Is Supersmart AI a possibility? Part 2

They'll be back

Today we are going to do our best to round up my set of 2019 knowledge on Supersmart AI to come to a final conclusion upon what Superintelligent AI actually is and just how looming of a threat it would seem. As such, I felt it important through the course of my research to take a look at the mediums that were doing the best for AI development and, surprise, surprise, I found one of the leaders to be a topic quite familiar to this blog. You see, whilst 'weak AI' (defined in the last blog) is an incredibly useful modern tool for managing packets of data, we can see the greatest investment and innovation towards it being funded not by an industry in general but by a nation. The Chinese Nation. And that makes sense, doesn't it?

China is the most populated country in the world and, different to all the other countries on that top ten list, their government very much has the desire to monitor and sanitize as much of that populace as humanly possible. We hear about the ludicrous amount of surveillance that goes into 'safegaurding' the average Chinese city, as well as the deeply ingrained 'social credit system', but rarely do we reflect upon the complexity of the AI systems that are involved in order to make all that possible. Whatsmore, China have a desire to increase their presence on the world scale in order to become the global superpower, and as such they devote a heavy amount of research and funds into areas that they presume will blow up in the years to come. Should it be any surprise then, that China are the leaders in AI technology around the entire globe? All that is under the knowledge, however, that this drive to 'improve' AI is more aimed at increasing the capacity and scope of 'weak AI', rather than expanding the abilities of that AI itself and moving towards 'General AI'. (Intelligence comparable to humans.)

Many scholars, such as those who agree with the arguments presented by John Searle's 'Chinese Room' thought experiment, would argue that there is a fundamental barrier that AI will never be able to cross. That thing that we humans like to argue is the key part of our brain function that separates us from animals is something we refer to as 'Inspiration'. For the sake of this discussion, we'll choose to define such a broad word as 'the ability to come up with new ideas'. (Or compound upon old one's to create innovation.) As computers are expressly designed to operate within the parameters of their instructions, they should be actually incapable of 'inspiration' which would make their capacity to learn inferior to that of even the dullest human. As such, General AI should be an impossibility. But there are those who disagree and even those who think that concepts such as 'inspiration' are complete fabrications of human hubris. (but that's a topic I really don't have the time to go into today.) As I hinted at earlier, there is one medium in which AI possibilities are regularly being pushed to their limit, and true to this blog it lies in the world of gaming.

In 2018, Danny Lange held a conference through GOTO which explored the scope for AI development. But what made this particular demonstration worth paying attention to was the fact that Lange wasn't interested in AI that was taught to reach it's goal, but rather AI that learned what to do through the act of 'Deep learning'. Deep learning is a model of development very much inspired by biology, albeit in a more mindless, thrashing, fashion; so it's the perfect system upon which to test the possibilities of AI simulating Human-like intelligence. To this end, he named his conference "Deep learning in gaming" and you can watch it yourself to get a better understanding of what we're talking about. But I'll attempt to pull up the salient points.

Gaming makes for a great environment in order to conduct testing for learning capabilities, as that objective-based ecosystem works to quantify traditionally qualitative traits such as 'problem solving'. Therefore in order to create a game that simulates human intelligence we would have to define the key operating goal of every human being, those driving forces that unite us all. To that end, we must look at our base drives; we work in order to maintain energy and prevent entropy. We amass food in order to consume and keep our energy up, maintain order to prolong reliable access to energy supplementing sources and seek to multiply to stave of entropy, even if that's more symbolic. When we simplify intelligence like this, we aren't so much measuring 'human' intelligence as we are observing ' biological' intelligence in general, but that is an important stepping stone on the road to general intelligence.

Using a game engine no more powerful than Unity, Mr. Lange showed us a model of AI that was taught to navigate an environment in order to reach it's goal, with no prior programing to assist it in that task. The only incentive provided to the AI was a standard reinforcement learning algorithm, which is a process not so dissimilar to the 'Pavlov's Dogs' model. The AI would navigate it's avatar to the goal and once it reached there it would receive a 'point'; this builds upon how learning is achieved in nature all around us, through the merit of observation and reinforcement. By building upon this model for deep learning, one could teach an AI how to explore and exploit in a manner that replicates very human behaviours. Once the AI started to show some emergent behaviours, such as demonstrating an understanding of the reward function, the courses could become progressively harder to ramp up it's rate of learning. (Which, incidentally, is another parallel showing how computers learn in a similar curriculum to humans.)

Now, the problem with this model is thus; standard reinforcement learning takes too long. As I've mentioned several times now, when you provide a computer with nothing more than a goal it will take literally every path in order to reach it, no matter how little that path-way makes sense. Lange described solving this problem as teaching AI to 'Learn long short-term memory', describing that memory needs depth in order to grow into intelligence. To achieve this, there was a new parameter added to the reward system for the AI that would mirror the values of human's, in the form of extrinsic and Intrinsic rewards. Most AI deep learning evolves by offering extrinsic reward values, but if one could find a way to give AI the ability to distinguish between the extrinsic and intrinsic, you could then promote very human-like qualities to that machines such a curiosity. We saw an example of an algorithm that seemed to display exactly that during this presentation, and in the pursuit of expanding the scope of AI, that alone is supremely promising.

But what we discussed so far has been a string of maybes and hypotheticals, or small scale experiments that may mean something more at some far-off date in the future; but perhaps the most important question when it comes to the possibility of supersmart AI, is if we even want it. Now, that isn't to fear monger about how AI has the potential to wipe out humanity, but merely to wonder if creating such an intelligence will benefit mankind's struggles. Anthropomorphism has the tendency to make one assume that general or supersmart intelligence will emulate us, a thought-train which shapes the very methods we use to teach AI, although artificial minds might not end up thinking anything like ours do.

To demonstrate this best, I heard one thought experiment that I will refer to as the 'Stamp collector conundrum'. The scenario goes like this; you are a stamp collector with the desire of getting as many rare stamps as humanely possible. In order to achieve this end, you buy as many as you can off E-bay, but you find it hard to track them down so you create a general AI to assist you with the task; giving it the goal "help me get as many stamps as possible". With the help of this AI, you are able to contact thousands of fellow stamp collectors simultaneously in order to buy their stamps off of them, but you feel like you could do better and so does your AI. Now your AI is scouring the web for folks who aren't advertising their wares on E-Bay, for anyone who might have stamps and spamming Email their way. But you only have so much money, so you can't buy them all. So then the AI begins spoofing credit card numbers to pay for the transactions that you can't afford, or scamming them from the sellers in whatever way possible. Soon you have more stamps than you know what to do with, but the AI hasn't reached it's potential of "As many stamps as possible". Maybe it will hack into the postal service and start shipping stamps directly to your door. Soon it will have to come to a sobering realization, there are only a certain amount of stamps on the planet; so the obvious solution would be to create more. The AI starts hacking home printers all over the world and money printers and industrial plants, all to create stamps to ship to your door. What happens when it starts to run low on resources, or energy? Maybe it starts diverting energy from nearby infrastructure and taking over automatic harvesters to accelerate deforestation efforts. You get the message. It probably ends with an end to all humanity.

Now, obviously, that there is an example that is positively seeping in hyperbole, but the point is still valid; who says that a machine that is capable of the same level of thought as a human would play by human rules? Why would it? How could it share our ethical compass without the generations worth of evolution and societal training to ingrain it? How could we teach the goals of humanity to an AI and make them share and retain those goals as they evolve ever more, and is it even ethical to force that? Up until this point, Humanity has managed to evolve through the act of pooling their knowledge, until we can be sure that the next step of AI would be willing an able to do the same, perhaps it's best to slow down on the AI bandwagon.

Not that such would ever be likely in the near future, not with some of the biggest companies in the world throwing all their money at it every year. In America we see huge businesses like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft leading the charge for AI, whilst in China we can see Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba doing the exact same. It is for that reason, as well as the significant level of spending from the Chinese government, (like I mentioned earlier) that many call AI "The new Space Race", with it's ultimate winner earning the prize of potentially shaping the direction of humanity's future. Therefore when we come back around to the question that started this all off, is Supersmart AI a possibility, our corporations will be the one's to answer it for us, not our scientists. From my point of view, however, I'm slowly warming to the possibilities. Technology is always expanding and growing in surprising ways, but we must always be aware of the fact that once that line has been crossed, that is a can of worms that can never be closed again. (I doubt we'll get there in our lifetimes, though.) In my next blog, which won't be next Sunday, we'll take a look at the leaders of AI to determine exactly where this 'inevitable' breakthrough will occur.

Is Supersmart AI a possibility? Part 1

I have to go. Somewhere there is a crime happening.

Last year I penned a group of discussion articles about real-world topics that are, even partially, tangentially linked to the world of gaming in a manner that I found interesting. I very much intended to do more but I was interrupted by a series of other articles that I had to write alongside some prolonged research that I intended to do for a topic that would wrap up the common theme in all those blogs. (And yes, I am at least 2 months late with this particular blog, but here we are.) To recap, in those many blogs a reoccurring topic would be the way in which the technology of today and the near-to-distant future could and would be shaped by the guiding hand of, what we call, Artificial intelligence. Much of the information that I have gathered is from last year, and this is a topic that is forever developing, so I may need to do another update later this year but this is a culmination of the key chunks of information that I have found revolving superintelligent artificial intelligence. (Or 'Supersmart AI')

First, let's define what it is that I mean by 'Superintelligent AI'. 'Artifical intelligence' is, by design, a catch-all term to describe all of the algorithms and processes that make up the capabilities of learning software. Typically, this means that AI refers to systems that collate and shift through vast quantities of data at record speed and, in advanced cases, may even offer some rudimentary interpretation to be acted upon. (This is the kind of thing that allows Google to tailor search results and suggestions to your specific wants.) But these aren't the typical kinds of systems that we think about when we talk about 'Artifical Intelligence' both in a realistic and fictionalized sense. To accurately convey the difference between Supersmart AI and what we have today, I'll point to one such fictionalized interpretation that we should all be familiar with; that of Skynet from Terminator. (That also covers the 'video game' link as there was an earnest, if mediocre, Terminator game released a couple of months back.)

In 'Terminator', Skynet is an operating system that is most famous for outgrowing the scope and intellect of it's creators and developing goals of it's own. Those goals, of course, being the eradication of all human life on the planet, although 'Superintelligent' AI does not necessarily need to adopt those specific goals in order to meet the qualifications of it's name. This moniker is merely used to denote a artificial intelligence that has crossed, what we call, the 'Event Horizion'; a point at which the intelligence and scope of AI matches all that of humanity, and then proceeds to eclipse humanity at an exponential rate. (As technology is wont to do.) This is the thing that AI cautionists like Elon Musk are very much terrified of, as it signifies the point at which technology expands to a level that far surpasses our wildest dreams, making is effectively impossible to plan for what that age might hold.

Currently, the AI that we are working with in the world today is categorized under the terminology of 'Narrow Inelligence' or 'Weak AI'. This type of tech is very good at crunching through quantitative data and working with speech and image recognition, or undergoing algorithms and playing games with simple rules. This type of AI typically learns it's craft through an iterative evolutional process whereupon they try generation after generation of testing and pick the model for the next batch of generations from the example which made it furthest to it's pre-established 'goal'. This is often called 'Brute forcing' in hacker movies, or 'Machine learning' in the real world.

From the surface that may sound like a system similar to biological evolution, and therefore an effective model to follow, but as we discussed in my Transhumanism blog, machine learning is actually sorely lacking in comparison. Biological evolution doesn't just randomly evolve every generation in hopes of finding a new gene that better fits it's environment, it's capable of reacting to issues, imminent and perceived, in order to better the lives of the organism and to facilitate the act of multiplying. (The end goal for all life except, it seems, for Giant Pandas who would rather their species go extinct than procreate.) Machine learning lacks that innate sense of what is desirable for the outcome beyond what it is programmed to desire, and it's exceedingly hard (See: impossible) to teach a system to account for a problem that you haven't even considered yet.

The next notable level of AI is what we call 'Artifical General Intelligence (AGI). This is to denote AI that is almost at the level of human intelligence (or 'on par with' depending on who you ask.) The problem with this step of AI is that the closer our technology seems to get to this point, the harder it becomes to achieve. This is because as we creep closer to human intellect we slowly uncover new facets of it's workings that throws off our perceived process, along with the fact that, as I just discussed, humans can be selective with the information it retains whilst a computer is designed to methodically go through every possible option. This iteration of artificial intelligence is what is known as 'Strong AI'.
.

Then there is the final evolution of AI, or rather the point at which that evolution becomes immeasurable. 'Superintelligent AI' surpasses the technological singularity and becomes capable of teaching itself it's own algorithms. The big fear here is not of Superintelligent AI suddenly turning evil and attempting to wipe out humanity, but rather just exceeding the bounds of our instructions and reaching a point where it's goals do not match our own. Essentially that means this isn't a question of malevolence but of competence.

At this point the most pertinent question one can ask in regard to AI is whether or not 'Superintelligent AI' is even possible, as in order to surpass the experiences of humanity computers would have to be capable of achieving a process that no other machine has ever done before; inventing and innovation. Critics would point to this as being the one safe harbour of human intelligence, as far as we know there is no way to synthetically generate a new idea, only to build upon existing ones, however some have countered that the bounds of knowledge are not, and never will be, entirely human.

To understand what I mean by that, I would direct you towards an example that I have mentioned previously, that being of the ancient Chinese boardgame Go and the way the AI has interacted with it. Go is one of the oldest and most complex games of all time, and is often considered to be harder than even Chess. That is because the goal in Go is to maneuver one's units to a point where they surrounded more of your opponents units than they have for you, which is something that seems simple to achieve until you factor in the bevy of mental processes involved in achieving that, not least of all empathy. (That is a gross oversimplification of the rules of Go, by the by, but I've watched several tutorials and I can't even understand the game; so this is all I can offer.)

That is why one of the leaders in Western AI development, Google, wanted to undergo the task of creating an AI with the capability to play and master such a game. The product was 2016's AlphaGo from the heads over at Google DeepMinds, and it took a considerable amount of human teaching to get the machine to a competitive stage. At that point, AlphaGo was put up against the 18 time world champion of Go at the time, Lee Sedol, and managed to beat him in 4/5 games. In the eyes of the AI development world, this proved that modern day AI could be capable of more than 'Bruteforcing', it could posses the ability to strategize.

The most impressive part of this demonstration, however, came next year when Goolge DeepMind created another AI software, AlphaGo Zero, for the sole purpose of defeating their world champion killer. This new AI did not learn how to play the game with any human guidance and never played with another human during it's development process at all, and yet it still picked up the game in 40 days. AlphaGo Zero then went on to beat AlphaGo in 100 games out of 100, soundly proving the superior intellect from merely one year's worth of innovation. AlphaGo Zero mastered expert strategies in it's learnings and even developed brand new ones that have never been see before in play. So one may take such a tale as proof that the game Go posses more inhuman knowledge in it's mysteries than human knowledge, which is a frightening prospect once you expand it to more general fields of knowledge today.

Or rather it is frightening if you happen to be one of the growing number of people who seem fearful of what the future of AI might hold. CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk, has been one of the most outspoken critics of artificial intelligence danger and has purposed that "the danger of AI is much greater than that of Nuclear Warheads." This declaration he makes upon the grounds that "the rate of (AI) improvement is exponential" and it won't be long until it reaches beyond our ability to control, thus crossing that 'Event Horizion' that I mention earlier. Musk, therefore, has pushed for stringent government regulation to be levied upon AI development in order to ensure that nothing is allowed to spiral out of control unchecked, reasoning that the world wouldn't allow a country to create nukes without oversight, and AI should be treated with the same seriousness.

Less apocalyptic critics have bought up the issues with the growth of AI in more practical terms, namely the way in which they effortlessly outstrip the capabilities of man. For productivity this is a positive, but when it comes to creating a sustainable ecosystem this can be a bit a problem. How can a biological compete with the processes of robots? Simple. They can't. Biological neurons operate at a mere 200 hz, whilst modern day transistors (or, 'modern' as of last year) operate at 2 ghz, a whole unit of magnitude faster. In practical terms, this means that machines are capable of 'thinking' and problem solving faster than humans can even collate the problem. Specifically, Neurons travel through axons at around 100 meters per second, which is a third of the speed of sound. Computers transmit data at 299,892,458 M/s, which is the speed of light. Their is no question of competition there and that could spell disaster for future job security in data crunching fields. (Or even in simple labour fields.)

Incidentally, those above statistics are the reason why many AI relevant fictional stories such as 'Terminator' and 'Robocop' are unrealistic. The human resistance of the 'Terminator' world would be powerless to fight against the machines not just due to their technological superiority, but because machines would be able to literally move out of the way of their ballistics before humans had finished deciding where to shoot. The T-800's would be literally unstoppable on the battlefield and humanity would be forced to go into hiding in order to survive. Similarly, in 'Robocop' Alex Murphy's organic brain would be a terrible fit for his robotic body as it's slow processes would prove an actual detriment to his body's actions. ED-209 would be far more capable and deadly than him and would, realistically, kill Murphy before he had a chance to draw his awkwardly holstered gun. (Although, to be fair, the ED-209's bulky body likely does it no favours in matters of agility. Or going up stairs.) 

Then there are those who scoff at the possibility of Superintelligent AI, or rather just it's imminence. Take the word of Christopher Bishop, Microsoft's director of research, for example, as he lauded about “how different the narrow intelligence of AI today is from the general intelligence of humans." adding that "when people worry about 'Terminator and the rise of the machines' and so on? Utter nonsense, yes. At best, such discussions are decades away." Now, one might look at a statement like that and retort that such discussion will be too late once we start on the road to general AI and beyond, but in response there are those who argue further still that AI could never reach the intellect of humanity due to insurmountable weakness of machines.

It is here where the whole thought experiment about 'The Chinese Room' becomes applicable. (Which I covered extensively in a previous blog.) This is a side of the argument that I intend to pick up on next time when I go into the ways that artificial intelligence is evolving and attempting to bridge the gap between machines and flesh. Maybe then, with everything I could find thusfar, we'll be able to come to our own conclusions about just how real the threat of 'Supersmart AI' really is.

Addictive tendencies in gaming

I just can't put it down!

The act of gaming is one that has become more widespread in recent years as proliferation has started to stretch over the globe. I've mentioned before how gaming is currently the most profitable form of entertainment (as an industry) and that is a distinction that will only grow as we move into the next decade and the prevailing stigma surrounding the world of gaming starts to die down. As more and more people have begun getting into the world of gaming, it has become more readily apparent that many of the presumed 'ill effects' of gaming. (i.e. increased predilection towards violence and anti-social behaviours) have proven to be mere figments of fiction. However, there is one accusation that has been levelled upon the world of gaming that has not only stuck, but recent received an official classification by the World Health Organization, and that is of it's addictive properties, leading to the establishment of 'Gaming Disorder'.

Much ado was made about this classification when it was first issued, but the principles behind the 'disorder' are simple enough; gaming is a commodity that is capable, in excess, of invoking symptoms similar to non-chemical addiction. That's something that anyone could have told you for free, but I suppose having a label assists the filing process for Doctors and Therapists. Folk were still disgruntled to hear about the establishing of 'Gaming Disorder' and demanded to know what effects this may have on the industry. Since then, however, we've heard little to nothing in realm of notable public blowback towards the perception of gaming and, as the dust settles, we are left with no other distraction from the issue and are now forced to confront the question, 'Is gaming addictive? And if so then how bad is it?'

Now, obviously, I am no expert on the subject of gaming addiction, (in fact, at this point nobody is.) but I have been around the world of gaming and participated with the community enough to offer my own glimpse into these matters. As of how such matters have effected me, I'm not so sure, if clinical objectivity is a necessity for casually diagnosing such a disorder then I am clearly the least qualified person to determine. Regardless, I intend to take a look over some of the anecdotal stories of relevance that I have heard on this topic with some rough approximation of objectivity, and so I hope that we come to something interesting and valid by the end of this.

Before I proceed, I wish to make it readily apparent that I, as of the writing of this article, have intentionally done no more than preliminary readings into this topic for the sole purpose of providing another 'more researched' blog down the line. This blog is intended to an approach from a purely anecdotal angle, (as most of my other entries are, you'll notice) with myself focusing on the ways that game developers feed into addiction. So, in other words, don't expect quotations and heavy research into my following words as I wanted to approach the topic as blind as possible for the good of the topic. That being said, as always I should remind you that I am biased, take that into account at all times.

When someone says 'addiction' in relation to gaming my initial first thought goes to the big boogie man of the gaming world, EA, and the cash-hungry, Games-as-a-service, model of game that they popularized. That is primarily because if we distill the key identifying symptom of an addiction, the dependency on the substance in question, then the main goal of 'Games-as-a-service' is clearly to be as addictive as possible. Whilst there was a time, somewhere between the arcade age and where we are now, where developers and publishers worked together to secure that one-time entry fee to their games, now it much more lucrative for those folk to work all the wily tricks that they can to establish a steady stream of regular payment from their customers. How do they do that? With, what is colloquially know as, hooks. (Or 'recurrancy incentives' if we're being fancy which, judging by my inexplicable verbosity today, I suppose we are.)

We see this concept materialize in our games through the ways in which modern online games ape the actions of Mobile games, MMO's and gambling stations. We see hooks that inspire us to revisit the game as often as possible, (Daily quests and rewards) hooks that make us equate our time with the game as valuable and thus seek to elongate it, (timed challenges, sales in stores, and the mere act of spending money on the game in the first place. The more you've invested into the game, the more valuable it becomes in your subconscious) and Hooks that keep us coming back because we've never seen the end. (New content as often as possible for as long as possible.)

All of these little clever tips and tricks work together in order to create a dependency between the player and the game; which, off the top of my head, is the threshold at which the hobby tips into the beginning of an addiction. Unfortunately, at least for those companies who wish to readily exploit such tactics, non-chemical addictions rarely come accompanied with the 'life threatening' side effects that can tie people into other addictions, but they sure can effect and manipulate one's mood in a way that would encourage them to stick around. 'Exclusivity offers' and 'timed events' can feel exclusive to those that aren't there to participate, and many of these games company literally bank on people fearing the feeling of missing out more than spending their time and money in a non productive way. (I know where I usually land on with such decisions.)

But does any of that make 'Game-as-a-service' addictive, or at least, in a manner voracious enough to encourage labelling by the WHO? Possibly, but I still feel that such would probably be insufficient to justify it on it's own. Afterall, the fact that games are slowly evolving in a way that intends to suck more and more money out of their players is a natural evolution for any profit-based-industry. Which would mean that the driving force behind the label of 'addictive gaming' runs deeper than the greedy machinations of unscrupulous cooperate entities. ('Players gonna play', as they say.)

In that case, why don't we look at one of most addictive common traits of gaming; collectibles. Now don't get me wrong, I'm using the term 'collectable' as more of a catch-all for any type of 'collect them all' type of list. Similar to how collectors will dedicate their free time to the acquisition of every type of a certain specialty item, Like Stamps, Classic cars or rare stuffed Fish, (I've met odd people in my time) some people can feel the allure of completing things just as strongly from the digital world. I suppose a more apt term might be 'compeletionism' as it comes from one's desire to complete everything that the game has to offer, even if it only in a certain regard. And I believe that this has some addictive qualities to it.

Most prominently in the way that people can find themselves coming back to a game that they don't particularly like or enjoy with some desire to 'complete it'. This is something that Online games like 'looter shooters' can take advantage of by constantly updating items and adding new ones so that players never quite get to the end. That desire to 'finish collections' is by no means unique to gaming, but it can be realized in this medium and result in financial trouble or merely excessive quantities of spent time. For my part, I have an issue with playing through series in the middle and feel the need to play every game leading up to the entry that I'm interested in. That led to me pushing my way through such titles like 'Splinter Cell: Double Agent' which I now hate myself for.

Although a better type of game that can be addictive for people is a genre that I'm going to label as hobby games. Those that settle into someone's everyday and become a staple in their life in the way that another hobby might. More specifically, I'm referring to the types of games like 'Second life' or 'World of Warcraft' (Or even 'Minecraft') which are so deep and/or offer so much scope of play that one can dedicate a huge portion of their free time to it on a regular basis without exhausting their possibilities. Ideally, this is what a lot of people want out of their gaming experiences, but driven to excess it can be actually quite destructive on folk's personal and/or social lives.

During the heyday of 'World of Warcraft' there was a lot of chatter about 'gaming addiction' and South Park even did an episode directly targeted at it. That is because this was around the time that we were hearing about people who were falling into disrepair due to prioritizing the game over all else. (You'll often hear Joe Rogan talk about this period when disparaging gaming.) Self neglect, breaking down of relationships and general anti-social consequences actually became a reality around this time, and although these situations were minority instances, people tend to remember the worst moments a lot more than the good ones. Compare such examples with the troubles of junkies and you may find some similarities, albeit to a generally much lesser degree.

We've heard stories similar to those days popping up again, recently, due to another rising habit: addictive gameplay loops. The Battle Royale genre in particular has been blowing up in the past couple of years due to it's accessibility and quick match turnover, both of which is just enough to draw players in and encourage them to stay. Fortnite specifically, has seemingly been a hotbed for stories of general personal woe at the hands of unfortunate self neglect. We've heard about children who's grades have suffered considerably since they started prioritizing gaming over their personal lives and even those who avoid school altogether. (Although that could just be a personal choice) Could these destructive habits be serious enough for the hobby to be considered dangerously addictive? Well it all comes down to how wide spread these issues are, or more appropriately, how wide spread the perceived issue is.

I have no doubt that the vast majority of folk who partake in regular sessions of Fortnite and other Battle Royales do so in some sort of moderation, afterall the damn things are frustrating, however if enough of a fuss is raised about such games then institutions who manage such situations are inclined to act. Personally, I don't find myself sold on the accusations that gaming itself is a hobby the encourages and inspires addiction, but I will concede that there are certain addictive aspects to it. Perhaps my opinion on that will change once I sink more hard research into the topic for my next blog on it, but I won't hold my breath. (We'll see what we see.)

Bookending

Start at the beginning...

A while back I was enjoying my very first dedicated MMO, such to the point where I would consume ancillary content from the developers, including a monthly stream that consisted of little more than Devs hanging out. It was during these streams that one could get an interesting look behind the curtain of development as creators shared woes and tribulation that they went through on a daily basis, insightful stuff. However, one topic in particular resonated with me as it pertains to the realm of storytelling, something I dabble in myself. This was when one of the lead writers was explaining the lengths that the team go to in order to avoid 'Bookending'.

'Bookending' is a term in storytelling used to describe a dynamic wherein the lionshare of the pertinent story information is exposited at the end or beginning of the story instead of being spread throughout. The obvious effect being that the consumer is less invested in the information and is less likely to pay attention and/or care. This phenomena isn't exclusive to MMO's nor is it to gaming, just look at any horror movie for the past 20 years; each of which harbour some shattering twist that completely repaints everything you just sat through. (Or at least, it ideally does that. In reality the twists usually feel shallow and unearned.) There is nothing inherently wrong with bookending, per se, when it is achieved well it can be a particularly unique way of laying out the narrative, but when it is an unfortunate consequence of the writers not paying enough attention, then it just tends to look lazy.

I think that one of the key reasons why any writer, aspiring or otherwise, would want to avoid bookending is due to one element who's importance I find myself harping on about every other day: Context. Context is the glue that brings together the story of the game, the actions of the player, and why you should care about any of it, and that context works far better when it isn't provided after everything is already said and done. On series of games that seem to have real trouble understanding this is the Assassin's Creed games series. (I know I talk about them a lot but there's a lot of games, cut me some slack.) The vast majority of those games follows the same formula, the Assassin travels to a new area, is introduced to a target and then they kill the target. This works fine throughout the early games when the story was still playing around with who the villains are, but now we know that the targets are all invariably members of the same secret organization it just feels like a huge waste of time and storytelling effort. Why should I spend time remembering this person's name when I'm going to kill them within the hour? Bookending has the same effect but with the entire story, invalidating a lot of the immersion that the quest crafters are attempting for.

In MMO's it can be all to easy to fall into this writing trap due to the way that those games have to sacrifice a lot of the pageantry of dedicated RPG's in order to facilitate for the multiplayer audience. Quests that might have been accompanied with long spouts of exposition and contextualizing in a single player outing become fetch quests in the Online sphere. How many times have you loaded up a new MMO just to be told to kill some goblins or hunt some rats. Follow up question; for how many of those times can you tell me reason for doing it? These are the kind of quests that rule the roost with many MMO's and therefore it can be tempting for a quest designer not to put in the effort of crafting extensive narrative at all, or to fit it all into a lengthy wall of text that pops up the second you take the quest. (On a related note: Dear developers, no one wants to be forced to read a wall of text. please, stop.)

Once again, I will stress that withholding context and information is not an inherent sigh of laziness, some games do it intentionally. Sometimes, Horror games like 'The Evil Within' like to play around with withholding key information for key parts of the late game in order to utilize the sense of confusion that it imbues the player with. Much of that game revolves around jumping the player to different locales and experiencing vastly unique world spaces with no apparent rhyme or reason between these transitions. It is only in the late stages that you provided with the information to discern reality from imagination which still leaves the player with unreliable memories as they try to piece together the early game in their heads. (Or you could just play through it all again, but that's no fun!)

Other games put in significant effort to avoid context spamming but still manage to achieve that peculiar aura of mystique. The Dark Souls franchise famously only really offer two unmissable moments of story, the intro and the end. (And the endings tend to be pretty ambiguous.) Everything else that the game has to tell, from it's context to it's themes, are told through the environment or through legends and tales in item descriptions. Not only does this create one of the most natural narrative environments that I have ever experienced, and one of my favourites, but it ensures that the average inattentive player could miss it all and go through the game having no idea why they did anything. (Although, they may have to look up a guide to tell them when to stick on the Covenant of Artorias.)

So what are the best methods for avoiding bookending? Well, there is no one surefire way beyond ensuring that it is something you take into account whilst crafting the mission. In The Outer Worlds, you'll often find salient info chunks on terminals mid mission, and in games like Borderlands 2 (And, I'd imagine, 3) you'll get updates as you play. The key is simply to spread things out until you have a steady pace throughout the mission. How that feels can differ wildly from game to game, but it's one of those things that you'll know when you achieve it, and notice if you miss it.

Play video games and invest yourself in storytelling for as long or as fervently as I have, and you start to really notice things like these dragging a game back. It goes to show how the greatest games can juggle so many factors with ease whilst remember to space out it's narrative and maintain a steady decent pacing. Most of the parts that make a narrative work are, and should be, invisible to the naked eye, and that's what makes it look so easy and feel so natural. The 'Bookending' lesson is one that is hard to teach without experience, so it'll be interesting to see if this particular issue crops up with the inevitable growing pains that Blizzard can expect when they bring a campaign to the rumored Overwatch 2.

Ruminations on video game atrophy.

Insert funny line/obscure reference here

I had another blog lined up for today. It had bells and whistles and everything. But after some unfortunate circumstances it all got wiped and now I feeling weak and useless and can't even work up the creative energy to re-enter the paragraphs that I lost. (I suppose I underestimated how much I needed the stability of this blog in my life.) However, I am sad. Really freakin' sad. So I thought I could replace my fallen content with something that fits my morose mood. (Don't expect many zany jokes and punchlines with this one.)

So what do I mean by a video game atrophy? It's a fairly vague term with many different possible meanings or connotations, but which drove me to write this blog? Well, I was thinking about the general wasting away of gaming in the industry sense. (Maybe I'll cover personal atrophy the next time I feel like hurling myself off a roof.) You see, gaming has evolved incredibly rapidly in the past few decades from a niche activity to the most profitable in the world, and that sped-up growth could be met with a hastened demise considering how things appear to be panning out from here. (FYI, the rest of this blog is going to be an off-the-cuff personal dirge of an article, so don't expect heavy research, mirth, or a happy conclusion.)

There have been a few individuals who have taken a look at the progression of gaming and remarked how it resembles the ebb and flow of other art forms, yet in fast-motion. So it is my no means an original idea when I point out how gaming trends fall out of grace in a matter of years as opposed to generations. Remember when breaking the fourth wall was the height of intelligent storytelling? (Well, maybe not in the mainstream. Everyone seemed to roll their eyes in Assassin's Creed 2 when Juno spoke to the player.) That trend seemed to be wholly axed off with the cumulative and creative; Doki Doki Literature Club. To try that again would be old hat and uncreative. How can you top the type of manipulation that Dan Salvato pulled off? Simple, you can't. People's tastes moved on and so did video game storytelling. All in the space of one game.

Of course, that isn't to say that there aren't trends that don't overstay their welcome. When Kojima delivered one of the greatest horror teasers of all time in PT, many indie Devs tried to copy the ideas and concepts that were introduced here. If I had a penny for every looping hallway horror indie project that I have come across since, I would have enough to pay off my debts and become a functioning member of society. (Thank god that's not the case and I'm resigned to this purgatory, huh?) Not that I blame anyone for borrowing an idea here and there, what Kojima and his team presented was truly inspired. In horror video games there are usually those few spaces in which the player is safe, these are areas that you get to know exceedingly well and take comfort from that familiarity. These help to pad out the time between terror sequences and prevent the player from becoming desensitized too quickly. Kojima turned this concept on it's head slightly by familiarizing the player with this hallway location and having them loop through it again and again, then he changed it up by subtly adding small detail to the map and throwing in horror ques to deeply unnerve you. He played on so many levels of horror that other games hadn't manage to reach yet that it was inevitable that someone would try to emulate his game. That being said, Polish Itch.io horror project 'Estacao Liberdade' is literally just PT on a subway. I mean, they literally stole the creepy radio script and re-worded it for their game. (Good artists borrow, great artists steal, I guess.)

So where am I going with this? Just that I think that the rapid adoption rate of video game trends could have an adverse effect on the future of gaming. Heck, I don't like being an alarmist, but I think that if things carry on the way they are it's only a matter of time before we hit a second Video game crash. Let me explain. Recently I was playing 'The Outer Worlds' (Today's blog was supposed to be on that game, but you know...) That is a game that is feature complete with every bit of desired content finished and shipped with the product. That is to say, this isn't an a work-in-progress game that is going to try and persist itself for years and bum a few pity bucks off you in order to keep up with expenses. 'The Outer Worlds' is a very "what you see is what you get", kind of game. And that strangely makes it something of an abnormally in today's gaming landscape.

I have spoken in length about the steady rise of live services in our gaming sphere, but I find it really is important not to understate just how prevalent these types of games are becoming. Every release window we seem to get at least two live service releases, attempting to compete for your money and attention through recurrency incentives. Ubisoft famously claimed that traditional games were gone and everything was about 'live services' now. They even demonstrated so with a hilarious amateurish flow chart featuring a .Jpeg of Bayek (from Assassin's Creed Origins) in the middle. (You guys need to start paying your graphic designers more. Or at all.) So that is one huge company that has committed to bowing out of making traditional video games in favour of ones that are more 'lucrative'.

The problem is that when such a trend starts to catch on, you start to run afoul of Syndrome's razor; "When everyone's a super, no one is". All these games want to be different and advertise their games as a journey for their players to go on. 'Join us and you can see this game start from humble beginnings to become the next WoW or FFXIV!' The problem is, this usually doesn't work out. When we live with a work ethic of "It's not where yo start, it's where you end up." (Thanks Todd Howard.) we start to see games that finish unpolished, unfinished, or straight up broken. (Or all 3 if we're talking Fallout 76.) From there these developers are expecting fans to latch onto these messes-of-a-game until the thing becomes worthwhile, dedicating their time and money along the way. The industry has essentially found a way to mix crowdfunding and early access in the worst way possible.

Even when things work out and the game isn't total trash, Devs still need the community to be playing and paying constantly in order to justify the game's servers being kept up. This leads to situations where players will find themselves with literally no more freetime left to split between their games as they have to do a daily in this game, before completing a dungeon here, and then the weekly boss in that game before finishing with the monthly contract. All of these 'recurrency incetives' are slapped with a timer in order to promote their exclusivity and encourage impulse buying. Essentially, this means that every live service game is competing each other for your screen time oblivious of the fact there is only so much to go around.

So, as the quality of games is slowly starting to become worse, people are starting to buy less of them and instead stick to the games that they know to be good, or are already a shoe in. Battlefield, Call of Duty, and Sports games are all going to hit their sales quotas, that's a given, but every other game has to struggle for recognition and sales. It's slowly starting to create a bubble where only a handful of games are getting the lion share of the industry profits, and bubbles are known to be susceptible to bursting. Wasn't the last video game crash caused by an influx of low quality products that cost too much to produce and nobody wanted to buy them? (I may be wrong on the particulars there, but I think I caught the gist.)

So what do we do about all of this? As consumers, we have to let these companies know that it's time to change tactics into something that it more sustainable and healthy for the industry. And that means we'll have to play hardball with the only bargaining chip that matters, their money. Of course, this is implying that people have enough social responsibility to even act in the greater good. Heck, the other day I saw a Reddit post of someone complaining about how they were getting rude messages over Xbox live because they purchased Fallout 76's subscription service and were running around in the exclusive ranger armour. "I don't agree with it either" He wrote "Blame Bethesda, not me.". If that is any hint as to the intelligence of the average consumer, then it's safe to say that gaming is doomed. (Have a happy Halloween!)

Who is reponsible?

Can't business and pleasure co-exist?

Recently there have been a great deal of developments in the fields of microtransactions and Lootboxes. It seems like every other day we're hearing about some new game that pushes the boundaries once again or a retrospective from someone who has had their financial stability ruined from such mechanics. After a while, whenever I read these stories they would leave me with a thought running through my head; should companies be held responsible for situations like this. By that I mean, are game developers and publishers responsible for safe guarding their consumers against the possibility of losing everything. Just so we're clear, this blog will consist of less statements of fact and more my opinion on the topic at hand.

A while back I wrote a blog about a BBC story detailing a family who's savings had been eaten up after their four children were allowed to run wild with the microtransactions. The father had bought a couple of them for the children as a present, and the kids had observed how he had done it and repeated the process. (If I recall correctly, this is rather easy to do as neither PlayStation nor Xbox ask for you put in your credentials more than once.) The sub-10 year olds ended up spending £550 in search of their favourite player; Lionel Messi. (Whom they never received.) Once the parents discovered this, after receiving their bank statements, they went to both EA and Nintendo to solve this issue. This next part of the story is a bit sketchy and I'm not sure how much I believe it, but apparently, EA sent them back a link to their 'Controlling in-game purchases' site page, whilst Nintendo actually refunded the money. (I'm not sure if that's real, it just fits EA's MO a little too well.)

The wasn't the end of that story however, there were more instances of situations like this. In the article they mentioned one player who submitted for an information's request and discovered that he had spent around $10,000 in two years towards the game. When talking about it in a Eurogamer interview, he uttered that infamous quote "It's just not worth it." I actually do remember this story at the time too. When this data law was implemented there was so much grumbling from the likes of EA and Activision that they decided to make it a huge hassle for customers to receive their data. They're were even some gaffe's outside the gaming sphere, such as when one Alexa customers was accidentally sent copies of the recorded audio from another users device. (But that's a whole other kettle of fish.)

There was actually a follow-up article from the BBC where they collated different stories from consumers into a list of accidental infractions. One woman told of her 22 year old Autistic son and he ended up spending his life savings of £3,160 on a mobile game called 'Hidden Artefacts'. (Wait, he's 22 and he had 3 grands worth of savings? Well, I feel like a failure.) The woman worked tirelessly to get the money back but, as one would expect from the mobile market, everyone was extremely unhelpful and she ended up hitting a road block. There was another story about a 16 year old who spent nearly £2000 on NBA, which had to be paid out of his sister's college funds. A 12 year who dropped £700 on Clash of Clans and a 5 year old who put £500 into a golfing game.

Now, initially you may be thinking something along the lines of "So what, should these companies really be held accountable for buyer's remorse?" But I'd urge you to take a look at the ages of those people I mentioned again. You may note how everyone there is either underage or somewhat vulnerable. Now, this may be because high functioning adults who fall for these schemes are too embarrassed, or pig headed, to admit it, granted, but I feel there is a more insidious angle to all this. You see, a lot of mobile games or video games that allow for this kind of overspending are aimed towards appealing to kids. That 'Hidden artefacts' game featured a young girl in it's art, the golfing game looked bright and appealing, Sports games are always a safe bet for kids, and 'Clash of Clans' has always had a low effort cartoony look to it. (Although that may be more a comment to Supercell's lazy art direction.)

With the plethora of advertising laws that exist to limit the amount and type of content that be advertised to children, given their inherent weakness to suggestion, wouldn't one assume that similar laws exist towards targeting money-grubbing games towards them? Well, no actually. Advertising law is hyper focused on the advertising area of marketing (go figure) with the actual presentation of the game, and more importantly it's contents, falling under the supervision of the Entertainment Software Association. And we all know their stance towards featuring gambling in games .("What gambling? I don't see no gambling.") The point is moot anyway.  Children are merely collateral damage in this conflict anyway, the real target for these companies are the adults.

Fifa don't make their tens of millions a year through miss-purchases, oh no. EA, 2K and just about every AAA gaming company nowadays, gear their games towards getting players hooked on the Lootbox cycle. I'll use Fifa as an example. Fifa totes their popular Ultimate Team mode every year as a 'fanatasy football online', experience. It is the key mode and the star attraction for fans, and the main source of revenue for the people running the show. Once players access this mode, they are encouraged to build their team and play them against other players online, but there is a problem. You'll go online, get your butt kicked and come away realizing that you need better players. (And if you think that the chances of coming across a better equipped opponent is random, I suggest you take a look at some of the matchmaking patents that game's companies were filing for towards the end of 2017.) The consumer then realizes that their only way to get better players is to fork out on Lootboxes. They get crap so they keep going until someone useful arrives. They go online, maybe win a few matches, and then get hit up against a roadblock again and return to the Lootboxes.

That is the cycle that rules Fifa and it is what makes them their bread and butter. It is coupled with the fact that every year your Ultimate Team is reset, requiring you to go through your grind all over again from scratch. When you purpose build your system for this, then it is an entirely consensual relationship in the eyes of the law. Moral obligation might have people point their fingers at the predatory game play loop that keeps people spending, the gambling-esque psychological cues to get people hooked, and the obfuscating 'FUT' Coins to devalue the money that is being spent. But none of that is the concern of EA, because everyone partaking is doing so willingly.

So if that's the case, why are there people who still walk away from it feeling like they've been taken advantage of? Remember that guy who spent $10 000 on FUT, he certainly feels upset with himself for going that far. Go onto Fifa's own Reddit and you can come across people who bemoan the money they've spent on Microtransactions. Just now I managed to bring up a thread from 9 months back that has people saying that they actually hate playing the game, due to it's pay-to-win tendencies, and find opening packs to be the most fun part. Take a look Here, this stuff is real!

The question that I want to purpose at the end of the day is (once again); are these companies responsible for the systems they implement? Should they be held responsible for the way they twist and torment people into spending more then they should in things that they regret? One could almost compare a situation like this as similar to living in an abusive relationship, with one party always pushing the other into situations they feel uncomfortable with. (Although, perhaps that is a tad too flippant.) Ultimately, there is no legal answer to this question as of yet. As much as these companies like to boast about how the law permits them to make their games like this, the truth is that the law is silent on the issue, we'll see which way the pendulum swings when the matter makes it to court. (Perhaps soon if Parliament has any bite to it's bark.) Until then it is an issue of ethics, and that I cannot answer definitively. I leave the matter open to you to decide. Take a measured look, remember to be empathetic, and see if you know were the blame should lay.

Is gaming threatening the concept of intimacy?

Am I doing clickbait right?

Before I settle into a regular series of blogs, which I have been planning for a while now, I wanted to cover this funny little story that I saw pop up on my Twitter feed. This is by no means a new article, having been published back in April, but I guess the Twitter community have a thing for summoning necro-threads because I saw a pundit mention this post just a couple of days back. So, seeing as how this tangentially links to the world of gaming, I wanted to address the allegation that The Daily Star's Sophie Roberts made claiming that; Young men would rather play games than... uh... copulate.

First of all, let me say that I approach this issue from a place of no personal experience. I am a socially awkward shut-in who can't even maintain long-distance acquaintances, let alone dedicated relationships, so I cannot comment on the romantic aspect. However, as a life long gamer, I can certainly see the appeal that playing games has over social interaction. (Perhaps I'm a tiny bit incredibly biased in that regard.)  In today's gaming landscape, a lot of AAA games are specifically designed to be an all-encompassing experience that suck up all of your personal time and almost become a second job. That is part of the reason why the Industry cannot sustain itself on the 'Live service' model. If every game is designed to take your time and money perpetually, than eventually you will run out of people to spread between these games. So I can understand why people would want to forgo carnal pleasure in order to seek fulfillment in running the Vault of Glass once again. (Oh Jeez, did that reference date me?), Okay, how about running 'City Of Ash II'? (Oh god, that just made things worse!)

The article, which covers a accusation made by Fox News, (Alarm bells ringing.) claims that a "large proportion" of "20 something men" underwent a "General Social Survey"in which it was discovered that "23% of over 18's said that they lacked intimacy in their lives." Okay so, ignoring the fact that all the sources and information for that survey seemed sketchy and vague, it immediately strikes me as odd that the Daily Star ('Paragons of Journalistic intergrity' that they are) seem unable to provide any links pointing to the survey itself. I'm not usually the type to question the validity of a silly Internet article, but what can I say, I'm bored.

They then went onto to address how The Washington Post looked at sex survey data from the last decade. ('Sex Survey'? This is the same newspaper that champions the quote "Democracy dies in darkness", right? Nice to see this is how they've chosen to fight the good fight.) They found that three times as many males under 30 had "reported no sex over the course of 12 months." (Curious that they were keeping track. Or maybe I'm the weird one.) Also, "28% of young men have abstained for a year." whilst for women that figure is more around the 18% mark.

So what does all this data mean and what is it's connection to gaming? (This time I'm the one asking the questions.) Well, Roberts then goes on to bring one Professor Jean Twinge into the equation. (Who, according to google, is a real person.) Twinge, a Professor of psychology at San Diego SU, lays the blame at the fact that many millennials don't have a "live-in partner." (With that information, one might go so far as to blame this situation on the rocketing price of housing, but Sophie choose a different angle.)

Professor Twinge also implied that the rise of technology might have something to do with the shifting culture, explaining that there are "More things to do at 10 o'clock at night than there were twenty years ago." (Sounds like Netflix binging has taken the place of most other nocturnal activities.) She then went on to make a throwaway comment about how young people are more interested in "Streaming video, social media and console games." There it is ladies and gentlemen! The smoking gun! Slap 'Video games' at the top for the 'headline readers' and call it a day!

It is hard to call such an anomaly like this an epidemic, especially as there is no available information that details the parameters of this survey (or even a freakin sample size), but it is still an interesting reflection of the changing priorities of society. It seems that the further we get we away from the World War II generation, those who lived in times of fear and uncertainty and came to value the most imperative aspects of life, the further we lose sight of that our value for life and the more we seek out tendencies that one might call hedonistic. Perhaps the undeniable rise of video gaming (officially the most profitable from of entertainment as of 2018) is symbolic of how deep our society has sunk into escapism and indulgence. We would rather spend our time in fictional worlds over which we hold dominion, than face us to the world we currently live in.

Although perhaps that is a natural evolution for the wider state of consciousness in response to a world gone (My old Business teacher taught me to hate this word) glocal. With instant access to communication and news all over the world, it can sometime feel like every citizen is duty bound to walk about with the weight of the world on their minds, or else be branded ignorant. Don't get me wrong, I feel that it is important to hold some understanding and/or knowledge over events that occur across the world, but I don't begrudge anyone who finds that responsibility overwhelming. Why trouble oneself with the struggles of a world that you cannot change when you can retreat into fiction instead? Books, Show, movies and games do all reflect the issues of real life to some degree, (I firmly believe that it is impossible for any fiction to be devoid of social/political influence.) but oftentimes it is diluted to the point where one can just enjoy the ride without worrying about the end.

I do enjoy the conversation this Daily Star article has inspired, even though I did not like the article itself. It's not that the topic itself incensed me at all, I found it rather funny and it does seem to meld with similar reports that arose, regarding young Japanese men and video games, a couple years back. My problem is with how lazy, hodgepodge, and sourceless the whole article is. I mean, sure, it's not like I put down my sources, but I'm an idiot on the Internet who pens these blogs to avoid facing the harsh crippling aimlessness of his own
lonely existence, not a paid author for a (semi) well-known online newspaper. (They're in print too! Who knew?) In fact, this article is so dubious, I wouldn't be surprised if it was written on April 1st. Like it was. Now, I'm not going to declare the whole thing is a joke, (Despite being updated on April 2nd, there seems to be no information clearly indicating to one conclusion or the other.) I'm just hoping, for the sake of their careers, that this isn't the standard this newspaper holds itself to. However, I will say, if it is a joke, I'm not sure I get the punchline.