it seems that we have some kind of high-level emotional receptors that reacts to characters.
There have been many efforts in the field of synthetic characters design to create a virtual character which evokes emotionally deep experiences. So far, we came to the conclusion that just visual reality is not the only element. Characters in CG movies such as Final Fantasy are not very appealing and fascinating. It might be because the image achieved certain level of visual reality and we expect the characters to have some sort of emotional reality as well. This expectation ends up in cognitively amplifying unnaturalness and unemotional aspect of the characters.

At the other end of the spectrum are low-res synthetic characters such as bitman and tamagocchi. the fact that those virtual pets really caught on implies that what makes a character emotional cannot be reduced to just a few elements. There is even grave sites of tamagocchi on the internet. It is a really exciting topic where an external system and internal cognitive process converge.

oops. i put some links on the comment and your blog setting seems not accepting embedded HTML tags. the trade-off is that it is useful and on the other hand might cause a problem security-wise.