Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 148

The AI being forced to climb Minecraft’s highest hills

Somewhere in Microsoft’s New York offices right now, an artificial intelligence is busy repeatedly trying and failing to climb a hill in Minecraft (2011), as if a modern day reenactment of the Sisyphus myth. This AI is being watched by a team of five computer scientists, and its many deaths are being meticulously recorded. Its name is Project AIX, and it’s part of a new open source initiative from Microsoft to advance not only games, but artificial intelligence as a whole.

It’s a project not dissimilar to the one going on at Germany’s University of Tübingen entitled Social Mario, the concept of which is simple: use the familiar world of Nintendo’s Mario series to create artificial intelligence that learns by observing and imitating each other. Like Social Mario, Project AIX also makes use of videogames to teach AI how to learn. But whereas Social Mario is based around a monkey-see, monkey-do approach, Project AIX is more akin to pushing a baby bird out of a nest and hoping it can fly.

As of now, Microsoft’s researchers have placed Project AIX in control of a character in Minecraft and asked it to climb the highest hill it can find. However, as Microsoft writes, “The agent [AI-controlled character] starts out knowing nothing at all about its environment or even what it is supposed to accomplish…It needs to endure a lot of trial and error, including regularly falling into rivers and lava pits.” The hope is that after enduring enough pain, the AI will eventually learn to avoid obstacles entirely on its own, without having been programmed to do so by its human creators. Additionally, the team feeds it incremental rewards when it does well, so it knows to continue that behavior. The result is a cycle of negative and positive reinforcement that’s meant to mimic how humans learn in the real world.

mimic how humans learn in the real world

There are two key benefits to doing this research within Minecraft. First, it means that researchers don’t have to build or repair a real robot and instruct it to climb a real hill every time they want to test their AI, saving time and money. Second, the project can be made open source, allowing programmers of various skill levels around the world to develop artificial intelligence on their own.

While Project AIX has currently only been released to a small group of researchers through a private beta, Microsoft plans to release it to the public as a free open source application this summer. The idea is to give the project the lowest barrier to entry possible, and it is promised to work with Windows, Mac, and Linux, as well as whatever programming language is preferred. Additionally, Microsoft emphasizes that although the tool is associated with Minecraft, “the platform is intended for research into various forms of artificial intelligence and is not a consumer product.”

Along with Social Mario, Project AIX demonstrates the capability games have to improve our everyday lives, even for those who have never held a controller. You can find out more about Project AIX over on Microsoft’s website.

Hacking Game Boys and sharing whiskey on the game jam journey across America

There’s something intoxicating about long-distance train journeys. I think it has to do with the fact that, these days, it’s non-standard. It feels detached from the cattle-like experience of air travel: passengers enjoy a luxurious amount of legroom, there are private rooms with bunk beds, closing doors, some coaches even have exclusive toilets and showers.

But it’s impossible to deny that it’s also an aging mode of travel. Trains are no longer the fastest way to traverse great distances, and can seem wasteful or frivolous when compared to the speed of flight. Fewer people every year choose to take the longer rail routes, reducing the money spent on the service by Amtrak and the US government. Surfaces are beginning to show this decline through wear and tear—hinges creak and things made to fold-out or extend can only sag limply.

Opulence fades, which is a shame, and yet when you’re sat in an observation car looking out the broad windows at the passing countryside, surrounded by the laughter and busy-sounding voices of a group of people doing something truly silly, it’s easy to get swept up in the romance of it all.

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I removed the Oculus Rift and returned to reality, suddenly very aware of how ridiculous I must have looked moments before. I was helping test a virtual reality game that was experimenting with extrapolating the physical movements of the train. The idea was to exaggerate the rickety to-and-fro of the carriage as you run across its roofs toward some unknown end. My brain was supposed to merge what was being shown in the VR headset with the physical motion felt through my body. When the real train shook and rattled it was meant to help me believe in the existence of the virtual one projected in front of my eyes. Throughout the demo, I was crouching to duck under tunnel arches, leaning left and right to avoid giraffes for some reason, and jumping over the gaps between cars.

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Train Jam is an annual game jam that occurs on the Amtrak train from Chicago to San Francisco in time for the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) every March. More than 200 game developers, designers, artists, writers, audio engineers, and people with other game-adjacent skillsets come together from all around the world. United, they make small videogames to the backdrop of innumerable corn and wheat fields, snow-capped mountains, and endless deserts.

This is Train Jam’s third year and organizer Adriel Wallick is in full swing, walking the length of the train’s nine cars, handing out portable 3G hotspots, explaining to non-participating passengers what all the laptops and VR headsets are for. She stops rarely, but does so to drink in the atmosphere of the event she has created, painstakingly, from the ground-up.

it’s easy to get swept up in the romance of it all

“It means a lot to me, but it’s hard to put it into words,” Wallick tells me during one of the quieter moments. “There are times where I’ll look back at photos, or videos people have [made] about Train Jam, and my eyes just start watering. I just feel so many emotions!” Wallick is heavily invested in Train Jam, both emotionally and financially. She sinks a huge amount of time into creating the event, locking down sponsorships, managing ticketing, and trying to teach an aging organization like Amtrak just what the heck she’s trying to achieve. It’s this effort that makes her “misty-eyed” when thinking about it, especially when seeing people carry on the relationships they establish in the carriages on social media, or anywhere else. “It makes my little heart swell,” she says before laughing. “I’m not going to cry. You’re not going to trick me into crying.”

If nothing else, Train Jam could be said to be about making connections. The physical journey itself connects two sides of America; the endured proximity inside the carriages connects people; the games created connect the whole experience to people outside of it. Wallick stands at the center of all this, and yet she still takes the time during the event to speak with the other passengers and staff on the train. She explains to them what a game jam is, why it’s important. “The way I normally explain a jam to people outside of the technical field is that it’s very similar to a band jam—where a bunch of musicians will get together just to play music and explore their creativity,” Adriel told me. “For Train Jam, specifically, we take it one step further and put ourselves in a particularly creative environment that tends to be a bit out of everyone’s comfort zones.”

As people come around to the idea, she offers them a “Fun Meter,” a badge worn by all Train Jam attendees that has a moveable dial to show how much fun is being had at any given moment. Fun Meters become a lovely expression of inclusion and acceptance of Train Jam as a concept. They identify the wearer as being one of only 200 among the 26,000 con-goers at GDC. They also become a person of authority at the Train Jam booth where jammers can exhibit their creations at the largest professional gathering of videogame creators in the world.

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I’m writing this piece while sitting in my cabin, watching Middle America pass by my window. Iowa gives way to empty Nebraskan corn fields, expanses of loam and dead stalks awaiting seeding. I can see for miles in every direction, the mountainous horizon only interrupted by grain stores, barns, and farm equipment sitting idle. Despite their desolation, these views hold a captivating beauty to someone from a hilly region with very few opportunities for such open vistas.

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Train Jam presents a dichotomy between the typical pressures of a game jam—deadlines, collaborating with new people, hacking out creativity—and the soothing rhythm of train travel. Most of the jammers work together in one of the two observation cars available on the train, their attention divided equally between their work and the views outside. Built into the very structure of Train Jam is the expectation that people may not complete their games. The journey is as much about enjoyment and creating relationships as it is about making games. Tied into this ethos is the fact that Train Jam is also about ensuring its attendees feel safe—no matter who you are, where you’re from, or your level of experience with making games. It employs a rigorous and enforced safe space policy, which is important because Train Jam attracts a very diverse crowd. A set of tickets reserved for underrepresented genders, and a broadly international attendance means that the games being made on the train come from a much wider set of worldviews than at most game jam gatherings. During the trip I’ve met attendees from Zambia, the Netherlands, the UK, Pakistan, Australia, the US, Sweden, and elsewhere. Some have come before, for others it’s their first time. All agree that Train Jam is a uniquely inspiring trip.

“It’s a very different environment to a normal game jam”

“It feels very cliché to say ‘oh it’s so inspiring to see the mountains and the fields,’ but it really is!” says Wallick as she looks out the window, gesturing to a lifeless wheat field. “We haven’t even gotten to the really pretty parts yet, we’re in the midwest right now, but soon we’re going to hit the Rocky Mountains with all the snow, and it’s beautiful. There are animals, eagles, moose—it’s just really inspiring and different and beautiful.” We sit, rocking from side-to-side with the movements of the train, one of us trying to conduct an interview and type up notes, the other awkwardly speaking into a voice recorder. “It’s a very different environment to a normal game jam, and that makes a lot of really good ideas pop out of the little hidden parts of your brain.”

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Walking through the train affords many opportunities to see creativity in action. Some people are busily tapping away at their laptops, a few wear VR headsets, a good many sit idly by the windows enjoying American culinary atrocities. One is wringing music from the bones of old Game Boys.

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After nightfall, the numbers in the observation cars thin out. A few of the teams have opted to work in shifts, some plan to pull all-nighters, others choose precious sleep. One team has set up camp in my cabin with a bottle of whiskey and a disregard for my neighbours. I attend what they refer to as “The Nightlight Lounge,” which I’m told started as a legitimate planning meeting, but soon devolved into frivolity and shenanigans. Some cabins on the train have a night light, a blue light that’s designed to not wake your cabin mate should you need to get up during the night. Awash in its blue glow with jazz playing loudly from a portable Bluetooth speaker, we drink and share together, becoming fast friends. We were soon joined by Campo Santo’s Sean Vanaman, who seemingly has a tracker’s nose for whiskey fumes.

Train Jam’s connection with GDC makes it unique in that, not only does it attract game makers from all over the world, it attracts all levels of experience. Vanaman teamed up with fellow Campo Santo programmer Ben Burbank and a pair of students during Train Jam to create an adventure game in the style of the much lauded Firewatch. “We’ve been working really hard, but it doesn’t feel like hard work, y’know?” one of the students tells me. It showed. Theirs was one of the most accomplished games to come from Train Jam 2016, but that isn’t really the point. Sure, they get to put a game on their portfolio that shares credits with two members of Campo Santo, but they also got something more. “It’s all about making new friends. It’s been so great to share this experience with such wonderful people.” Separated from the larger world by sparse internet access, swaying to the beat of the rails, you can’t help but smile at your fellow passengers turning from computer screen to nature scene. Oh, and Wallick was right, the Rocky Mountains are beautiful.

Body photos credit: Izzy Gramp

Lead photo: California Zephyr by Cleapreso

Your first look at Figment, the luscious dreampunk game

Surrealism, by its least-detailed description, is the illogical illustration of one’s dreams. Be it through painting, writing, or anything else in the art realm. From the works of surrealist pioneer Max Ernst, to the ubiquitous Salvador Dalí, the textbook surreal aesthetic is known far and wide—and still inspires many to this day. The latest to channel their surrealistic itch are game development team Bedtime Digital Games, who are exploring the art style for the second time in their career with a spiritual successor of sorts. Yet this time they’re exploring the surreal in a prolonged, grander way: as a full-fledged isometric adventure game rather than a lone puzzler.

“We really liked the idea of creating a world, instead of just a string of levels,” said Jonas Byrresen, lead game and story designer for Bedtime Digital Games’ Figment. Player feedback for the development team’s first surreal-themed title, Back to Bed (2014), was optimal in beginning production of Figment. “We only scratched the surface in Back to Bed,” added CEO of the company, Klaus Pedersen.

“We want this to feel like when the game ends, the world is still here.”

In Figment, the player’s character is a courageous, mouse-eared fellow named Dusty, who explores the many realms of a human’s subconscious during a reaction to trauma. There are three worlds overall, all exploring a different aspect of the human mind itself. There’s creativity (with its most colorful environments), logic (via a clock-laden world), and at last, a mountain of stress (littered with towering bills and dirty dishes). As the game progresses, color seeps out of the worlds, and the environments contort to the varying themes host to it. As Dusty explores each realm, he must defeat the nightmares (in the form of enemies encountered) that inhabit it. In addition to the run-of-the-mill nightmare enemies, there’s sing-song-y bosses that taunt Dusty in rhyme along each world.

Prior to beginning development on Figment, Byrresen and Pedersen avidly researched how human beings reacted to concepts of fear. They incidentally had a striking discovery: all basic human fear is essentially the same, no matter who the person is or where they are from. With that idea in mind, Byrresen and Pedersen embarked creating a game starring its symbol of courage (Dusty), and the struggle to overcome general, recognizable fear in order to preserve the mind. “We want this to feel like when the game ends, the world is still here,” said Byrresen. “The mind is still there. And these people in it, they make the mind go ‘round and function. And these fears are what we’re trying to stop, and once we stop it, the mind will hopefully go back to its normal state.”

The game has also acclimated a classic Surrealist concept to describe its unique world’s ideology: “dreamlogic.” “The windmills [in the game] are a good example,” noted Pedersen. In the game, the dragonfly-propelled windmills are powered by well-placed (and color-coded) batteries. Oddly, these all have the opposite effect to the windmills our reality’s used to. The windmills in Figment expend wind to blow away poisonous clouds, by blowing air in the complete opposite direction, rather than wind travelling through it and generating power. “In this context it makes sense: it’s dreamlogic,” explained Pedersen.

Figment is not simply just exploring the subconscious, but rightfully pairs a striking classical surrealistic art style along with it. The surrealism adds an extra dimension to exploring the dreampunk landscapes of the mind. Plus it’s moments like hearing the light squish under Dusty’s feet while walking across a centipede bridge, or approaching the far-and-in-between towering homes of the mind’s residents, that make Figment not just look aesthetically promising, but feel promising. Its release window is still a ways off—2017—and it remains in the early stages of development despite its artistic style being nearly nailed down perfectly. But, when a game’s screencaps look like concept art, it can be surely said that there’s something going right.

Look out for updates on Figment over at its website. Check out our ongoing coverage of GDC 2016 here.

The perverse ideology of The Division

In the first few hours of The Division, you will be bombarded with phone recordings, resources and consumables, an overwhelming litany of damage numbers and weapon mods. It puts you in such a constant state of information overload that after a while it’s easier to ignore everything but the essentials. You come to assume that, as long as you are shooting, progress is being made. Stalking the cold streets of an abandoned New York City, running missions to collect supplies for upgrades, assaulting strongholds and rescuing hostages, the rhythm of the game is a familiar one. It’s one that has slowly been developed by Ubisoft over what is now a decade of open-world game design, one that colors a map with a rainbow of icons and symbols, the fiction merely a dressing on top. The numbness that grows out of this overload is also a process of occlusion, slowly divorcing your experience from the troubling fictions that make up The Division’s premise.

That’s why I was surprised when one little statement stuck with me, when all the who’s-who and what’s-what seemed to slip away: “The purpose of the Division is to secure the city and ensure the continuity of the government.” It’s a seemingly innocuous statement, hidden as it is among other loading screen tips about grenade types and upgrade nodes; another bit of information bloat in an already bloated game. Perhaps it’s because the statement is so strange; “ensure the continuity of the government.” Is that really what I have been doing in my role as a Division agent—Ensuring presidential control? Helping to form an ad-hoc dictatorship? It’s a statement that started to get to me, to get under my skin. As I ran back and forth, killing and collecting, I started to wonder what this game is really about.

When I began trying to unpick the confused web of real-world references and speculative fiction in The Division, it was this statement I kept coming back to. It’s perhaps because it is an appropriation, a direct copy of the wording of Directive 51, created and signed in 2007 by the president at the time, George W. Bush. Mostly classified, its small public portion regards government actions in the event of a “Catastrophic Disaster,” and is designed to cement presidential control until the all-clear has been called. For The Division, it is a key jumping-off point for its central conceit of a network of sleeper agents across the U.S, activated in extreme circumstances, and given absolute authority. But it is also a link to contemporary politics that the game seems proud of, mentioning the directive by name multiple times, as well as the bioterrorism outbreak simulation Dark Winter. It’s all part of an attempt at “authenticity” and “realism” that seems to motivate the game’s depiction of a post-viral New York City.

Directive 51 is also a highly controversial document. Accused of allowing the president to take dictatorial control in the event of a disaster or terrorist attack, it was both riffed on by conspiracy theorists and criticized in the press. The fact that access to the confidential “Continuity Annexes” were denied to Congress on multiple occasions only adds to this potency. The Division, however, treats it with a strange reverence, fashioning itself as a celebration of absolute power. As a Division agent the player is portrayed as the best hope for the city, an everyday hero in a beat-up parka and jeans, ready to fight anyone who might resist. Empowered by Directive 51, they can cut through the red-tape of the judicial system and civil law, to supposedly impose order back on a lawless city through running battles and military assaults. It’s a muddled fiction to step into, one that casts you as an authoritarian enforcer with an unlimited license to kill, as well as “the savior of New York.” But when the game says New York, it isn’t referring to the citizens or the culture, instead it is referring to that most important of features in a capitalist society—property.

it isn’t referring to the citizens or the culture

It’s always been a quirk of videogames that they succeed in depicting believable environments over believable people. The Division feels like the ultimate realization of this trait. The section of Manhattan island that the game takes as a setting is an artful work of digital craft. It takes a detailed one-to-one replica of the existing city as its starting point and covers it with layer after layer of enviromental detail. Every surface is creased, worn, scratched and marked, then plastered with trash, water, notes, graffiti, and greasy footprints. There is an obsession with garbage that tells the story of the breakdown of the systems of society so effectively. Bags of it lie in great drifts across roads, it fills stairways and alleys, piling up in cavernous sewers. It is an image that speaks so strongly to the supposed knife-edge the game wishes to depict society as resting on. It defines a society of endless consumption brought to its knees. When combined with the Christmas imagery that comes with the games’ “Black Friday” timescale—wrapped trees lined up on the streets, fairy lights twinkling above burnt out cars—it starts to feel like a visual interrogation of late Capitalism. And when the precisely simulated snow drifts in, and you are stalking down an empty city street surrounded by refuse, The Division seems to make sense, it seems to say something. But before long, out of the swirling flakes will come a jerky citizen, who will congratulate you for your efforts, and then ask you for a soda. And all at once, that something is lost.

The Division has a serious representation problem. Despite the complexity of its world, and its bleak sophistication, it fails miserably to represent the culture within it. Its crude depiction of a society divided entirely into “us and them” feels like the ugliest of conceits. “Citizens” are classified as those friendly-looking, passive idiots that wander up and down streets looking for a hand-out. “Enemies” include anyone who might take their own survival into their own hands. Within the first five minutes of the game you’ll gun down some guys rooting around in the bins, presumably for “looting” or carrying a firearm. Later you’ll kill some more who are occupying an electronics store and then proceed to loot the place yourself, an act made legal by the badge on your shoulder. Even the game’s “echoes,” 3D visualizations of previous events, seem designed to criminalize the populace, usually annotating them with their name and the crimes they have committed. This totalitarian atmosphere pervades everything—even down to a mission where you harvest a refugee camp for samples of virus variation, treating victims like petri dishes. Developer Ubisoft Massive runs merrily through any complexity and shades of grey in these acts, in what seems like a vain attempt to mask the fact that you are shooting citizens because they are “looters,” constantly prioritizing property and assets over human life.

When discussing these aspects of The Division it’s tempting to start linking to articles on social behavior in disasters, on the myth of widespread looting or the psychology behind it. But as interesting as these debates might be, in this case they don’t apply. While I wonder where these factors were in the developer’s supposedly painstaking research, it’s important not to confuse real-world ethics with those of a game, where a closed system functions in highly defined ways. The gang members you kill and the civilians you save in the game are not citizens, or even equals, they are simply actors within a limited simulation. What they are, though, is a representation, an image of the world we live in, reflected back to us. For this reason, like any system of representation, the game has specific politics. It doesn’t matter that the game’s associate creative director Julian Gerighty claimed “there’s no particularly political message” in an interview with Kill Screen’s Michelle Ehrhardt. What matters is that by its very nature The Division is political, and, more importantly, that those politics paint a paranoid and misanthropic image of society.

Let’s try a simple thought experiment. Imagine we modded the game to switch the character models of the idle and sick civilians with those of the hooded “Rioters.” All across The Division‘s ailing New York, men in hoods and bandanas would be stumbling along the street, asking you for food or aid, while gunfights erupted between pea-coated men and women with carefully wrapped scarves. The strangeness of this image only serves to evidence that we constitute society through visual cues, class hierarchies, and pre-formed assumptions. These assumptions are used within The Division in order to criminalise a whole segment of society. The enemies of The Division aren’t an invading army, they weren’t created by the disaster, instead, as the game suggests, they were already there. They were, says The Division, part of a vast underclass that lies at the dark heart of the city, ready to prey on the weak, waiting for their moment to rise. The Division’s viral outbreak is imagined as exactly this moment, where all the rules are forgotten and the vicious may overpower the innocent.

a paranoid and misanthropic image of society

This is the paranoid fantasy of the right-wing brought into disturbing actualization by The Division. Look at the three gangs that form the main antagonists of the game: The “Rikers” are the prisoners of Rikers island prison that lies off the coast of The Bronx. They are the most obvious member of what The Division presents as societies’ dangerous underclass—known criminals. The “Cleaners” are former sanitation workers, who have decided that the solution to the virus is to burn it out of the city. A gang of blue-collar garbage men and janitors equipped with flamethrowers, they represent the lowest rung of the working class. The third gang are the “Rioters,” a majority black, generic street gang, decked in hoodies and caps that spend their time looting electronics stores and dead bodies. Perhaps the laziest and most repugnant of all the game’s representations, the Rioters might have been clipped from the one-sided and inaccurate media coverage of disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Their collective name even seeks to mark anybody who resists the dominant regime for execution. Together, these gangs present a trinity of soft political targets, those that can be killed with little social guilt or questioning. The Division mercilessly uses these skewed representations to justify its political violence.

It’s a perverse idea of society, one where the government and its agents are the only thing standing between the average man and a host of violent sociopaths that surround him; from the “hoods” hanging on his street corner to the janitor at his office. They want what he has, the man thinks, because it is what they lack. They want to take what he has earned—to destroy what he has built. It comes from a deep seated place of ignorance and selfishness, one that doesn’t seek to understand the world but to divide it up into property and power. This ideology is nothing short of poisonous and yet The Division uses it as the fuel for its world. It borrows, word-for-word, the rhetoric of the New Orleans police department command who after Hurricane Katrina gave the order to “take the city back” and “shoot looters.” It presents those disenfranchised by society as its greatest enemies. It follows neo-liberal dogma so blindly that in one bizarre mission it actually sends the player to turn the adverts of Times Square back on, as if those airbrushed faces and glimmering products were the true heart of New York City, shining down like angels on the bodies of the dead among the trash.

Let’s be clear here. I couldn’t care less about legislating the morality of digital characters, or attacking the prevalence of killing as a mechanic in games. What I do care about is any cultural object which sells itself on paranoia and ignorance, which propagates the worst self-destructive fantasies of Western society and that wields political ideologies under the pretence of entertainment. The Division does exactly this, its representations reinforcing the fractures of contemporary society. It’s this overriding ideology of The Division that I find hard to ignore. Even while I am cycling through its rewarding, if rote, selection of upgrades and improvements. Even while I am cutting through the player vs. player “Dark Zone,” one eye on the corners for the signs of rogue players. It’s an ideology that many will let slip into the background, as they spend hours churning through the upgrade tree, following the endgame pattern of daily missions and loot runs. It’ll still be there later in the year, as the three expansions for the game arrive, bringing with them new players and new systems. It will persist, like a virus, beneath all the firefights and the exploration, between the safe houses and the dirty, dangerous streets. It’s even there in the title, which for me no longer refers to a military designation, but the “division” between “us and them,” “the have and the have nots,” to the game’s own politics of segregation and repression. The Division is a game so eager to criminalize the poor, so eager to play into clichés of class war. Yet it staunchly refuses to take responsibility for its representations, for its politics. If we want that to change, we have to make it, and its creators, responsible.

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Social Mario teaches AI to learn by imitating each other

As videogames are frequently focused on having a single human player interact with dozens or even hundreds of computer-controlled characters at a time, they tend to be particularly fertile ground for development of artificial intelligence. This is why it should come as no surprise that when the Chair of Cognitive Modeling at Germany’s University of Tübingen decided to create new ways for artificial intelligence to grow and interact, they opted to do so through the lens of Nintendo’s Mario series. Dubbed Social Mario, the project’s concept is simple: Rather than reacting to players or following the scripted commands of a programmer, let artificial intelligence learn from each other.

To test this, the project’s team first created a facsimile of Super Mario World, then populated it with four AI characters—Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Yoshi—each set to achieve certain goals based around pre-set “motivation factors.” For instance, if Mario is programmed to acquire wealth, then his AI will direct him to coins. Additionally, each character has a special trait that the others do not, such as Mario being able to break iron blocks or Yoshi being able to carry other characters. The hope is that as the characters go about achieving their goals, they will learn about their world and their abilities simply by observing each other. A human user is also able to command the characters and ask them questions through voice control, which helps the project’s team monitor what each AI knows at any given moment.

This is demonstrated in a particular scene where Mario and Toad are gathered under a row of iron blocks. A human user asks Toad what he knows about iron blocks, to which he responds that he doesn’t know anything about them. Then the user asks Mario to jump, at which point Mario breaks the iron block above him. Upon being asked about iron blocks again, Toad says that he knows that Mario can probably break iron blocks by jumping. Then the team member asks Toad to jump, but the iron block above him does not break. Again, Toad is asked what he knows about iron blocks, at which point he says that if he jumps, nothing happens. He has learned that Mario can break iron blocks and that he cannot. Importantly, he didn’t learn by being told the answer, but rather by organically observing another AI.

building systems that are capable of learning on their own

It’s a simple experiment, but it serves as a proof of concept for building systems that are capable of learning on their own. By having multiple AI characters interact with each other, they can together grow more aware. In addition to the user-controlled and “motivation factor ” modes outlined above, Social Mario also features modes where characters must work together to achieve a goal, such as protecting Princess Peach, entirely without user aid. As they work to achieve this goal, they will observe each other and learn in the same way that Toad learned about iron blocks from watching Mario.

“Social agent [a term for a character operating under artificial intelligence] interactions and social communication with artificial agents is only at its beginning,” explains team member Fabian Schrodt. However, the team believes that they can use this technology to make advances in not only games, but also in everyday technology like smartphone assistants, or eventually, self-driving cars. As Schrodt shares, “We believe that the implemented techniques can be adapted to other games and even other applications where intelligent agents may help to make our complicated lives a little easier.”

You can learn more about Social Mario over on the project’s website.

Videogame to explore the possible causes of the Jonestown massacre

In The Church in the Darkness, you play a man looking for his nephew outside the borders of his own country. The lad has gone to a commune or cult in South America called the Collective Justice Mission, a group led by a charismatic married couple. The parallels to America’s third most famous cult—the first two being Scientology and the Apple corporation—are readily apparent.

In 1974, Jim Jones led the Peoples Temple to South America to found Jonestown, a name most Americans would come to associate with tragedy. But Richard Rouse III, who leads the team creating The Church in the Darkness, was interested in the Jonestown massacre for more than just the infamy. “A lot of the stuff he was saying was of the progressive bent. He was for reintegration, he was for taking care of your elders, he was against the Vietnam war. You hear all the things he was saying, and it makes you think—what happened? There are a lot of positive things about the People’s Temple, and then it all went wrong.”

a dangerous group of believers headed towards a dark end.

From his research, Rouse says the line between an apocalyptic death cult and a harmless commune can be razor thin. “The interesting thing to me about these religious sects and extreme progressive groups is that they say a lot of good stuff,” said Rouse. “And I think they mean it, usually. Some groups go a dark way—the leaders get consumed by egomania and start going down an apocalyptic path. But then another group, the ones we don’t hear about as much, they’ll just keep going. There are communes in California that have been going since the 60s.”

So which of these categories does the Collective Justice Mission, the cult in which the player’s nephew in The Church in the Darkness is ensconced, belong to? The answer will be different for each player, as the beliefs of the group are determined anew at the start of each play through. Some games will center around a functioning, if insular, commune of people seeking to escape a country they feel has persecuted them. Others will concern a dangerous group of believers headed towards a dark end.

Rouse himself isn’t a practicing Catholic. “I’m from the left wing of the Catholic Church,” he jokes. In the context of the game, his religion seems more of an information source than a driving force. “Having read the bible, there’s so much stuff to pull from,” says Rouse. “You can get what you want out of it. The people in the game are socialists, and they’re pulling from the socialist parts of the bible.” He’s careful with his language—Rouse previously wrote for big budget productions like The Suffering (2004), which could afford blood and guts but not a strong political statement. The habits are still apparent.

But there’s more than just a fear of alienating his audience to Rouse’s caution. He isn’t trying to take a stand morally or politically, or if he is, the stance is that the issues he’s discussing cannot be easily captured in a pithy statement. The Church in the Darkness is, more than anything, about moral grey areas, and the minute changes that can take an admirable set of ideals spiraling into tragedy in ways we have historically seen before. “I’m worried about people thinking this game is bashing socialism, or bashing religion,” says Rouse. “It’s not about that. It’s about figuring it out—because it’s complicated.”

You can find out more about The Church in the Darkness on its website and Steam page. Check out our ongoing coverage of GDC 2016 here.

Media artist makes cute little sex machines

If you’ve ever wondered how it would look to watch virtual machines masterbate, Latvian artist Elstons Kuns has you covered. In his surrealistic virtual art project Erotic Objects, Kuns celebrates the human body by reducing it into a cleaner, less-messy series of colorful automotron, or more precisely, autoerotic machinery. It’s difficult to look away: these hypnotizing pastel mechanical contraptions, made via coding in Linux, can masturbate themselves into oblivion.

Erotic Objects takes the most base human act and immortalizes it as art. The project, on one hand, represents industrialized sexuality without the intricate human nuances and feelings allegedly necessary to bring the act to life; these are isolated, cold machines made for efficiency. And yet, the viewer feels a sense of intrusion when looking at these machines, as though they represent some sort of robotic Kama Sutra, a sexual wisdom to which humans can’t be privy to.

Either way, I find myself wanting to cheer for these little guys. Or congratulate them.

See the full Erotic Objects gallery here. You can see more of Kuns’ work on his Tumblr blog .

Source: Electric Objects

80 Days writer thinks you should stop playing the hero

“Protagonists have had their way for too long,” declared Meg Jayanth, the writer behind 2014’s 80 Days and a contributor to last year’s Sunless Sea. At her GDC talk on Monday, Jayanth took the stage to instruct a room full of game designers to transgress one of the most fundamental conceits of their craft: “Forget your protagonist,” or, in other words, forget the player.

Almost since their inception, videogame worlds have bended backwards to the whim and ego of the player-protagonist, leading to conventions like leveling up and the Badass Anti-Hero With A Gun cliche. Of course, arguments against the classic power fantasy narrative aren’t new, either. You don’t even have to be a game critic to get the sense that there’s something increasingly lackluster about the annual blockbuster-ification of human history, which reduces the complexities of warring ideologies to a power fantasy.

“true immersion necessitates loss and frustration.”

Yet while the topic isn’t new, Jayanth dismantled the fundamental assumption that the power fantasy even delivers what players want. Many designers argue that empowerment supports two fundamental aspects of fun: immersion and agency. Yet, as Jayanth points out, there’s a reason why the first prototype of the Matrix (the virtual reality world that contains all human consciousness in the 1999 film The Matrix)—dubbed the “Paradise Matrix,” where no humans suffered and everyone got what they wanted—failed miserably. Because human beings demand engagement and “true immersion necessitates loss and frustration.”

“Your perfection simulator is doomed to fail,” Jayanth continued. Because when we tell every player in every game that they’re the most special snowflake alive, more powerful and important than all other snowflakes, we take them down an inherently lonely path. Rather than assume players prefer to be the sole agent in an otherwise empty world, Jayanth proposed something radical: “Immersion is a social experience We want to engage with NPCs that feel like real people.”

What Jayanth argues for is not just a more diverse approach to game design (though that would be an outcome), but rather a fundamental philosophical shift in how we define “agency.” The current definition, synonymous with absolute control and power and adherence to a hero narrative, leaves little to no room for anything but the player’s motivations. But as Jayanth reminded her audience, “agency is an effect, not a goal.” Player agency does not necessarily need to translate to an action, especially not the repetitive acts of killing, rescuing, or protecting.

Instead, Jayanth suggests an equally effective tool for achieving agency can be allowing players to form their own opinions and emotions about other characters, and to explore the world through “human entanglements.” Take, for example, one of Jayanth’s favorite non-player characters (NPC) of all time: Isabela from Dragon Age II. Though, as with many other NPCs in a BioWare game, players can choose to make Isabela either their lover, enemy, or friend, there is one aspect of their relationship they can’t decide for themselves: no matter what, Isabela betrays the player and steals a relic that is meaningful to her people. Nothing you do can stop Isabela from acting on her own wants, desires, and motivations. At most, the player can choose how to react to her agency, with either forgiveness or hostility.

“maybe unfair isn’t the worst thing a game can be.”

With her background as the writer of a massively populated universe like 80 Days, Jayanth was not only uniquely qualified to tackle the discussion but also uniquely qualified to negate all excuses from designers. Drawing from the most quintessential white male colonial adventure—i.e. Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days (1873)—Jayanth transformed a stereotypical hero narrative into one of gaming’s most deft explorations of marginalized personhood. “If we did it,” she challenged, “you can too, no matter the constraints.”

In her final and most breathtaking example of great NPC writing, Jayanth pointed to an encounter the player can have in 80 Days as they pass through Brisbane. An indigenous Murri girl tells protagonist Passepartout about a letter she wants to deliver to a local newspaper in protest of the white settlers. No matter how the player may try to “fix” the Murri girl’s problem—either by offering to use his whiteness and privilege to bring attention to the issue himself , or offering her every item they own as a solution—the Murri girl will always respond to Passepartout with mistrust. Online, many players expressed outrage over being set up to fail, somehow expecting that they should be able to solve racism in a single conversation, or the gifting of a quest item.

Therein lies the fundamental issue with the kind of game we’ve taught players to expect. While giving the player a quest they cannot complete might seem unfair, Jayanth argues that “maybe unfair isn’t the worst thing a game can be.” Jayanth reasons that expecting more from players can only happen once they learn that they should expect more from their games. The moment designers realize they can steal power away from their supposed heroes will also be the day we begin to create “games that can function outside of entitlement,” so says Jayanth.

Be sure to follow Meg Jayanth on Twitter, and c heck out our ongoing coverage of GDC 2016 here.

The tricky brilliance of Downwell’s gunboots

“Shit, this game is hard.”

It was the jesting gripe heard ‘round the panel room at the Game Developer’s Conference on Monday, March 14th. A grievance that, surprisingly, came from game developer Ojiro Fumoto himself while playing a live tech demo of an early prototype of his own game: Downwell. Fumoto’s vertigo-inducing roguelike Downwell released late last year to critical acclaim, and soon became the hot topic at everyone’s fingertips. In the aptly named panel, “Polishing the Boots – Designing Downwell Around One Key Mechanic,” Fumoto detailed the many iterations his now infamous “gunboot” mechanic took on through the game’s 15-month development process.

“I set out to make a game that I would want to play,” Fumoto said. He directly cited his primary inspiration of another charming roguelike. “I am in love with Spelunky,” he said succinctly of his appreciation for the 2008 title. While today’s Downwell is no Spelunky copycat, initially, it might have appeared as such.

Gunboots solved the early prototype’s two primary problems: pacing and action

Before thinking up the ephemeral “gunboots” mechanic, Downwell was simply a downwards-winding platformer. And simply put: there wasn’t much there. The character leaped from disintegrating block to block, but absent was the heightened intensity of the vertical-scrolling, shoot-em-up game sitting in our phones and PCs today. Fumoto knew there was something missing.

As legendary developer (and prolifically quoted) Shigeru Miyamoto once said, “A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once.” Fumoto absorbed Miyamoto’s piece of advice, and he implemented an idea of gun-like shoes that doubled as both an offensive mechanic, as well as one to propel movement in the game. A game mechanic that solved that early prototype’s two primary problems: pacing and action.

Thinking up the idea of gunboots wasn’t the end, but rather the beginning to what Downwell shipped off to be. Another rough idea for Downwell’s gunboots was the need for ammo. Should the player hop to ammo boxes, as was in the original prototype, or would that break the pace of the game? That’s when the phrase “stammo” came to fruition. “Stammo” is a medley of stamina-esque replenished ammo with every brief landing on a platform, inspired by the similar usage of stamina in Dark Souls (2014). The player can use stamina by taking action, but also can quickly meet defeat if not using it at all.

Another glaring problem Fumoto faced in another early prototype was mastering the fluidity in movement. In its original form, Downwell was heavy on the platforming, and low on the freefalling. By creating a more open space, and the ability to see platforms in the distance, Fumoto crafted a more fair, yet strategic experience. In addition to implementing a combo-counter, a “higher difficulty” for those who want it, Fumoto explained, the game’s gunboots were at last starting to see its polish. At the 10-month mark of his 15-month development process and many, many prototypes later, Fumoto was at long last confident in the mechanics of his game’s bullet-wielding boots.

For advice on his own experience to other developers, Fumoto’s take-away was simple: “Focus on what makes your game special.” Whether it’s gunboots or some other wild thing, polish it up, just like you would a good pair of boots.

Check out our ongoing coverage of GDC 2016 here.

Graphic novel tackles issues of contemporary Iranian identity

In an international context, Iran is often thought of as a news headline, or a generalized and vague region in the “Middle East.” When the youth in Iran make statements about pop culture and their relationship to it, like the video of Iranian youth dancing to Pharrell’s hit Happy, it immediately becomes an item of politicized news. However, with recent movies like A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), described by director Ana Lily Amirpour as the first “Iranian vampire spaghetti western,” Iran gets a chance at an international identity without the typical assumptions or politics. That said, Amirpour is American-Iranian, rather than a local Iranian resident, and it’s impossible to ignore that contemporary Iranian life is informed by Iran’s political climate, in one way or another.

Enter Jensiat—which Small Media describes as “a joint creative project in the form of a website and animated graphic novel”—to find the balance between the political and the personal. In this six-part series, written by satirist Kioomars Marzban and illustrated by Vahid Fazel, Jensiat tackles issues of cybersecurity, gender, and sexuality in contemporary Iran. It does this through protagonist Leila, who is a 34-year-old aspiring entrepreneur returning to Iran after over a decade spent studying and working abroad. This aspect of Leila’s identity highlights the diasporic nature of Iranians around the world, while also emphasizing the local situation and dynamics in Iran today.

the lives of contemporary Iranians are informed by Iran’s political climate, in one way or another

Leila’s myriad experiences include: the competition of the tech industry, the frustration of complex gender politics in the workplace and beyond, the support of those who are similarly minded—including the story’s central love interest Jamshid, an Iranian-American digital rights activist—and the thrill of heading a startup, a project Leila calls jensiat.io—the namesake of the graphic novel’s platform.

Beyond this narrative aspect, Jensiat seeks to use its platform to disseminate important information about good cybersecurity practices in people’s day-to-day lives. For example, it exemplifies the use of such platforms as Signal Private Messaging as important alternatives to platforms like Whatsapp and Telegram for more robust cybersecurity. As Mahsa Alimardani, Jensiat’s producer, told The Creators Project:

“From our knowledge of the Internet space and Internet users in Iran, we know that digital security practices are not necessarily concerns that come naturally to Iranians…We’re hoping to get fans who genuinely care about Leila’s life and struggles, and to follow along, and start raising more awareness and discussions about how to implement day-to-day technologies such as Signal or PGP.”

Jensiat‘s site and social media are written entirely in Farsi, however, the messages of the platform and the themes are important ones the world over, especially among the complex identity politics and revolutions of today. It is also essential that we learn and remember that other countries have important and nuanced contemporary politics, beyond what our knowledge and assumptions may be. Jensiat challenges these assumptions and offers Iranians a platform by Iranians on these larger issues.

Check out and keep up with Jensiat on its website. Be sure to also follow Jensiat on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and also to check out other work being facilitated by Small Media.