Keep a Straight Face

Resting faces differ, so it measures yours first

Plenty of people sit at 0.4 on the smile blendshapes doing absolutely nothing. A fixed threshold either eliminates them the instant the round starts, or has to be set so high that a deadpan player can grin freely.

So the game spends a second measuring your neutral face and scores everything relative to it — using the median, because one frame where you blink or the detector jumps would drag a mean and skew the whole round. There's a test for exactly that: a player resting at 0.40 still scores 0.000, while the raw value would already be above the threshold.

One frame is not a laugh

Blendshape scores flicker, and a single noisy frame ending a forty-second run is infuriating. The meter integrates: it fills while you're smiling and drains while you recover, and it fills faster than it drains. A quarter-second twitch costs you a third of the bar and then clears; a real laugh costs you the round in about two-thirds of a second.

It watches your eyes, not just your mouth

A genuine smile squints the eyes and raises the cheeks — the Duchenne markers. Weighting cheekSquint and eyeSquint alongside mouthSmile makes the meter much harder to cheat by simply holding your mouth still while your face gives you away.

The jokes escalate

Four tiers. A round that opens at maximum silliness has nowhere to go, and one that stays mild is a staring contest. The hold time tightens from six seconds to two as you survive, so the pressure builds without the content needing to get louder. Each tier is shuffled and walked through rather than sampled randomly — seeing the same line twice in one round breaks it completely.