Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture
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Games and AI: Paths, Challenges, Critique
No full textIn 2006, the first-person shooter F.E.A.R. makes headlines in the gaming world. One feature in particular attracts much attention: the non-playable characters seem to behave intelligently to a degree yet unseen in computer games. From earlier productions like No One Lives Forever 1 & 2 (2000, 2002), players were already familiar with NPCs that are able to seek cover under fire and to leave it at random in order to shoot back at the player. In F.E.A.R. that happens too, but in a much more realistic manner. Computer-controlled enemies attack players in a coordinated way. If one member of the enemy team comes closer, he gets supportive fire by his team members. If the player attacks them, enemy forces remain in cover until they are immediately threatened.Ten years later, an AI system called AlphaGo beats the human world champion Kim Sung Yong in the ancient board game Go in five rounds—final score: 4-1. The global community of Go players is perplexed, almost shocked, even though the victory did not totally come out of the blue. Already in October 2015, an earlier version of AlphaGo was able to beat the European Go champion Fan Hui. However, Hui’s playing level was significantly lower than that of Kim Sung Yong (2-dan out of possible 9-dan levels).As these introductory examples illustrate, the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and games can basically be studied from two perspectives: The first is the implementation of AI technologies in games, in order to improve the game experience in one way or another, for example with the intention to make it more believable, more immersive, or simply more enjoyable. The second is the use of games as a benchmark, a learning or test environment to evaluate, but also demonstrate, the current state of AI technologies. Both perspectives have gained enormous importance in recent years—technically, but also culturally and economically
How Gamification Affects Crowdsourcing: The Case of Amazon Mechanical Turk
No full textSince its very first appearance the concept of crowdsourcing has undergone major variations, coming to include highly heterogeneous phenomena such as Google’s data mining, exchanges on sharing economy platforms (e.g. Airbnb or eBay), contents production within creative communities online (e.g. Wikipedia) and much more. If one assumes a very broad perspective, it is eventually possible to extend the category of crowdsourcing to cover whatsoever phenomena involving the participation of the crowd online, as in fact has been done. On the contrary, I will argue that crowdsourcing – and in particular its microwork branch – represents the specific practice of extending outsourcing processes to a large, low-cost, scalable and flexible workforce, in order to generate greater added value for a supply chain. To develop this analysis, I will especially focus on the case of Amazon Mechanical Turk, and on how the operations carried out on this platform are primarily intended to manage the huge flow of information which spans across a supply chain. The practice of subcontracting to the crowd tasks previously carried out by employees or third-party suppliers highlights how crowdsourcing involves a reshaping of the supply chain, further extending it to a large network of individuals. Through crowdsourcing processes, companies are either able to replace or train AI, integrating human computation skills in algorithmic structures through simple, and oftentimes tedious, microtasks. In this context, processes of gamification are capable to put further downward pressure on already small piece-wages, as long as crowdworkers are rather willing to earn an even lower economic compensation, if it’s associated to challenging tasks; thus, to make a task more enjoyable through gamification could be an effective way to further reduce a supply chain’s expenditures in crowdsourcing, pushing forward labor exploitation practices structurally embedded in this phenomenon
A Conceptual Critique of the Use of Moral Disengagement Theory in Research on Violent Video Games
No full textMoral disengagement refers to cognitive processes of misrepresenting immoral acts in order to justify them. Research on moral disengagement factors in violent video games assumes that the digital representation of violence in video games is meaningfully similar to the cognitive misrepresentation of immoral acts that defines moral disengagement. Thus, the story worlds of violent video games are thought to misrepresent violence as being justified in order that players may morally disengage from their violent actions. This article challenges the moral disengagement perspective on violent video games by demonstrating its empirical reliance on a conceptual misunderstanding: The story worlds of most video games are not representational; they do not deviously misrepresent an underlying reality against which players ought rightfully to judge their own in-game conduct. Rather, video games simply present a story world that is as real or unreal as the violence that occurs within it. Therefore, moral disengagement theory is not readily applicable to the story worlds of video games. The article proceeds to show how this misconception leads researchers to draw empirically false and topically fraught conclusions about how players perceive and respond to violence in video games. Thus, the article challenges the moral disengagement literature’s claim to meaningfully inform the pervasive debates surrounding violent video games
Playing with Fear: The Aesthetics of Horror in Recent Indie Games
No full textThis article explores the aesthetics of horror that recent indie games offer to their players. Following a general discussion of how the audiovisual, ludic, and narrative aesthetics of indie games relate to the fiction emotions, gameplay emotions, and artifact emotions that these games in general and horror indie games in particular invite their players to experience, the article offers in-depth analyses of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Neverending Nightmares, Darkwood, and The Forest. These four case studies allow for an extensive reconstruction of the various ways in which indie horror games are designed to evoke uncanny moods and abject horror as well as the subtle interplay between fear as a fiction emotion and fear as a gameplay emotion, the experience of which may also spark positive or negative artifact emotions that in turn may lead to aesthetic judgments of various kinds
Study of Artificial Intelligent Algorithms Applied in Procedural Content Generation in Video Games
No full textThe Development of Decision Support Systems in the 1960s as Antecedent of “AI-Rationality”
No full textThe decision making process in a given game is usually organized in binary form and oriented toward a final and finite set of goals. This determinative action shapes the game on both formal and ludological levels. At the same time, however, the computer (or better, the algorithm) is also a decision making machine: the deeply logical calculus of the code and the program do not seem to know any \u27perhaps\u27—the system works (literally) according to the logic of \u27or\u27, which represents one of the central elements of digital computing. The decision rationality of computers (at the heart of computer games) is characterized by simplification, reduction, symbolic coding, and also by a dynamic of action and reaction (in the sense of decision and consequence). Such observations about the consequential logic of game-based AI inevitably lead to one grand question: Who is the primary decision maker in games—the player or the machine
Gamified Flow and the Sociotechnical Production of AI
No full textRecent advances in AI, computer algorithms, and automation applications across industries have generated hyperbolic discourses about disruptive technologies. Futurists envision fleets of driverless cars delivering human bodies, armies of robots taking over jobs, and advanced AI systems outgrowing their superfluous masters. Extending into science fiction, such predictions distract from scrutinizing contexts in which lesser versions of these technologies already proliferate and appreciating subtler, long-term implications. Particularly the interfaces of a rapidly expanding attention capitalism and its gamified operations warrant closer analysis. Here, demands for frictionless services and coordinated mobilities necessitate strict surveillance protocols and continued engagement with platforms that transform attention into revenue. More than the formalized and singular manifestation, for instance, DeepMind’s AlphaGo, AlphaGo Zero, and most recently AlphaStar, the current logic of accumulation desires the continued sociotechnical production of active participants in evermore data networks. The most lucrative and transformative AI systems of the future will rest on a gamified subjectivity, whose datafied claims to entertainment, movement, and income coincide with increasingly vertical corporate network structures.Attention capitalism appeals to sensibilities of entertainment and, in no small part, competition. Applications therefore feature score-based systems, monetary and nonmonetary rewards, and certain privileges of access. Habit-forming interface design represents a crucial strategy whereby corporate platforms inject their on-demand services, automations, and AIs with life. To guarantee uninterrupted consumer experiences and efficient processing of goods and people, service environments are increasingly designed around concept emulating “flow,” a state that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2009) describes as an “optimal experience” in which the constraints of the inner and outer world are suspended. Csikszentmihalyi derives his ideas primarily from athletes and artists, but anybody losing themselves in an enjoyable and challenging activity can relate. In Csikszentmihalyi hands, however, flow remains largely a phenomenological account, abstracted from social and historical context. A more critical concept of flow might follow Natasha Dow Schüll’s (2012a) “machine zone,” a space in which addictive algorithms, ergonomics, and built environments capture gamblers’ attention. Dow Schüll grasps rising figures of machine gambling in Las Vegas and elsewhere not merely for flow’s own sake, but rather as a result of bankrupt states betting on casinos to fill their cashboxes. In other words, flow must be theorized as a priced commodity, a history of deregulation, and a market that continues to show immense potentials for global capital
Games, AI and Systems
No full textIn recent years, we have observed impressive advancements at the intersection of games and artificial intelligence. Often these developments are described in terms of technological progress, while public discourses on their cultural, social and political impact are largely decoupled. I present an alternative rhetoric by speculating about the emergence of AI within social systems. In a radical departure from the dominant discourse, I describe seven roles - Mechanic, Alter/Ego, Observer, Protector, Player, Creator and God - that an AI may assume in the environment of videogames. I reflect on the ramifications of these roles for the idea of an artificial general intelligence (AGI), mainly hoping to irritate the prevailing discussion
A Feel for the Game: AI, Computer Games and Perceiving Perception
No full textI walk into the room and the smell of burning wood hits me immediately. The warmth from the fireplace grows as I step nearer to it. The fire needs to heat the little cottage through night so I add a log to the fire. There are a few sparks and embers. I throw a bigger log onto the fire and it drops with a thud. Again, there are barely any sparks or embers. The heat and the smell stay the same. They don’t change and I do not become habituated to it. Rather, they are just a steady stream, so I take off my VR headset and give my recommendations to the team programming the gameified world of the virtual museum of the future (one depicting an ancient Turkish settlement, being built now at the institution where one of us works). As much as this technological world seems almost too futuristic, it actually retrieves obsolete items from the past—a heater, a piece of wood, and a spray bottle—in keeping with McLuhan’s (1973) insights regarding media that provide strong participation goals and the rubric for achieving them. Moreover, the VR world extends the progression of game AI that occasioned the love-hate relationship with the “walking sim.” The stronger the AI, the more clearly defined the rubric for participation. In the VR interactive museum the designers want people to be able to “play” with haptic devices—like the smell, smoke, and heat generators—in order to heighten not only the immersion but also the perception of being there, or what Bolter and Grusin (1999) call “immediacy.” Indeed, Bolter and Grusin argue that the need for immediacy overwhelmingly takes over, regardless of the media’s intrusion. However, in the example above, the system fell short because the designers had not figured for someone laying down the “log” on the virtual fire and having it send a representative—that is, a perceptual, based on experience, intuition, etc.—amount of sparks and heat. Someone else could throw the log as hard as they want. The machine only senses log in or log out. This corresponds precisely with how we feel about phenomena, for machines and AI are based upon a model of intelligence which prioritises mental representation and symbolic manipulation. For Laird and van Lent (2001), in their field defining presentation, the “killer app” of human-level AI was going to be computer games. Writing a decade later in the same conference proceedings, Weber, Mateas, and Jhala (2011), are still responding to this original position, by way of AI in strategy games. Writing for this year’s, IEEE meeting Petrović (2018) also makes the case for human-level AI in games. What becomes clear, then, is that as much as we have wanted games to offer human behaviours, perception has taken a backseat in the extant models.As phenomenology makes clear, the emphasis on behaviour over perception leaves out the crucial, indeed foundational mode of intelligence: affective intentionality. Simply put, how we feel about phenomena impacts how we perceive phenomena as significant, inconsequential, interesting, etc. Thus, we should be asking if machines can understand significance? Can they feel any particular way about a game, a move, or the phenomenon of play? This becomes important when mental representation provides the mode of symbolic manipulation and vice versa. This occurs in and through a given game or gameified world’s ability to instill, simulate, or otherwise produce affective intentionality. We would argue that herein lies the crux of the mixed reactions to Red Dead Redemption 2. Similarly, the example from the virtual museum highlights the ongoing omission. Human-level AI should not just reproduce a human’s response to inputs, but should produce responses that a human would perceive. In short human-level AI needs to perceive perception itself. Indeed, this is the primary cognitive and affective response. Phenomenology does not tell us that; first principles semiotics tells us that. However, phenomenology gives us the means and methods to understand the response to affective intentionality and, more importantly, to develop the contingent hermeneutic (Merleau-Ponty, 2013). Moreover, semiotics will never encompass the materiality required of such a system, let alone the simulated materiality that exists through the interaction with the AI device and its interface, a device that bears the mark of the maker, just as surely as a bespoke shirt does. Thus, our paper will consider the production of affective intentionality and the ways VR games and gameified systems, like the virtual museum and Red Dead Redemption 2, facilitate, impede, and especially teach the perception of perception. As a corollary, then, our paper necessarily considers meta-cognitive processes—that is, the strategies for learning about learning—that occur in and through interaction with AI in games and devices (cf Hacker, 1998, 2016). Indeed, meta-cognition becomes a contingent component for instilling affective intentionality