YouTube Tuesday on a Wednesday

Image Source: http://edu.d2d-7986.branch.development.devtodev.com/articles/197/10-youtube-kanalov-pro-geymdizayn

Sorry about not posting for the previous two days, but I’ve been feeling under the weather. Nothing Covid related, nor anything like that, I’ve just been very fatigued for the most of the weekend and early this week. It’s probably related to the vaccine (again, not Covid Vaccine) that I had to take for MTSU to register me this semester, but that’s just a guess. Needless to say, I’m finally feeling a bit better today, so on with yesterday’s blog–a day late!

Today, I’m going to focus on a channel that I subscribe to called AI and Games.

Image Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt1XmiDwxhYUnder the Hood

Most people think of video games as really advanced CG versions of movies. They only see 1) graphics and 2) sound. They see video games as movies, for the most part. The graphics = the visual image and the sound = dialogue, sound effects, music, etc. If the people are really savvy, they might also note the interactive aspect of games, so a 3rd tenant of this would be 3) interactivity.

However, games are more analogous to cars in many respects. The graphics and sound are very much like the outside body of the car while computer code runs underneath (much like an engine) and the computer code creates AI that makes the enemies in various games seem life-like.

The Magic Shot

I found this website through the video below in which the creator discussed one of the AI parameters in a game that I have played (and finished and 100% completed), Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands. I had intended to write a “conference paper” for this video game (a paper for a conference that detailed some scholarly aspect that I noticed about the game), but I never got around to it with class work and teaching (although I may revisit this later on as I still have the idea for it and think that it would be very interesting to explore).

However, what this video brought to the forefront were the ways in which the game “cheats.” Now, most video games cheat in some respect so as to increase tension, or make up for the deficit in human vs AI intelligence, but this particular YouTuber illustrated how the game cheats in your (the player’s favor) in order for the player to have a good time playing the game.

Basically, in order for the AI companions to feel like they are useful and supportive, the game allows them to do things that would be impossible in real life, one of which is the “magic shot” in which the player can mark targets for the team and the teammates will “always” hit them (so long as they have an unobstructed shot). The teammates don’t even really “fire,” but rather the AI just enters the “death” state to simulate them firing and you (the player) being part of a crack squad.

Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Now, I’d seen all the behaviors listed in the above video, but I used my “willing suspension of disbelief” to ignore all but the most egregious cheating (teleporting into a helicopter in mid-air by my teammates after I had taken off without them), but this video reminded me, “yes, there’s code/AI running under the hood and the designers are making conscious choices that affect my playing and enjoyment of the game–which is a CORE tenant of Rhetoric and more specifically, Procedural Rhetoric which looks at the “system’s beneath” to see what those systems are doing and how they are communicating with the rest of the code and the user at large.

While I would definitely need to supplement his videos with scholarly articles, this channel is a gold mine for ideas in looking at procedural rhetoric and how games (and by extension, game designers) fulfill their mission of creating experiences that evoke an emotional response in players.

I most definitely intend to reference at least one or two of these videos for my dissertation and find them intriguing to see how the AI works “beneath” the surface to foster/engender certain emotional responses in us (the players). I think this channel is both fun to watch and makes one think more deeply about the topic of video games and I highly recommend this channel to anyone interested in “how the sausage is made” when it comes to video games.

Sidney

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