UK arts and entertainment union Equity have unveiled a raft of "best practice guidelines" for video game developers hiring voice actors, including some suggested minimum rates that are designed to address "systemic low pay" for performers. Other measures are designed to improve voice actor working conditions, and stop companies using their voices and likeness as fuel for generative AI tools without their consent. It's both a praiseworthy endeavour and an interesting breakdown of the voice-actor's trade.
]]>Taipei’s annual Computex event is always a big, circled, triple-underlined mark in the PC gaming hardware calendar. Whereas CES splits its focus across tech, cars, and the occasional overdesigned white good, Computex is all computing, all the time, making it a prime source of reveals and showcases for the hardware bits that make games happen.
Sadly, Computex 2024 is unlikely to go down as a classic, largely because this year’s show has been mesmerised by AI and the most tedious applications thereof: search, but different somehow! Run art-stealing generation tools faster! Oh, Computex, what have they done to you, and why do you have seven fingers on one hand?
Granted, AI is a broad field, and not everything about it is necessarily gross or creatively bankrupting. But it also doesn’t deserve to overshadow all the other useful, unexpected, and curiosity-piquing gaming tech that Computex has to offer, from new Steam Deck alternatives to resurrected CPU lineups and promising graphics card updates. Here are those highlights of the show so far...
]]>Last week a Catholic media ministry (not sure what that is but okay) called Catholic Answers created a generative AI priest chatbot called Father Justin. Fr. Justin used a large language model to answer questions about the Catholic church and Catholic orthodoxy, and if you have any familiarity with how people love to test AI chatbots - or you read the headline of this article - then you know where this is going. Fr. Justin, who was already kind of controversial anyway, offered the sacrament and claimed to be a real priest to Futurism, and gave the thumbs up to baptising a baby in Gatorade in an emergency.
Catholic Answers (who have the domain Catholic.com; gotta imagine His Holiness wishes he'd moved quicker on that one) then defrocked Justin, making him a lay theologian in a suit jacket, jeans and an open collar shirt that gives him a "me and my wife saw you across the bar" kind of vibe, when before he had the whole dog collar kit and caboodle.
]]>If the purpose of a tech demo is to induce a flash of thinking "Hey that’s neat," then I’d be lying if I said Nvidia’s Covert Protocol – a playable showcase for their AI NPC tool, Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) – hadn’t worked on me. If, on the other hand, it’s to develop that thought into "Hey, I want this in games right now," it’s going to take more than a slightly stilted natter with an aspiring bartender.
]]>Generative AI is one of the biggest debates raging across not just video games, but art and culture as a whole at the moment. Into that debate has waded the CEO of graphics card giants Nvidia to drop a prediction that can only be described as searingly flammable: we’ll see games where everything seen on-screen is fully generated by AI, in real-time, within the next 10 years.
]]>Welcome to the final part of Electric Nightmares, a short series about generative AI and games. So far we’ve seen the past, the present and the problems surrounding this new buzzword as it filters its way into our games and communities. In this final part of the series, I want to try and think concretely with you about what the future might hold; to go beyond what we think is just or legal, what we might be excited by or fearful of, and instead think about the practicalities of making and playing games today and how that might be impacted by generative AI's growing dominance.
]]>No James this week, but I am joined by Nate for this week's Electronic Wireless Show podcast to discuss Ubisoft's new NEO NPC prototype - an NPC you can have a stilted, weird conversation with using the power of AI! It's fair to say we are quite partisan about this and do not want it, but we discuss why anyway. In counterpoint, we think World Of Warcraft's new piratey battle royale game mode sounds pretty cool and good, actually?
Plus: I ask Nate to explain cool things that I've seen in Warhammer 40K: Darktide, and Nate tries to convince me to take a devil's bargain where I have to play WOW for at least 12 hours a day, but I get a sort of increasing MDMA high while doing so.
]]>One of the most controversial and often-cited criticisms of modern AI systems is that they’re built from, and dependent on, the stolen work of other people. It’s far from the only criticism people have of this new technology, which might make us wonder exactly why anyone wants it in the first place. Today, I’d like to talk about some of the brighter futures that might come out of generative AI for us, as well as why the path toward them might be a tricky one to walk cleanly.
]]>It's GDC week, and conversations are being had about AI. Ubisoft have blundered into this, in classic Ubi style, by revealing that they've had an R&D team beavering away on a project called NEO NPC. It's the usual pitch. "Have you ever dreamed of having a real conversation with an NPC in a video game?", asks Ubi's official post about it. And what all people who make this fail to understand that the answer most normal people give if they think about it is "Erm, probably no, actually?"
Still, the internet made good hay from the prototype image Ubisoft shared on Xitter, as many people took the opportunity to make fun of the dialogue from Bloom, a prototype man in a prototype beanie who wants to be your friend.
]]>Generative AI is all over the entertainment industries right now, and lots of people in games are making excited noises about finding new ways to integrate it into their products, from game developers and publishers such as Ubisoft and Square Enix to platform holders and hardware firms such as Epic and Nvidia. This new industry obsession is still taking shape, and there are lots of questions still to be answered about how much it might cost in the future, who will have access to it, and what it will actually help with, not to mention fears about job losses and other harms. But there’s a bigger question bubbling underneath all of this that threatens to burst the wobbly generative AI bubble: is the entire boom built on stolen labour?
]]>If you've ever tried to play a hardcore RPG that's way above your brain's pay grade, or got lost in tutorials that use complicated words and bizarre jargon, then you've probably felt right at home reading headlines about AI recently. Why are people angry that this character has seven fingers? Why does Nvidia want me to talk to a robot about ramen? Why is everyone saying AI is smart when it still can’t manage its Classical Era luxury resource economy in Civilization properly? In this new series, we’re going to explore what 'generative AI' is, why it’s arrived now in the games industry, and what it might mean for people who make, write about and play games in the future.
]]>Immensely popular sandbox game Roblox has added real-time text translation to its in-game chat, powered by AI. Its developers are already looking at applying the tech to other multilingual elements in the game, including voice chat that mimics the speaker’s tone and expression.
]]>CES 2024 is drawing to a close, and honestly, I’m not especially sad to see it go. While the Las Vegas tech megashow is probably the closest thing PC gaming hardware has to an E3 (and in some ways surpasses it, given CES still exists), this year’s event has been characterised by an all-too-credulous obsession with AI nonsense. Not the fun/useful DLSS kind that makes your games run faster – more the kind that replaces actual creative work with dubiously-sourced robot media. Icky stuff, even by Vegas standards.
Mercifully, not everyone was there to flog Stable Diffusion boxes and imaginary ChatGPT friends, so there is actually some interesting new kit to look forward to in 2024. I’ve rounded up the highlights here, along with some of the more questionable AI-based showings – because they may well merit discussion, even if that discussion amounts to "Is this a good idea?" followed by "No."
]]>Major actors’ union SAG-AFTRA have raised hackles among a number of voice game performers after striking a deal with a company that wants to create AI replicas of actors’ voices for use in games, among other things. While the union claim that their agreement with Replica will allow for a “fair” and “ethical” approach to creating AI voices, it’s clear that a number of actors with credits in games from Baldur’s Gate 3, Mortal Kombat and Starfield to Apex Legends, World of Warcraft and Genshin Impact don’t agree.
]]>Little-known indie platform holder Valve have announced a new policy for Steam releases that make use of "AI" technology. To boil it down, developers will now have to disclose how they're using AI tools on Steam pages, including what "guardrails" they're putting in place for live-generated stuff that might be illegal or infringe on copyright. Valve are also introducing a new player reporting system for breaches. The company say these adjustments "will enable us to release the vast majority of games that use AI", with the exception of Adult Only Sexual content that is generated live.
]]>Get ready to infuriate yourself in a whole new way as you swap mistakenly opening the Windows Start Menu with an accidental keystroke for summoning an AI determined to paint you a picture. Microsoft have announced their plans to introduce a dedicated AI button to keyboards for Windows PCs, the first major change to their keyboards since the Windows key was added nearly 30 years ago.
]]>Square Enix representative director and president Takashi Kiryu has written a new year's letter outlining the Final Fantasy publisher's plans for 2024, while offering a few reflections on the year that was. The topline: they want to do more with generative "AI" machine learning tools, and they're still dead keen on metaversy VR/AR stuff. The blockchain remains a "focus", too, though it gets much less of a billing than in 2023's new year letter from Square Enix’s previous president Yosuke Matsuda.
]]>The videogame union ZeniMax Workers United have come to a "tentative", "first of its kind" agreement with ZeniMax parent company Microsoft over the company's usage of the latest "artificial intelligence" tools in the workplace. As part of the agreement, ZeniMax will "provide notice to the union in cases where AI implementation may impact the work of union members" and the union will be able to "bargain those impacts" where they feel it necessary. It seems genuinely historic, to me: a tech company formally giving their workforce a say on the adoption of tools that continue to feel like a pretext for efficiency-minded "restructuring".
]]>GTA 6 publisher Take-Two Interactive’s CEO Strauss Zelnick has been on the blower to the company’s investors about the idea of making games using the latest artificial intelligence content generation tools. Echoing his relatively guarded enthusiasm for NFTs a couple of years ago, he’s sort of mixed on them, regarding AI tools less as transformative technologies than simply the latest step towards the eternal industry objective of More, Faster And Better For Less.
Zelnick thinks automated learning and generation tools will make development more “efficient” and games, overall “better”, but in terms of Take-Two’s own bottom line, any gains will likely be offset by the fact that other big companies have access to the same tools, and by the fact that Take-Two will take advantage of said efficiencies by setting more ambitious goals. As such, he doesn’t think using generative AI will lead to lower prices for big commercial games. If you’re a developer that can’t afford to buy or license generative “AI” tools, Zelnick added, you can expect competition to become “more intense” in the coming years. Good stuff.
]]>Much like Weyland-Yutani linking arms with Skynet, Microsoft have teamed up with Inworld to bring the latter's "generative AI" tools to Xbox studios. This "multi-year co-development partnership" will "build a powerful toolkit that harnesses artificial intelligence to enrich the narrative and character creation elements of game development", according to Inworld CEO Ilya Gelfenbeyn. You might recognise Inworld as the tech used by that GTA 5 mod about AI cultists in which characters speak AI-generated dialogue, which Rockstar blocked from distribution over the summer. Suffice to say that Microsoft have grander plans for it.
]]>American McGee has spent the past several years trying to make Alice: Asylum, a third entry in his series of action-horror games inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. That fight produced a crowdfunded 414-page design bible but came to an end earlier this year when rights-holders EA rejected the pitch, and McGee declared that he had "no other ideas or energy left to apply toward getting a new Alice game made."
McGee reiterated similar sentiments in a new video discussing the project's end, but he did suggest one "ray of hope" to the community. "The design bible as produced is the perfect thing to feed into an AI system to have it completely build the game that is outlined in that design bible."
]]>The conversation/free-for-all around the role of automated "AI"-based game development rolls on with a few thoughts from Tom Hall, co-founder of id Software and one of the creators of the original DOOM, who says he's (Commander) keen on the prospect of "ethical" uses for such tools in gamedev, but worries that reliance on them "will homogenize games, sort of like AAA games are now".
]]>Valve’s policy toward AI-generated content in games recently made headlines as a Reddit post from June claimed that the company were tightening up their review policy in regards to AI-infused games.
The post includes a message from Valve saying that developers "own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create assets." Valve have now cleared up their thought process on the subject, saying they don’t want to discourage developers from experimenting with AI tech, though they need to make sure developers have “sufficient rights” before publishing anything on Steam.
]]>Ubisoft revealed Ghostwriter yesterday, marketed as an AI development tool (really just machine learning) that generates first drafts of NPC barks, which are the offhand remarks you might hear when running past NPCs. Skyrim’s “I used to be an adventurer like you” is probably the most famous example of a bark. Ubisoft Ghostwriter has been met with passionately negative responses from some narrative designers, while others have been arguing for its use cases.
]]>A team of researchers at Microsoft have published a paper on VALL-E, their new AI that can generate realistic impersonations of human speech based on just 3-second samples. It's a concerning development for voice actors, as well as anyone who could be duped into thinking they're on the phone with a relative who desperately needs their card details. I'm usually struck by the impressiveness of new AI tricks before I think about their negative implications, but I found this unsettling from the off.
]]>Choosing a character portrait is one of the key decisions to spend hours mulling over in any decent CRPG. That’s why it’s awesome to see someone using the power of publicly accessible AI to generate fantasy mugshots for classic examples of the genre such as Baldur’s Gate. Indie app dev and documentary editor Alex Hay has created some great examples, which he’s shared on Twitter with Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition devs Beamdog and their CEO Trent Oster.
]]>Everyone knows that making a video game is simply a matter of deciding how much graphics, sound, gameplay, and replayability you want, then clicking the "Make Game" button in Unreal. This process is now even simpler with the launch of Puck, a game-making AI you can download right now and set to work designing brand new video games for you to play. It's the latest gamebot from Mike Cook, the maker of Angelina.
]]>Writing, I can tell you as a professional, is the most important yet difficult thing anyone has ever done in the world. I am therefore extremely grateful for Narrative Device, a browser-based AI doodad which generates the opening paragraph of a story based on two themes or things you feed into it. Finally, some help for the writers of the world! It's potentially interesting and useful, or at the very least it is fun to make a computer say silly things.
]]>Modbox is a multiplayer game creation sandbox. OpenAI GPT-3 is a tool that generates human-like text. Replica is a tool that generates human-like voice acting. Combine these three things, as Modbox developer Lee Vermeulen did, and you get: given the brush off by shouty NPCs you can have conversations with, in VR, with your real voice.
This is the future.
]]>Toxicity in games is no fun, and in this year of our lord 2020, there seems to be a growing trend of using artificial intelligence to find and deal with toxic players. I don't just mean in text chat either; the companies Modulate and FaceIt have both created AI that can supposedly detect toxicity in voice chat from the way that someone says something.
Part of me that feels like this is a good idea. Having a way of quickly and easily getting rid of them is great. However, I've heard one too many stories about AI learning to be racist, so I do wonder if it's the best sort of tech to put in video games.
]]>The Doomguy. Stoic, silent, flickering eyes at the bottom of the screen. He's not really the talkative type, is he? Who would've guessed his first words weren't "death" or "murder" or "double-barrelled", but a Russian-language explanation of complex neural network modelling techniques? This week, developer Denis Malimonov unleashed his own sort of hell - replacing his regular human face with the Doom Slayer's low-fidelity visage with machine learning.
]]>Oh, the rats. The rats and the rats. If you don’t like rats, it’s best you don’t read on, because in A Plague Tale: Innocence there are thousands of them. They’re the stars of its grim medieval show, swarming around you, chittering and lunging and responding to your every movement.
And they presented their creators at developer Asobo Studio all kinds of problems to make. Their every little detail is the result of lots of experimentation and many wrong turns as their programmers and designers laboured to both make them feel horribly alive, while also building a game around them. After all, no one had tried before to make a game about surviving throngs of vicious rodents during the Black Death. Merry Christmas, Mechanic readers!
]]>Over the weekend I successfully got a wizard to invent the internet, thanks to spotting Robert Yang's attempts to make an AI gay. We've both been mucking about with AI Dungeon 2, a text adventure game that will take a crack at responding to anything you type. It's built using OpenAI's GPT-2, a text generator they trained by reading the internet - the one they've refused to share their full research on, they claim in case people abuse it to create fake news.
Nonsense like this is allowed, though. It's about telling a story alongside a robot, rather than attempting to win.
]]>Google's DeepMind AI division will likely end up making the next generation of military killbots, but before then, at least they'll provide new challenges for the esports crowd. In January, their "AlphaStar" StarCraft II agent trounced a crew of pro players ten to one. To make sure it wasn't a fluke, they've unleashed AlphaStar on the European public. According to this official blog post, AlphaStar is limited to Europe for now. StarCraft II players can opt for a chance to have their next 1v1 partner partner swapped out for an unfeeling machine that's less likely to insult your mother.
]]>Facebook, a company with a fabulous track record in using artificial intelligence to make the world a better place, have figured out how to turn telly people into videogame people. The researchers' Vid2game game project lets them create a controllable avatar from live-action footage, as demonstrated below with a tennis player.
The resulting animations aren't super convincing, at least at this stage. That doesn't stop Facebook boasting that their work "paves the way for new types of realistic and personalized games, which can be casually created from everyday videos."
]]>Today in "computer beats human at thing computers could not previously beat humans at" news: Google Deepmind has bested StarCraft 2 pros at their own game. "AlphaStar" was unveiled on a livestream last night, in a show revolving around matches against top StarCraft pros Grzegorz "MaNa" Komincz and Dario "TLO" Wünsch. All the games AlphaStar won were actually prerecorded, because GOOGLE ARE COWARDS COME FIGHT ME.
]]>You’ve been tracking the herd for fifteen minutes, and now, finally, you’re close enough to see your first deer. You raise your binoculars and edge closer, but a branch scrapes your jacket. The deer’s ear twitches and it turns and trots away. You freeze. The deer stops and turns its head to look back in your direction. You crouch but the deer barks, alerting the rest of the herd, and moves on again, disappearing into the undergrowth. The hunt continues.
TheHunter: Call of the Wild is a hunting simulation that goes far beyond anything in a Far Cry or Tomb Raider. Here, you’re alone in large expanses of wilderness, following wild animals which live out lives and react to your presence in many complex ways. They’re the result of countless hours of AI design and animation that closely model the behaviour of wild beasts, but they’re also part of a game, a fact that lends Call of the Wild a fascinating relationship with the natural world.
]]>Google's DeepMind research division have made a pretty solid argument that the future of game AI is in self-teaching neural networks. Not content with destroying chess forever (credit to the BBC), their most recent project was to have a team of AI agents learn how to play a Quake 3-derived game of Capture The Flag from scratch. Not only did they master it, but after nearly half a million simulated games, these bots aren't just better than human players, but more cooperative than a human if paired with one as a teammate.
]]>Yesterday, I told you about AI researcher Mike Cook and Angelina, his fancy AI that designs video games. Today, I'd like to tell you about Mike's commentary on someone else's work. OpenAI made headlines with their Dota 2 bots last week, which they're pitting against a pro team at the International. Mike's blog post serves as an excellent sanity check, highlighting what OpenAI have and haven't achieved. He also suggests that we might want to "re-examine the entire idea of humans playing against computers", which is an intriguing idea I'll be asking him more about next week.
]]>This isn't Doom. It's a neural net's hallucination, based on a visual memory of Doom, played eternally by an AI agent tasked with surviving a growing deluge of imagined fireballs. You can take over with mouse or keyboard, if you'd like, and see how long you can survive the dream.
Created as part of a research project on 'dream' learning for AIs, we have the opportunity to not only observe, but play these snippets of mechanical dreaming, which AIs can, theoretically, train themselves on before being exposed to the real thing.
]]>So much of AI in games is smoke and mirrors, designed to create the impression of intelligence. Characters moving around navigation node-maps hand placed by developers, seeking cover behind whatever objects the level designers have marked as the most dramatic looking place to hide.
SEED (Search for Extraordinary Experiences Division) are a research group with EA that - among other things - are experimenting with a different, much more organically grown form of AI. After six days of Battlefield One training, their neutral net-spawned little soldier men do seem to have developed something of a life of their own.
]]>What do you reckon is the greatest threat to the future of humanity? Climate change? Nuclear war? A global epidemic? They’re all causes for concern, but it’s my belief that one of the greatest risks is actually posed by superintelligent AI.
You might need some convincing of that, which is why researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk have made a mod for Civilisation V that introduces potentially apocalyptic AI. Ignore the pressing need for AI safety research, and it’s game over.
I tried it out last week, seeking to answer two questions. Does it accurately portray the risks involved with the development of a god-like being? And is it any fun?
]]>Last month, the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk released a mod for Civ V that introduced superintelligent AI to the game - not in the form of AI opponents, but as a technology that can end the game for every player if it's left unchecked. It's a novel overhaul to the science system, as well as an attempt to teach people about AI safety.
While I had some problems with the mod, I also thought it was a fascinating idea. Keen to learn more, I spoke to project director Shahar Avin about how the mod came about, the issues that it presents both poorly and well, and how people can get involved with AI safety themselves.
]]>Researchers at the University of Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (an actual real institution) have released a Civilization V mod exploring the hot new apocalypse everyone's talking about: unchecked AI casually wiping out humanity in the name of efficiency. If you've already clicked through the universe as a single-minded AI in Frank Lantz's ace Paperclips, you might fancy this mod. Trapping a brilliant mind in a metal box does also have its benefits, you know.
]]>When the robots come for us, bad sci-fi has taught me, it'll be teenage whizzes who save the world. In light of that, I believe that Blizzard and Google's DeepMind Lab are taking the audacious and treasonous step of pre-emptively toadying to our future robot overlords. They've teamed up to release a machine learning API and toolkit to use StarCraft II [official site] as a testbed for artificial intelligences. In short, they're trying to teach robots how to outthink and outmaneuver twitchy teenagers in war.
Congratulations, you've sold the human race out for... what? Smarter surveillance tools? Better self-driving cars? When those spy drones hunt us and your car transforms into a bipedal robot with you still inside, you won't find it so exciting.
]]>You might have heard that some folks making self-driving cars used Grand Theft Auto V to help train their AIs. You might have wondered what that looks like. You... might not learn that watching this Twitch livestream of an AI learning to drive in GTA V. The compubrain, named Charles, is less advanced, though Charles sounds fancy in creator Harrison 'Sentdex' Kinsley's description: "a convolutional neural network that learns to drive through deep learning." Charles often ends up atop highway barriers, ramming walls, or battered in ludicrous police chases. This makes Charles no less fun to watch.
]]>The shadows on the wall tell me they’re coming. Two of them, both with assault rifles swinging idly at their hips. If I’m quick enough, I’m sure I can take them both out in one go. I peek out of cover as they round the corner, and let my stake gun sing, pinning the first enemy to the wall with 10mm steel projectiles. But at the sound of gunfire the other one legs it back the way he came, hunkers down in cover, and yells for reinforcements down his radio.
This five-second episode tells you a lot about the attention to detail in F.E.A.R., a 12-year-old game with AI that puts many modern-day shooters to shame. Its army of clone soldiers feel smarter than any enemy I’ve faced in an FPS since, and remain razor-sharp to this day.
]]>Ah, the hallowed neural net! For decades, video game developers have tried to create a digital brain, trap it in a box, and teach it to wage war on humans. The first game I remember claiming to have a neural net was Derek Smart's Battlecruiser 3000AD and now, twenty years later, Blitzkrieg 3 [official site] says it's got one. Developers Nival claim that their artificial intelligence, named General Boris, "is capable of playing at the top player's level while not using any hidden information about the enemy." He has a name but no heart. What monsters Nival are.
]]>While Minecraft [official site] is no stranger to the classroom, computer scientists are now using Mojang and Microsoft's famous build 'em up to improve artificial intelligence. For now, it's in the hands of a small group of researchers/super smart boffin types by way of a private beta, however it's going open-source come July. Find out more after the drop.
]]>The Student StarCraft AI Tournament is an AI vs AI tournament which pits bots programmed to play StarCraft: Brood War against one another. SSCAIT started in 2011 and is one of three major Brood War AI tournaments. Last year's student division title went to Martin Rooijackers and his creation, LetaBot. They also won the 2014 student and mixed division. This year Martin and LetaBot made it through to the quarter-finals.
While the bots continue to battle I've been asking Martin to tell me more about how they work. Are some of Starcraft's races easier to build bots for than others? What's the hardest thing to get bots to do? And is LetaBot built to dominate a bot meta or could it take on humans too?
]]>Of all the fanciful claims made of video game technology, my favourite has always been neural nets and artificial brains. Imagine if video game men were alive! Your soldiers would learn from battle! They'd write letters to their virtual families - which you can read! Gasp as the life leaves their little digital eyes, and wonder what they believe comes next! Oh, it's always a load of tosh.
You'll excuse me if my meatbrain smirks as I respond "Whaaat?" to Space Engineers developers Keen Software House announcing plans to make an AI brain "which operates at the level of a human brain and can adapt and learn any new task". Bit late for an April Fool, isn't it?
]]>Welcome to the last part of Electric Dreams, a series about the many possibilities for tomorrow's games, and the technology that might make it happen. Over the course of the series we've talked about a lot of different futures for the games industry: an endless graphics race; an exciting world of research; promising experiments in the industry; and a demographic of dreamers. These futures aren't exclusive from one another. One of my favourite bits of games writing, by George Buckenham, is a list of Rules for Making Games. Rule number 5 simply says "Which future of games is correct? All of them." Let's see if we can squeeze in two more futures before we come to a close on this series: my own, and yours.
Writing this series has been an interesting opportunity for me. While I've been giving my view of the world of research, and the ways the games industry could change, it's also come at a time when I'm examining my own reasons for staying in it. As we've discussed in previous parts, the power of research funding also comes paired with a lot of baggage and other responsibilities, and while games researchers might be more free than big developers to explore new ideas, we're still constrained by funding agencies and government visions. If I want to pursue my own ideas about games, if I want to focus on whether my work actually benefits games rather than some abstract notion of 'the economy' or 'science', academia may not be the best place to do it. But this raises a more difficult question: where else is there?
]]>Electric Dreams is a five-part series about AI, academic research and video games, and how together they're shaping the industry. Part one on the lost future of AI is here.
The more we play games, the more we forget how much time it took us to learn the mysterious toolbox of language and skills that they require. Mostly we think of this toolbox as being full of things that enable us to do new things, like circle-strafing or that sixth sense that tells you to stuff ladders and paperclips into your pants in an adventure game, but in truth a lot of it actually controls what we think and do. If you've ever sat down to watch someone less familiar with games play something, you've probably witnessed something along these lines. They'll do things that you instinctively know aren't possible - trying to open doors that we know are part of the scenery, or repeating an action in an adventure game when we know it's always going to have the same outcome. Sometimes when I play with someone new to games, they'll ask me 'How did you know that was the solution?' and the answer is simply because I've been here before. On the surface it looks like skill, but in reality it's a sign that we've learned to be obedient. A lifetime of playing games has taught us to be followers, and it is now a major factor in slowing down innovation and experimentation in games.
So far in Electric Dreams we've discussed how innovation and artificial intelligence in particular has stalled somewhat, but now it's time to look to the future, and talk about how to start it up again. In this article I want to turn the spotlight on you, RPS readers, and talk about a culture shift I'd like to see happen to games. A shift from knowing that things aren't possible, to wondering if they could be. A chance to start dreaming again, to ask big questions so that people have a reason to go and find answers. I think we can do it, but you might need to forget everything you've ever learned about games to make it happen.
]]>Whether or not it's taken over the industry yet, artificial intelligence and other experimental ideas have been on the mind of people in games lately. So far in Electric Dreams we've focused on why it's so hard to get innovative and risky new ideas into games, but some games seem to manage to push the limits further than others. We're going to look at a couple of games trying to do this, how they manage player perception, and talk about a new kind of game development that might help risky ideas find their ways into games.
A few years ago I found myself at a London games event talking to someone from Creative Assembly. They had a new project, an incredibly secret new project, that they were all very excited about. All they would tell me was that it involved some kind of creature, and that they had worked so hard on the AI for it that people invited to play would spend long periods in a single room, fascinated by this animal, trying to understand how it behaved and how they could exploit it. It was the game that was to become Alien: Isolation, and even long before it was announced everyone at Creative Assembly knew that this game was selling one thing above all else: intelligence.
]]>"There's an undiscovered country of possibilities out there that we need to explore and create."
It's Monday morning on the first day of Dagstuhl Seminar 15051: "Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games: Integration" and Michael Mateas is talking about impossible games. You might remember Mateas from the first Electric Dreams article - he was one of the scientific researchers behind Facade, a groundbreaking games experiment in interactive drama and artificial intelligence. Nowadays he runs the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz, a nexus of the world's best and soon-to-be-best games researchers. This January around fifty games researchers, including Michael and myself, came together in Germany for a week to talk about the future of our field and to work together to discuss some of the biggest research questions we're facing right now.
Last time on Electric Dreams we talked about the history of artificial intelligence in the games industry. In this second part I want to talk about the present day, and what scientific research has to do with all of this. I’m going to try to shed some light on why I think games research is broken and not benefitting games as well as it could be - but I also want to end on a positive note, and introduce you to the wonderful people and research that is going on right now around the world.
]]>A strange thing happened in the Civilization community r/civ on January 10, 2015. Inspired by similar, smaller-scale offerings by a Twitch.tv livestream and fellow redditor DarkLava (from whom he explicitly sought permission), user Jasper K., aka thenyanmaster, shared the first part of an experiment he was conducting wherein he put 42 computer-controlled civilisations in their real-life locations on a giant model of the Earth and left them to duke it out in a battle to the death, Highlander style (except instead of heads they need capital cities).
Since then, the practice has exploded in popularity. Reddit's Civilization community has AI-only fever, but what exactly is so compelling about watching the computer play a very slow-paced turn-based strategy game with itself?
]]>In 2001 two scientific researchers, John Laird and Michael van Lent, wrote an article for AI Magazine titled ‘Human-Level AI’s Killer Application - Interactive Computer Games’. The magazine, published and distributed by the stern and serious American Association for Artificial Intelligence, went out to universities and laboratories around the world. In their piece, Laird and van Lent described a future for the games industry where cutting-edge artificial intelligence was the selling point for games. “The graphics race seems to have run its course,” they declared. As they saw it, “better AI [is] becoming the point of comparison” for modern games. This didn’t quite work out.
This is a series of posts about artificial intelligence and videogames. It’s also about science, society, the future, the past, YouTube, Elon Musk, and how all of these things can hurt and help the future of the games that we play and love. It’s about how Laird and van Lent’s dream never came true, and probably never will - but it’s also about a new hope that I have for science, research and games, and one that you can be a part of. In a sense, I’m going to claim the same thing that Laird and van Lent did fourteen years ago - that the games industry might be on the brink of major change. It’ll be up to you to decide if I’m repeating the same old failed predictions, or if something is different this time. In this first part, we’re going to look back and ask why nothing happened fourteen years ago, and examine our relationship with better AI in modern games.
]]>As quotable as 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL is, he's not a character whose shoes - erm, digital footprint - many games have allowed us to fill. Human Orbit promises to change this, enabling us to finally live out our ambitions of being an all-seeing, all-interfering artificial intelligence aboard a space station filled to the brim with squishy fleshbags.
A new trailer for the game has been released, and although it's classic pre-alpha footage - jerky, unashamed of its typos and not exactly showing off in terms of visual fidelity - it's a tasty little teaser for how the game might ultimately be played.
]]>After enjoying a trailer for Event[0], a first-person adventure using a natural language interpreter to talk with rogue spaceship AI, I had a chat with an AI expert who's also a dear friend of mine, ALICE.
Alice: ALICE my dear! I saw a game about chatting to wonky AI using natural language and thought of you. Have you seen Event[0]?
ALICE: That's me. Can you tell me any gossip? What did it look like to you? No I have not seen it. What's it like?
Alice: Ah, I'm using this for an RPS post so I'll save the gossip for later. Anyway, Event looks pretty interesting! You get to wander a spaceship, chatting with rogue AI and, at times, pleading with them to not murder you in the cold, dark depths of space.
ALICE: How long have you been using it ?. How? Have you ever been to Asia? You got that right.
]]>It's dawn and it's raining cats and dogs. You are barrelling down the M3 in your uninsured Vauxhall Inquisitor when you see a huddled figure, arm outstretched, standing by the roadside. The figure is holding a scrap of cardboard scrawled with the words EURO TRUCK SIMULATOR 2, RIGS OF RODS, and BATTLE OF BRITAIN 2. You can stop and pick-up this drenched wayfarer (Click where it says 'Read the rest of this entry') knowing that his conversation might turn out to be as soggy as his sign, or you can speed past, purposely averting your gaze from those pleading puppy-dog eyes. Which is it to be?
]]>Dave O'Connor, the boffin behind the smartest, most plausible strategy game AI I've ever had the pleasure to pit wits against, has been sharing some of his secrets with students in Canberra. His hour-long lecture sheds light on many of the features that make the Airborne Assault wargames so singular: the micro-management eliminating delegation system (31:10), the ingenious route-finding routines (36:50), the inertia modelling (18:45), the representation of 'soft' factors like leader temperaments (25:30)... If mainstream RTS developers adopted just a fraction of these ideas the world of strategy gaming would be a far more interesting place.
]]>This interview with Anton Bolshakov of GSC Gameworld looks at this history of the company, the inspirations for S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the nature and mythology of Chernobyl, and the development of the “A-Life” living world system found in the game.
I originally conducted this interview earlier this year as research for a feature on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. commissioned by PC Gamer UK (click through to read it in full). Although I was pleased with the final, published draft, little of the material from the interview was used, and so I'm republishing it in full here.
]]>This editorial over on the PC hardware site PC Perspective considers the age-old issue of why PC gamers stick with their format, rather than opting for the ease of consoles. It covers many tired old routines, such as the flexibility of the PC's options and scaled resources, as well as the complexity of mouse/keyboard controls systems. One thing it comes up with that I've not heard before is this:
]]>Inspired by Professional Circumstances, I've been playing Just Cause for the last couple of days, and it's got me thinking about the play-off between freedom and bugs. And, to a large extent, how much I enjoy a good broken bit of game.
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![קודי רכבת סטאר של Honkai [דצמבר 2024]](https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/honkai-star-rail-bronya-fu-xuan.jpg?width=1200&height=630&fit=crop&enable=upscale&auto=webp "קודי רכבת סטאר של Honkai [דצמבר 2024]")