luxury as the first Tactics did. There were custom sprites for some situations like a few characters shaking their head to say no, but the rest were just recycled animations used from battles. Final Fantasy Tactics a 2 improved it a bit; one character's sprite shakes when he is freezing and he also spins in circles when panicking.
 * Drakengard averted this, surprisingly. Every cutscene is scripted, including the facial gestures and the characters talking. It was surprising for some to play the sequel and learn they had removed all motion, going with select character portraits for the facial animation and stilled 3D shots for what used to be the cutscenes. They must have lost money or something.
 * The facial expressions in the first game are actually pretty minor, and the in-game movements are rather undetailed. Drakengard doesn't have the best visuals in the world (and makes up for it with how twisted the script is).
 * The Harvest Moon series makes full use of character portraits during dialogue to to show emotion. However, Magical Melody took this trope to extremes with the characters moving wildly to express emotions such as embarrassment, joy, or panic, turning the characters into Large Hams. While amusing at first, it gets old quickly.
 * World of Warcraft gives the player-characters a limited amount of animations, which are often used and re-used to limited effect on Role Playing servers. Most can be seen (including the ridiculous dances) on the South Park episode set in the game.
 * Unfortunately, alternative forms (from one of several gag items or druid forms) often have even less variety. One model of a birdlike humanoid, however, actually has a lot of animations, including a simple but unique dance, a sleep pose (instead of simply using the death pose) and several others that are never used normally on enemies. And the item that transforms your character into this for some minutes is pretty hard to obtain, too.
 * The large number of emotes in that NPC race led to rumors it was going to be a PC race in the next expansion-- it wasn't.
 * Almost every crafting ability uses the same 'rubbing an invisible grapefruit' animation, from cooking to tailoring to leatherworking. Alchemy uses the same animation but has the character holding two flasks. Blacksmithing and mining use a 'pounding on something' animation with a hammer or pickaxe.
 * Psychonauts used this during less important exposition or dialogue cutscenes, but only sparingly. Some animations that stand out are Raz's "stand there in rage with gritted teeth" animation and Sasha's hair-flip and arm gesture animations. However, the facial expressions are not tied to the body movements. For example, Raz has a standard talking gesture that is basically moving forward a bit and shrugging. In one scene, when Raz is talking to Bobby about winning the levitation race, they play that animation halfway and make him smile, making it a hilarious blend between "I'm better than you" and "Please don't kill me". Also, the facial expressions Raz makes during Mr Pokeylope's reveal scene are hilarious.
 * Lt. Kirce James in Command and Conquer 3 acts exactly as the seductress example given above, shifting from one 'sexy' pose to another at the end of every... hang on, she's a real(ly terrible) actress!
 * Yeah, but she (Jennifer Morrison, better known as Dr. Allison Cameron on House) is a totally hot real actress. Forgiven!
 * Valkyrie Profile has a truly impressive number of unique situational sprites. There weren't more than a couple scenes that were made with stock poses. You could tell when crap was going to hit the fan by the use of Valkyrie's more emotional reactions or more dramatic poses.
 * The Sims converse with exaggerated stock guestures and nonsensical language.
 * The lack of variety of expressions causes much Narm in some Neverwinter Nights 2 cutscenes.
 * Super Robot Wars has very few actions that can happen to a particular unit on the map - moving, exploding, and "leaving". This leads to a few strange ways to set up scenes - when characters fall into a body of water, for instance, it's shown by them moving very quickly over the body of water, then leaving. Cutscenes also have to use the offensive and defensive support features to reasonably good effect. Generally, unless you know what's going on, just watching the little units dance around can look very strange.
 * It gets just plain odd (and hilarious) in Super Robot Wars Z where, after completing the Overman King Gainer plotline, the entire team does the Monkey to "King Gainer Over!"...which is represented by their map sprites, including the battleships, spinning and "hopping".
 * Original Generation 2's throwing of Dy Gen Guard's sword, anyone?
 * In the games that use the Squad System, certain ALL attacks invoke this when used on Squads that only have one or two units - it can easily lead to Narm watching a unit shoot or slash at targets that aren't even there.
 * Hell a Cyberpunk Thriller is one of the worst abusers of this trope. During dialogue characters constantly put their hands on their hip, play with their hair, throw their hands up... the two main characters go through each and every motion several times in the first minutes. After several hours of this some players may get the urge to toss their computer out the window.
 * Cutscenes in Gothic are very well animated, but everyday dialogue with NPCs involves about three gestures. Over, and over, and over again. The most common one is a sort of air-punch, is used on every other line and generally makes no sense whatsoever.
 * The first two Xenosaga games mostly avoided this, only using stock poses for unimportant scenes, and otherwise using nicely animated cutscenes... until the third game, at which point they changed the format over to oldschool textboxes-and-stock-animation for the most part, which was somewhat disappointing.
 * Animal Crossing has a various amount of animations and effects that are used to display emotion when the characters are talking. In Animal Crossing: Wild World, players can learn some of these emotions and set them off whenever they want.
 * Every character portrait in Starcraft has a few different motions they do while talking. This leads to people nodding about once every third word they say.
 * Starcraft 2 normally goes well, well out of its way to create realistic movements in pre-rendered and in-game cut-scenes alike, but most standard conversations display a surprisingly limited number of speech animations. Some, like  tendency to raise his hand as he speaks, become painfully noticeable.
 * Mega Man Powered Up has a stock set of emotive gestures for use in the short cutscenes preceding a boss fight - since most of the characters have the exact same body type, these animations are shared across all characters except Dr. Light, Dr. Wily, Roll, and Gutsman (Who has his own versions of the exact same animations).
 * Non-video game example: Space Ghost Coast to Coast, which deliberately reuses the same familiar animations over and over again throughout the series (in a deliberate So Bad Its Good). None of the characters have ever so much as moved their legs on screen.
 * The spinoff show Cartoon Planet had even more fun with it, particularly with Brak's immunity to Space Ghost's laser. Apparently he simply doesn't have any "getting shot" animations, and knows it, so of course it never happens to him, even when he taunts Space Ghost. At one point, when asked to perform a task that would have involved getting out from behind his podium and then asked why he wasn't doing it, he responds, "I'm not animated to do that."
 * Aqua Teen Hunger Force also often reuse animations.
 * The Disgaea series. Spoofed in Disgaea 2 when the characters realize that they FINALLY get a fully animated cutscene and thoroughly abuse the hell out of it. With a chaingun. (The video spoils only the good ending of the first game)
 * Every character in American McGee's Alice has this little "vanishing" animation they use every goddamn time you meet them, whether it is Cheshire Cat's fading out or the gnome's "twirl and shrink into nothing".
 * The cutscenes (besides the opening and ending ones, which are beautifully animated) in Heroes of Might and Magic V are painful to watch, as the only motions the characters have are their various spell casting ones. Every sentence is punctuated with a swirl of magic.
 * Expansions, thankfully, dealt with the issue and added much wider variety of movements - and also finally allowed character the get off their mounts.
 * The last three Bethesda games didn't even have individualized gestures, which isn't so noticeable when the monologue is delivered in 'Ye Olde Talking Head' style as was done mostly through Morrowind and Oblivion. But it's particularly noticeable in staging what's intended to be a dramatic in-engine cinematic, especially ones the designers felt were so important they had to straitjacket the player's controls to force them to watch. All models have the same wooden and vague hand gesture, elbows locked at their sides, delivering their body language like self-conscious amateur theatre auditioners. Even the celebrity voice-acted characters do this (it must make Liam Neeson wince to see the movement associated with his voice.) Any modder can find the vast library of idle animations the designers had at their disposal, but none imagined inserting those into the script.
 * Epic Games' early platformer Jill of the Jungle. Jill's 'look up' and 'look down' animations had her facing the screen/camera. Idle animations would post text at the bottom of the screen: "Look, An airplane! (look up animation)" "Your shoe's untied! (look down)" Also at various points, these sprites were cycled to make Jill nod.
 * Telltale Games uses this technique in their episodic Sam and Max Freelance Police, Strong Bads Cool Game for Attractive People and Tales of Monkey Island adventure games, presumably to facilitate their tight production schedule. It's generally done well, but a few gestures do stand out, such as Sam's "thumb to the side" gesture, Max's "twiddly fingers" gesture, Strong Bad's "rub hands (gloves?) together" gesture, Strong Mad's "point and raise eyebrows" gesture and Guybrush's "posing heroically while looking off into the distance" gesture.
 * In Sam and Max Season Two the characters learn to click their fingers, but it happens a little too frequently. Sam finally puts his hands in his pockets, to the delight of fans.
 * Tales of Monkey Island resorts to reusing a pair of character models "Fat Guy" and "Skinny Guy", to save on the amount of animations necessary for minor characters. While this is quite obvious, two characters (Bugeye and one of the Spoon Isle pirates) use Guybrush's character model, though this is much less obvious and you have to watch their animations closely to realize it.
 * Odin Sphere uses this, which is an acceptable trade-off for the amazingly detailed sprites it features. Though it does have its stranger moments: At one point, a character is injured, and his sprite shows him holding one arm. When he turns to face the other direction, he switches the arm that he's holding in a lazy sprite-flipping way.
 * Dreamfall unfortunately did not do this for non-major characters, causing a lot of unnatural looking conversations where NPCs stand completely stock still moving only their mouths.
 * The Last Remnant does this a lot in any non-plot-central cutscene. Most sidequests involve opening and closing dialogues with text boxes and stock animations, while anything that's part of the main plot has voice acting and (usually) motion captured animations, though even in main plot scenes there's still some stock usage here and there for minor lines.
 * Used for Foreshadowing in Digital Devil Saga. Gale demonstrates a common habit of touching his forehead whenever he's thinking. The player can later infer that this is because
 * The rest of the Shin Megami Tensei games aren't that good with it, even the ones that use 3d models. Persona 4 regularly uses Yosukes "Lean forward and wave hands" gesture whenever he says something with force, while Chie's crying gesture is so silly that the developers seem aware of what it looks like, and use it for her getting a bug off herself.
 * Devil Survivor indicates any measure of determination from the main character by him putting his hand over his heart, leaning forward and grinning angrily. You will see this a lot.
 * This might be also be a case of Fridge Brilliance.
 * Happens a lot in the first three Resident Evil games.
 * The Movies is a movie studio simulation, but in fact can actually be used as a studio for Machinima. It puts the player in the seat of a cutscene director: You can actually write, direct and edit short cutscenes (or long ones if you have the patience) which can include many actors with a staggering array of backdrops, camera angles and costumes. The game has a very large assortment of possible character animations in each "scene", but most of the motions look extremely exaggerated or contrived, making it difficult to make anything which doesn't look like a satire of itself. Still, with the editing tools at your disposal, and a bit of talent it's quite possible to actually make a movie that looks reasonably good. Some have won awards.
 * Banjo-Kazooie has several of these looping animations (particularly noticeable in Tooie). During cutscenes, Banjo will repeatedly put his hands on his hips, nod, put a hand to his chin, and repeat while Kazooie shakes her head in the background. This can get annoying quickly. However, the idle animations are actually fun to watch.
 * One cutscene has him passively nodding right before getting sniffed and then eaten by a dinosaur!
 * A classic includes Kazooie pecking Banjo on the back of his head and giggling. The second or third time around Banjo simply throttles her for a bit before letting her go.
 * The original Shadow Hearts was pretty clever in it's use of stock motions, enhanced through emotion bubbles, but Covenant had Yuri put his hand on his hip every time he spoke.
 * In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone videogame, Hermione adopts a folded arms position in every cut scene. Even in one scene, immediately after having her life threatened by a rampaging troll moments before.
 * Sprite Comics are bound by this limitation as well; Eight Bit Theater gets good mileage out of its "arms up" and "head down" poses.
 * Not only is it averted in the usual cases in Half-Life 2, the dev team goes out of their way to avoid this effect. At one point in Episode 2, the player can see squads of Combine infantry and support moving across a distant bridge. Apparently the effect of these half-inch-tall figures moving in lockstep was too "robotic" for the Combine (which is quite a trick for the transhuman troops, but okay), so they coded them to switch randomly between several walk cycles as they crossed. Details...
 * Super Mario RPG had hardly any additional frames for the characters. However, during cutscenes they use the standard walking, jumping, waving, etc. motions combined with sound effects to great effect. Usually, this was in the form of re-enacting what had just happened, in an effort to explain it to someone else. Its spiritual sequels, the Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi series, do the same thing.
 * One creative bit is when the "mute" pose of a bowed head is used to show
 * Every character in Sands of Destruction has one specific gesture to themselves which they go through when they speak. Yes, (nearly) every time they speak.
 * Obviously present in most second-generation Lucas Arts adventure games:
 * Monkey Island 2 has a few standard emotes for Guybrush, including scratching his head and proudly pointing at himself; and a few non-standard, such as jumping up in horror so that his hair flies off.
 * Fate of Atlantis has Indy crossing his arms and angrily pointing at someone, as well as Sophia's hand-through-her-hair motion.
 * Zak McKracken is one of the oldest games to do this: even at low resolution and few sprites per character, it gets a lot of mileage out of the 'smile' and 'frown' emotes.
 * Notably absent in every single Sierra adventure game, though.
 * Present in Fallout 3. Being a Bethesda game it has a lot in common with Oblivion and the like. This is mostly dealt with by characters not moving when you talk to them, though they can continue a few things like smoking or eating.
 * The few rare instances of humanoid NPCs not all using the same stock motions in conversation are almost jarring thanks to their novelty. The first one that comes to mind is in Fallout New Vegas, where the Courier can speak to a Hispanic Ghoul mechanic, who has some unique response animations when spoken to about certain subjects, most notably an exaggerated head-hanging slump that basically seems to convey "I don't know, but I'll say something anyway."
 * Left 4 Dead has a mixed bag when it comes to emotions and animations. Survivors have several idle animations, such as rolling their head and shoulders, wiping their faces, or picking their nose, plus their facial expression changes whether they are responding to another survivor or are trying to de-stress after an intense fight with zombies. However, every survivor character share these animations without any variation. The zombies themselves also have various idle animations, but when it comes to movement, they all move exactly the same (which the developers say they done on purpose since they consider the zombies to be like feral animals). The zombies also lack any facial animations other than their mouths sometimes moving.
 * Zoey has unique healing animations from Left 4 Dead while the other survivors share the same animations. When using a first aid kit, a survivor will wrap a gauze around their arm and then bend down to wrap gauze on their leg. When a survivors heals another survivor, they will make some patting motions from the face down and then wrap the gauze around the target's leg. In Zoey's case, when healing her self, she will bite off a piece of the gauze before wrapping it on her arm and leg and when she heals others, she reaches out to them from the chest down to wrap the gauze. In the sequel, Zoey lost her unique healing animations and uses the standard one, due to Valve reskinning Rochelle's model to Zoey, animations included.
 * The You Testament has characters often repeating the "checking the wind" animation.
 * Xtra Normal videos, at least the ones made on the website, either don't let characters talk and gesture at the same time and use stock gestures, or the creators are too lazy to bother fixing their creation. Either way, any gestures made will be made after a comment is made, looking incredibly awkward.
 * This effect is not limited to games. In Beast Wars Transformers, the robots' various transformation sequences were stock motions -- freshly animated each time, often from different angles, but with their body parts transforming in exactly the same way.
 * Legend of Dragoon's use of this was most painfully evident during the "battle" with Shirley. Every time one of the illusions she summons says anything, they do the same exact over-the-top animation, from Shana's hands-over-her-heart-before-bending-over-and-gesturing-beseechingly to Albert's waving-his-spear-around-and-pointing-it-at-you-imperiously.
 * One really noticeable instance in Sonic Adventure: During Amy's ending, she performs her boss victory animation, then abruptly snaps back to her standing animation once it's over.
 * Also, Sonic's idle animation has his eyebrows bouncing all over the place, and it seems that the person responsible thought nobody would notice. They were right that it's hard to tell during gameplay, but it's used in many a cutscene as well.
 * To the point of ridiculousness in Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit. There's some scenes which are faithful reproductions of scenes from the cartoon, but for a lot of the side scraps they use a small amount of generic animations, merely replacing the characters. Characters will fall over in the same way, they'll be taken aback in the same way, and get beat up/beat someone up in the same way. It's not just limited to the cutscenes though - there's also the Drama Pieces, which use a lot of the same animations.
 * The Doctor Who Adventure Games suffer from this to a ridiculous degree. The characters never stop making the same four or five movements, making them all appear like weird, hyperactive drug-addicts.
 * An attempt at an aversion occurred in Tech Romancer. That game had NO artificial atmospheric actions, somewhat justified by the fact that most characters are in giant robots, thus they wouldn't make idle motions. Thus, in cutscenes, no actions are made that are not already in the game. As such, one character tends to "disappear" at the end of cutscenes by using an attack that surrounds him in electricity, then jumping and letting the camera (usually) pan away before he begins the descent of his jump.
 * Skies of Arcadia, big time, and often accompanied by a matching bit of stock voice (the dialogue was not fully voiced).
 * Deadly Premonition did this quite often; the same animation was often recycled by different characters. One of the most prominent examples is an indignant/belligerent hand-on-hip, fist-shaking motion, shared by George, Nick, and at least one other male character, if not more.
 * Wild Arms 5 had this. From Dean's "rub upper lip" to Carol's "lean forward, fists clenched". Bonus points: each of the characters has a special default pose they regress back into when they're not moving. Unfortunatly, this can lead to such cases as Rebecca infroming the others that they have to save an orphan in a semi touching scene... then leaning a bit to the side and placing a hand on her hip in a sassy way.