Max Vs. The Internet

Magical Wasteland has a succinct, but brilliant post on Five Short Videogame Industry Keynotes. They are pithy and to the point, so I'm afraid I'm not really adding much, but I think we need more of this honest and confrontational style of writing about games industry laziness.

Here is a less explanatory welcome, or perhaps, an "about" page. Rather than worry about the circumstances of its existence, or all of those details that add up to how this blog exists, this is the what and hopefully the why.

I've had to do a lot of thinking about games. I'm a game designer. I suppose I'm about to be a producer, which means I'll be a producer who just pretends to design (Quick joke: How many producers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Two. One to hold the bulb and the other to hammer it in) or some such. I've been told I have a knack for it by exactly one person (not myself. I don't for a minute believe the hype), and with that absolutely no credibility. I believe in proof by hypocrisy, meaning that I'm wrong, or do things the wrong way, but know there is a better way to do them. If I catch you doing something the same way, then you're wrong as well. This only works because I'm honest about, and I try like hell to make it not the case. The effect is rather bathetic, but hopefully, falsifiable. Credo.

This blog is usually about neat things that I find. Things which lodge themselves in my brain and I have to share them or work through them. A designer told me once that the world, and all the things in it, are all endlessly and perfectly fascinating, and really, if you want to make good art, it can't hurt to start there. I'm inclined to agree. Memes can hijack a mind sometimes, you know? Other times I post things here because it's where they'll get seen. That's the ugly realpolitik of living on the internet and living beyond your means in terms of how much you're expected to read, write, think, analyze, design, and produce in a given day. I wish the faces of clocks had a baker's dozen of hours. What this blog is supposed to be about, what it is about, right now, is thoughts and commentary on the game industry, but somewhat broader than that: I think the web is going to eat our lunch. Games have currently eaten you lunch, Mr. Music, in terms of dollars, and they're gunning for you, Mrs. Movies, and in a little while it'll be the same way for attention. Remember, I wish we had 26 hours in the day, and unfortunately, when it comes to time spent on my ass in front of a glowing screen, something is going to have to lose out. I'm afraid we're all going lose to the web. It's where I waste enough time as is. So rather than hiss and curse and spit at its black magic, I'm trying to pull a Coyote and steal away the magic held in the web and use it to make better games. Simultaneously, the thinking around games needs to grow up. It's puerile, it's awful, and it's shortsighted in ways that make me tremble in frustration. Games sit beautifully at the intersection of emerging art and commerce, and it's a guarantee that in any room full of developers, you are not the smartest person there. Yet in these meeting rooms filled with the philosopher-kings of fun, no one seems to be willing to admit they are completely craven and working for filthy, filthy lucre (not that there's anything wrong with that, but let's come to that honestly, eh?) or stand up and declare that they are making real Art-with-a-capital-A-and-damn-the-torpedoes-while-we're-at-it! If we aren't being reductionist, there's no reason the two can't coexist, but because we are, and because the vast majority of ludic output at the moment is gutless, simpering dreck, I'm about to throw in with one camp or the other just to see a decision made, a line drawn in the sand, a bet placed, and something proven, either by success or failure.

I really, really don't want to play l'enfant terrible of the games industry (and that seems a bit presumptous of a college student in his final semester, that whole speaking for the 60,000 anglophone North Americans employed in this vocation), and I don't want to write a sweeping manifesto about games, or indie games, or writing about games, because all of those have been done. They've all had a marginal impact. Most have failed. What I want, and what you should be taking away from this, is the sense that you've just seen Diogenes with his lamp lit in broad daylight. Here's a trainwreck of a man, and what he's shouting doesn't make a lick of got-damn sense (and does he have to swear so much?), but at the same time, there's something noble about looking for the truth in all of this. For whatever reason, we've stifled ourselves. Shut ourselves down, and surrendered whatever artistic freedom we once had. We need that freedom back, and with it, the liberty to say what is good and what is bad. We must clamor for the former, and deride the latter.

We're on the threshold of something big, and something wonderful. Chances are, it's already happened and we're just trying to make sense of what that something is. Games are our shared future, just as they have been our shared past. In the short run, there are some very hard, but assailable problems facing game designers and developers. It's time to make story (I will stab the man who uses "narrative" as a verbal crutch) play nicely with emergence and interactivity. It's time to start treating AI as a first priority feature. It's time to bring modern gameplay into everyone's hands: rich, poor, young, old, man, woman, able-bodied or no. It's time to let games broach difficult, troublesome topics, to get into messy ethics and moralities. It's time to treat the scholarly study of games a real discipline unto itself, to embrace the syncretism with other disciplines that implies, while standing firm and rejecting the dregs of their work as dreck when it is useless or harmful to the discipline of gamecraft. We must stop coasting on novelty, while staying novel ourselves.

There are many, many reasons I am deeply and ardently in love with games. Here is one of the shorter ones: they are a form of Gesamtkunstwerk, and therefore, an expression of our highest humanity.

So that is what this blog is about: games, but games because they are human. Because in every game, there are players.

Writing 340's homework for today: profile and evaluate a blog. Raph Koster, I choose you! This is a little short, and formated poorly, but it has to be in on time. I'll correct it like Nice Pete's Peach Titus at the next opportunity, but until then, it's getting hidden behind a cut.

We've been asked to blog a short post on what politics, specifically, the presidential election, means for our topic. I am not a particularly political person: I do hold strong political beliefs, but they are not particularly common, nor ordinary. Add to this obstinacy, the unwillingness to compromise some principals in favor of others, and I am not easily wooed. I am more easily convinced by arguments to avoid voting than I am convinced that our republic needs my token participation in order to legitimize it. I am perhaps, overly bitter and cynical, but then, it's hard not to sometimes.

But all of this is deeply personal and inappropriate for this space. But by their very nature, politics is the public expression of what one's personally held beliefs are, with the ultimate aim of codifying those beliefs into a body of law that a set of citizens have agreed to submit to. It doesn't matter what color your state is, you're still wrong, and I resent you and your politicians for the attempt to impose your beliefs on me. By and large for the most part, we can argue until we are blue in the face, fail to reach common ground even if we acknowledge one another

Which is why I think games have a chance in escaping the whole process. Which isn't to say that there isn't a strong influence on games from the political sphere. The controversies of the 1990s, so reminiscent of the hysteria surrounding (in reverse order) rap music, films, rock and roll, comic books, surrealism, films, the waltz, Romanticism, novels, secular music, (I suppose) poetry, maybe fire, stone flint hand axes, and originally bipedalism. There is nothing new under the sun. Change has been scary since forever. Now that we have a group of musty legislators empowered to slow down scary changes (the senate is a fairly old invention) confronted with a new, scary set of changes.

Largely, these things are irrelevant. The ESA does a reasonably good job (in my uninformed opinion) of serving as a lobby for the commercial interests of our industry. Likewise, the VGVN seems a little bit hysterical when it claims "video games are being threatened by legislation on the federal, state and local level, and it is time for gamers to stand up and voice their concerns." At a grassroots level, I'm content to let these organizations pull their weight. I don't think Arizona's HB2660 is going to stop anyone from enjoying Grand Theft Auto IV anytime soon.

The larger issue at stake, if we've learned anything from the recent Mass Effect controversy, is one of free speech. It seems narrow minded to pretend that games, just because they are a relatively novel form of expression, deserve additional special regulations. That said, the number of politicians who still seem to thing that they can regulate speech, especially in this day and age (hint: internet) is infuriating. Thanks for electing them!

I'd be willing to embrace a principled politician who had the correct position on free speech, security, copyright, and net neutrality, but frankly, the market will do as it sees fit, and games will follow suit.

The biggest thing stopping the emergence of AO titles full of tastefully mature content (Titus: The Game) isn't The Man in Washington. It's Wal-Mart.

I can't remember what I was reading the other day that provoked this, but, here goes:
if eugenics and dysgenics are the study/practice of the manipulation of genes towards features good or ill (perhaps sinisterly enough, the former is always assumed to be by human intervention while the later has natural decay as its implicit origin), then where are eumemics and dysmemics in our lexicon?

The concepts practically named themselves, and I got all trigger happy about using them when I remembered two things: first, rhetoric already exists, and second, that memes are a great popular notion, but lack a rigorous theoretical/observational background like genetics. But at the same time, the underpinnings of eumemics and dysmemics are present in our everyday world: pretty much any form of media or communication deals with the promotion of a thought, e.g. "buy Denham's Dentrifice" or "I haz a bukkit."

Any communicative art, can, to some degree be considered eumemic. That is to say, such arts are designed to promote/cultivate specific memes which are held to be desirable by their creators. Largely, as a culture, we accept the practice of positive eumemics, or the cultivation of new memes (advertising). However, we tend to frown upon negative eumemics (censorship), but that varies with the cultural climate. Dysmemics, the spread of undesirable memes, is largely a matter of taste. In a somewhat reflexive manner, cultural practices of negative eumemics can be considered dysmemic: censorship may be a bad thing, but that doesn't stop it from remaining a popular idea. Eugenics is a dysmemic idea, despite the fact that we eat foods which are the product of thousands of years of eugenic selection, the atrocities associated with the practice of negative eugenics on humans were so horrifying.

Up until this point, I've really just been having fun with words. But someone asked a question as to what videogames are actually communicating, and asked it over two years ago. I haven't been able to come up with a good answer to that question in the meantime: sure it was easy to waffle and talk about what games could deliver if we wanted them to, but Jenova wrote,

If you ignore the importance of the message, just want to focus on an addictive interactive system, please check out Vegas. Slaughter machine is not a media. Why are there millions of people look down at video games? What kind of messages have we been making in the past twenty years?

So when it comes to games, what sort of media games are matters. Are they eumemic or dysmemic engines? Do you learn more or less, or rather, do you learn positively or negatively while playing them? There are dozens upon hundreds of questions loaded into "what sort of media are games?" (Interactive Media!)

Games are a very different media from others like television or the web, primarily because of their interactivity. What makes a game a game is still an open debate, even though there are several good working definitions ("a series of meaningful choices," "a closed system of rules with one or more players, a goal or conflict, and a finite outcome"), they all seem to describe a facet of games rather than getting to the axiomatic nature of what a game is. Approaching from the facet of games as media, I'd like to propose that a game is a memetic engine which propogates further interaction with that system. That is to say, a game is a piece of media which provokes play. Eumemic games propagate the meme of their play successfully-- they continue to be played and get based on. We might even risk calling this fun, or a source of fun. Dysmemic games, games which encourage undesirable memes, or do a poor job of propagating themselves and their play. They aren't fun. Other media may require you to suspend your disbelief, but games require you to suspend your disbelief and keep pressing a button.

Thus, while it may be important to load a game with a message or emotional goal, it's important to do so through the game's system. It is, in fact, ok to focus on an addictive interactive system (Vegas baby!), Slaughter Machine IV, or Nuclear Train Strike II: Double Impact (you can actually play some of these now). If you can build a memetic engine which encourages its own play, then congratulations, you've done something I'd kill to be able to do as a designer.

This doesn't let designers off the hook when it comes to the content of their games, but it should give us a different approach to worrying about what game content actually is. Rather than worrying about how much blood their is in a game, we should be worried about the blood generating activity, and why we've been resorting to stabbing/shooting/exploding to create our simulated murder, rather than more sophisticated means.

A slot machine is a perfectly valid game, so long as we recognize the validity of "gambling" as a meme. The potency of gambling as a meme, and its real world ramifications, certainly leave a lot of room for worry: is a slot machine a dysmemic artifact, dispensing a harmful meme with every interaction? The potency of gambling may be the very point. Or is it a meme to be cultivated for profit?

The problem with designing games as memetic systems, as a media fundamentally different from other media, is that formal content must be weighed against dramatic content, and the cognizance of a game's formal system complicates the whole matter. I don't think games will ever escape their dramatic roots in things like Muppet Wedding vs. The Space Mutants , but games will have to escape their roots in terms of simplistic interactions. The future of games as media won't be predicated on trying to design content around a specific message or set of emotions, but trying to design the interaction between player and system as a message. The problem games have isn't that for the past 20 years we've been showing increasingly elaborate murders, races, explosions, and breasts, the pace at which we've complicated and improved all of those things (from ragdoll corpses to jiggle physics) has outstripped the pace we've elaborated on the interactive hows-and-whys behind including those things in our systems to begin with. We've done a poor job of tuning the lever and payout on the slot machine, even though we've made it a helluva lot flashier and exciting to drop quarter in.

I think I've got it wrong at this point. I think there's something more beneath that simplistic conclusion, but I'm not sure yet. Anyway, from fun with words, I'm left with the notion that games are extremely potent eumemic systems, perhaps more potent than the web.

This post serves to aggregate the three sub-posts that comprise paper number 1. The first act consists of a dialogue I've had with the assignment regarding the website of Raph Koster, a well-respected game designer and outspoken intellectual on that same topic. The second is an analysis of Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's satirical critiques, their rapid-fire delivery, and the need for such wall-eyed calls-to-action. Finally, I attempt to justify the existence of my blog in joining this space that is already crowded with fellow would-be critics, commentators, observers, and pundits. The paper begins after the jump.

I need to declare a winner in the race for my heart. The contestants are those popular social bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, diigo, reddit, digg, etc.), and they are all racing to be number one in terms of usefulness.

But I think the winner is del.icio.us.

Despite its insipid name, I like del.icio.us. It's got a clean and simple format, it's easy to use, and it's fairly robust. It has a large enough user base that I can cull and glean useful or interesting facts from its social side, and it's relatively painless to use as a bookmarking service.

It has another advantage: because del.icio.us is so widespread and simple, other services can be made to work in conjunction with it easily. Diigo, for instance, has easily imported all of my bookmarks, and allows me to double post them back into del.icio.us.

The problem that I have with social bookmarks is that I have no pressing need for them. I am fairly competent at storing my own information and finding new information without an explicit network of friends to help me. I already know where I can find garbage content to sift through to find useful things. If someone wants to share a link with me, I'll get an e-mail or an IM. That minimal level of entropy is enough of a filter for all the garbage they are looking at, I'm willing to accept that lose of an occasional LOLcat picture that didn't get forwarded my way.

So for being low on cruft, but high on content, del.icio.us, I choose you. But we've got to do something about that name.

I feel a little odd undertaking this assignment: find a social bookmarker and profile them. Profile the dickens out of their interests, and think about how they are related to you by interests alone. So this must, necessarily, be a small investigatory project with a lot of interpretation.

I think I got lucky by finding Graydread on del.icio.us so easily. From what I can gather so far he (or she, but some unconscious gender sense is telling me he) seems to be an Australian teacher (perhaps this school, if an inference can be made from his network), probably of high-school aged students, and massive geek. One of his tags is "discworld_mud." I'll let that stand on its own.

His (there's an interest in sports, cars, and videogames, some I'm feeling more confident in a prejudiced declaration of masculinity) tag bundles include: "AboriginalStudies, Auto, Education, English, Humanities, Games&Simulations, ICT, Linguistics, Literature, Media, Philosophy, Politics, ResearchTools, Science&Psychology, Sport," and, of course, unbundled tags. So his interests are certainly broader than mine, but have a similar overlap in broader areas of anthropology, technology, humanities, and games. Of all his tags, it seems that games are what he most frequently posts about, both critical reading material and links to such necessaries as patches and mods. So whatever it is that we have in common, he seems to get it.

Right now, I'm watching a video he's saved, and it seems, if we are to follow Antonisse's classifications, Graydread is both a geek and a nerd.

I'm at a loss really, for what more I can extrapolate from a set of bookmarks alone: he tends to bookmark in bursts, a few things on a day, a day or two at a time, sometimes more, sometimes less. I think the same can be said for any casual production, whether it is writing or saving something. While his tags are extensive, his comments are laconic: usually they note the bare minimum of content on the available page ("Article on publication of 3 Dick novels"). I think he may be teaching/have taught a unit on The Doll, because a number of his bookmarks tucked in between resources about the play, are labeled described with a simple "cheat site." Expecting to find codes and "1337 h4cks" I was greeted by an essay mill. So he's a savvy teacher. His emphasis on pedagogy (I just realized that "peda-gogy" fits perfectly as a knuckle tattoo) and plagiarism seems to drive this home, but the additional material stored under psychology makes me think that this isn't just a teacher who is in love with his curriculum, but is actively trying to engage his students, to open up their heads and climb around a little bit.

There's a whole section carved out for "e-learning," including an article on how to use del.icio.us as a teaching tool, as well as a number of Edublogs, which isn't surprising given that service's Australian origins.

Something I haven't seen before, but what seems useful, is how he's tagged certain posts with "Dad" or "Becca," familial and familiar names, either indicating things family members can find easily, or things that he saved because he couldn't forward them immediately. Which seems odd, but I imagine based on his rigorously organized bookmarks, he separates his time online between gathering and disseminating links.

His game posts skew slightly towards roleplaying games, both MMOs and singleplayer, with a particular fondness for Oblivion. But racing games, soccer, and the like are also present in a healthy amount.

What first drew me to this profile was a similar number, and eye towards the quality, of bookmarks that talked about games. Now that I've spent a little more time here, I think I have a little more appreciation for what this one person is collecting. It's odd, because I never expected to drill so deeply into an anonymous collection of saved pages and try and re-assemble a person from behind them. But that said, I think I've managed to glean a better perspective on the editorial style behind this list of selections.

Dwarf Fortress:About - DwarfFortressWiki  Annotated

tags: dwarffortress, dwarffortresswiki, tarn adams, user community, wiki

The about page for the Dwarf Fortress Wiki, continuing my Dwarf Fortress sideline obsession.

We've been using Pageflakes in Writing 340 to aggregate our research. Here's mine:
http://www.pageflakes.com/Envarh/.
Come along with me after the jump for a tour of its multifarious and glittering features!

Ben Croshaw [wiki] hit the internet like a rabbit punch, swift and ruthlessly. Zero Punctuation, his weekly, ranting comic/animation was quickly absorbed by The Escapist, and in the process, their non-video page views increased 394%. Yahtzee's pithy, rapid-fire (in his own words, "fully ramblomatic") style of narration works, and seems to have an enduring charm beyond the initial novelty of his pace and commonwealth accent: his videos are still putting up good viewer numbers, despite the occasional editorial misstep (his video review of The Witcher included a brief machinima coda which was widely derided as an execrable attempt at the format). In addition to critical and comedic written works, Yahtzee is also a game designer in his own right, having released a number of independent games on his website. When people like Greg Costikyan make a lot of much ballyhooed noise about how games lack a proper tradition of criticism, that there is no actual critique to be found in most of the writing about games, it does a disservice to the work of popular satirists like Yahtzee. We would do well to remember that games are still a popular medium, and that while it is worthwhile to elevate the discussion surrounding their design, production, and consumption, such discourse is likely to arise from the popular vernacular surrounding games at the moment.

This isn't to say that critique is unnecessary, antiquated, or a foolish pursuit. But we need to re-evaluate how such critiques are produced. It's entirely possible that excellent essays regarding games and play are being produced somewhere-- I have yet to see anything written above the level of rigor presented by most popular magazines (The Escapist being a prime example of this). Most openly available writing about games outside of heavy books published by university or vanity presses tends to be material that is related to the field in an ancillary fashion, and as such, not entirely relevant to the actual business of play.

With Yahtzee, and popular critics and journalism at large, the business of writing is grounded in play. It isn't enough to engage in a thought experiment and then neglect the grounding of engaging with their subject matter on its level-- through play. Often, this is the crucial groundwork academics and outsiders ignore. Too often we see pretenders to the title of critic earn their hand-cramps at a keyboard rather than a thumbpad. It is enough to have their sons play through the game for them, after refusing to learn the controls. Any critic, even one outside of his expertise, has an obligation to undertake some professional due diligence when offering his thoughts on a piece of work. With the popular voice, this due diligence (if someone coins "dude diligence" I will burst a blood vessel in my face) is a given. With such solid grounding, Yahtzee has at least earned the right to employ the ethical appeal implicit in his highly subjective, first person reviews.

But that, maybe, is entirely the point. Yahtzee has earned the right to be brutally honest by eschewing the ivory tower. He, like any other good satirist, understands that the honest which underlies his craft, and with it, how to use a raucously foul-mouthed style to deliver it. His cartoons were nothing short of a minor revelation. Every gamer can likely recall a bull session with their friends where disses were dropped and props were offered for the faults and features of the games they were currently playing. Yahtzee does exactly the same thing, but throw in some comedic goblin silhouettes and on-the-nose visualizations and the whole enterprise gets cranked up to 11. His willingness to address not only why a specific game is bad, but why the recurrent tropes of its genre have grown stale and are largely failures.

His willingness engage with game-craft adds an element of fearlessness to all of this. By offering up his own work, Yahtzee proves too things: first, that he can take what he dishes out (even if it's shot back at him in his own style, albeit less ably), and second, that he's willing to put theory into practice. This sort of satirist-creator role isn't new, but it is rare. The only other example that springs readily to mind is Erik Wolpaw who managed to parlay his writing experience from Old Man Murray into a job writing on Psychonauts, and then on to a little game named Portal. Wolpaw as well seems to be willing to take his own medicine, for after unleashing the Start-to-Crate review metric upon the world (where games are judged on how quickly the designers broke down and used crates to provide ammunition and health, rather than design a better solution), one of his more memorable characters is in fact, little more than a crate. If being able to take it, as well as dish it out, is any measure of success in creating interactive entertainments, then Yahtzee is well ahead of the curve.

The willingness to put theory into practice, to criticize and still risk failure, is laudable. Frankly, in a field lacking rigor and often mired in intellectual cowardice, it is refreshing to see someone willing to participate in the very practices they are scrutinizing.

I saw an interview with Alan Moore once (I swear this tangent will bring us back home), where he spoke about he had declared himself a magician on his fortieth birthday. His express purpose was to make his friends think that he had leapt head-first off the deep end, and in his own words, he quite rightly had. At that point in his life, he had realized that words are magic (or I suppose we should spell it "magick"), and that to use them is to use a higher order of power beyond their symbolic coding. I'm fairly sure he was sincere, but the example he gave made me think he was a touch less bonkers: satire. To put a satire on one's enemies, according to Moore, is a fate worse than death. Kill a man and his family, and you end his genetic line. Satirize that same man, and do it well, and he will be remembered and mocked forever, his verbal destruction coded into culture at large, a creative act that preserves the folly of a man in order to skewer him for it endlessly, something capable of turning his own descendants against him. I think it was an excellent, if over stated point. In a cultural context, games hold a similar cultural power. It seems necessary that they be kept in check as well, that their stupidities and petty evils be pruned while it is possible, before the ink on the pages of cultural memory dries, leaving us with an inferior experience.

Satire then, is a key part of that pruning, and the work of Yahtzee points towards a just application of such satire. At least someone is trying.

Forgive me if this is too conversational: I'm at a bit of an impasse, and so, rather than coming to hard answer of my own volition, so I'm going to bounce an (a set of) idea(s) off of you, if you don't mind. We're beginning the next paper in Writing 340. From it, we're supposed to cull something juicy from the streams of research we've set flowing automatically. A topic is supposed to leap at us like a glittering salmon, and we are to strike it from the apex of its plump springing as would a lumbering grizzly. Were it that easy.

Instead, I've got a problem that's been humming away in the back of my mind, the sort of thing I can't entirely put down all the way, yet can't really pick up and address properly in its own right for lack of time. I think this natural percolation points to something that I've absorbed osmotically, and now need to do something about. It lives in the same place as the Latrunculi project, and all the other stories unwritten and designs unprototyped.

Here's the short of it: I think we need an ethics for artificially intelligent agents in games and virtual worlds. I think we need one now, or at least soon enough that now will be a prudent time to start thinking through the hard problems we are faced with. Right now, let me explain what I mean, the unfounded assumptions and leaps of faith I'm making, and introduce the larger game of what-if that I'm making. I realize this has very little to do with games/how is the web changing games, but I think I might be able to point to how it will be relevant after a few hundred words, bear with me, things are about to get crazier.

I have, for the past four years or so, held a concept of artificial intelligence as one of the hard problems facing game design. I'm not even sure if there's a nice list somewhere of "unresolved problems in games design," like there is for Egyptology, or philosophy (which will come back to haunt us in a little bit). For me, the short list is reconciling emergence with narrative intent, the creation of human-like artificial intelligence, and the creating emotional meaning without playfulness. Game design is a creative field, and so while it contains finite disciplines, I have some reservations as to whether these unresolved problems will ever be answered in a satisfactory fashion. I tend to take real-time photorealism for granted in considering the future of graphics. Whether photorealistic graphics are artistically desirable or necessary is another, more interesting debate than questions over when they'll show up or how they'll change things. But problems like making resonant stories, complex emotion out of play, or characters that don't need to be written may be fundamentally unanswerable.

That doesn't mean they aren't fruitful. I think attempts to chisel out smaller problem spaces from these larger sets are laudable. I think it may even be (almost) manageable to try addressing them this way (you can insert a plug for Errantry here, if you'd like). The exploration of any one of those three areas (or other areas I haven't dared to plumb for ignorance or cowardice) could easily be a comfortable career of sorts. If we must assign a category to "creating an ethics for the creation and employment of AI," we can safely tuck it under "creating human-like AI," but the troublesome thing about these categories is that any development in one has ramifications for the others.

So, on to why and how:
Artificial Intelligence is coming. If you're a particular flavor of futurologist, you believe that someday there will be a technological singularity, and there will be an apocalypse in the old revelatory sense, not necessarily a doomsday, rapture, or new eden. Just that the human condition will change, the rules will be crazy for a little bit, and the whole thing is going to be a surprise one way or the other. It's cool if you want to run around talking about how your brain is going to be rocking faces inside some new-fangled, self-created Newtonian God-machine, or that one very lucky T-800 will travel back in time and stop H. sapiens from fighting back. Awesome. I don't really have the patience to dream that far into the future, and as Keynes said, "in the long run, we'll all be dead." The post-meta-trans-prefixed-humanity of the distant then is, frankly, inconceivable to me, and therefore, in the tradition of grand thinkers everywhere, irrelevant.

But it's a fairly safe bet that along the way, there will be smart machines. And they will be relevant to us. If you give the smart machine a sufficiently robust body, somebody is going to sleep with it. Which is hilarious, icky, inevitable, and an interesting (read: prurient) enough topic that you can make dollars from it if you write it up in a book.(bonus points if you're forethinking enough to write the book on how to break up with your robot lover as well). But it's a fairly safe bet that it's going to happen. So somewhere, traipsing down the yellow brick road towards the singularity, we have a stop where artificial intelligences and robotics become sufficiently advanced that there will be a real-life Pygmalion. I'm betting that artificial intelligence will probably get its act together before the robotics side of the equation (we may wind up with all kinds of Nexus Six-type scenarios), and with that, games have already provided a demonstrable demand for such intelligences, not to mention less "frivolous" uses, or uses that don't offend our current mores.

But therein lies the rub: already the quickest verb for describing the employ of these intelligences was "use," as if they were still a dumb tool, which is, if anything, an antiquated way of thinking about them. What happens when these minds are sufficiently human that we cannot tell the difference between human wetware from meatspace and software running on hardware (I read too much Rucker as a kid) in a virtual environment? If at, some point, they are intelligent, or intelligent "enough," then they aren't they functionally human? If so, are we not obligated to treat them as such?

This particular problem for me starts with Aristotle, in uncomfortably enough in his Politics (book 1, chapters 3-7). There, he defines a slave as a possession:

Now instruments are of various sorts; some are living, others lifeless; in the rudder, the pilot of a ship has a lifeless, in the look-out man, a living instrument; for in the arts the servant is a kind of instrument. Thus, too, a possession is an instrument for maintaining life. And so, in the arrangement of the family, a slave is a living possession, and property a number of such instruments; and the servant is himself an instrument which takes precedence of all other instruments.

Having arrived at a set of natural conditions for slavery which are immediately complicated by the customary conditions, Aristotle's definition fails to reconcile the two. Much, as I suspect, we will fail to reconcile the difference between a sufficiently advanced semi-intelligent machine created to serve us, and a truly intelligent machine put to human use. At some point, lacking a proper definition, the distinction breaks down, which is why we need a set of ethics. The problem is, this is one of those unresolved philosophical problems.

I'd like to stick in the fairly safe and philosophically minded realm of antique slavery, because frankly, it is safe. A lot of people think that Classics is a field where one studies what dead white men wrote about dead white men, and while that's not strictly true, what racism is present in antique history is at least abstracted away from the current world, invested with customs that aren't familiar or widespread to modern (ca. 1500 CE and forward) notions of slavery, and importantly, not racially based. While it is possible to see a parallel between Aristotle's "natural slave/legal slave" and a chattel slave/indentured servant in the early history of the Americas, it is still possible to divorce the former from questions of race at least on an abstract level, while the latter distinction is driven by race at its very core. That's not an issue that I am equipped to deal with, but then I'm not equipped to deal with the creation of AI or deep-seated philosophical questions about the nature of intelligence. Not yet at least.

Additionally, slavery in the classical world could take forms we are unaccustomed to thinking about when we think of slavery today. A Roman, for instance might own a Greek slave who was better educated than he, who in turn would raise his master's children or run a business for his master. A gladiator could expect to die relatively quickly in his profession, and yet he might be treated like a modern rock star, being feasted and bedded in order to maintain his happiness, and thus ensure the quality of his performance in the arena. These are, of course, gross oversimplifications, but they form the broad outlines of slavery as an everyday condition that we are unfamiliar with.

Further muddying the matter is second half of one of Aristotle's antitheses, that just as some are born slaves, others are born masters; that there is an art and science to the rule of intelligent being. While it would be easy to leap to hysterics and couple the concept "natural" mastery with modern notions of race in order to arrive at the verboten concept of a master race, it is also an entirely too heated (and thoroughly disproven) chain of logic. Of relevance and use to us now is the question of how the perception of mastery alters the "master" class. Just how much does power corrupt, and through what means?

This question is an extension of a familiar one, that of "how are we shaped by the everyday use of our devices?" But again, in anticipation of the shift from "device" to intelligence, how will we be shaped by participating in a culture of use or cooperation with these "things," for lack of a better word.

We already have some experience with non-human intelligences, although to what extent they are intelligent is certainly up for debate. Somewhere back in the stack of unpublished posts for this blog I have an essay on Elephants, and whether or not they can play games. It was prompted by a video similar to this one:
We've already begun the process of exploring how to interact with non-human intelligences, things which think in ways fundamentally different from our own. Whether you or I think in the same way beyond a shared language is certainly open to debate: I'm willing to wager no, given my own relative stupidity and the diversity of "intelligences" they teach you about in grade school, like kinesthetic vs. spatial vs. musical vs. verbal learning and so on. Not to mention neurodiversity. Libraries worth of bad science fiction have been devoted to the topic, while a few shelves worth of books seem to have broached the subject intelligently. We're starting to explore it more in our natural world , as we try to get an empirical grip on what cognition actually is, but all the while we hold ourselves out above animals, and with good reason. Those lines of reasoning, however, cannot begin to prepare us for what happens when we finally through the switch or push the slinky down the first step on its path towards intelligence.

So, succintly, these are the issues I'm curious about exploring: what is an intelligence? When will we know it when we see it? How will we treat it? How should we treat it? How will we be changed by how we treat it? What are some of the precedents for these issues?

Obviously, this is a thought experiment, and more than a little crazy. It will likely be 20 years before any of these issues begin to really thrust up beyond the horizon.

So I'd like to learn more about the issues involved. I was told this could be a book, but I 'm not sure that's the best use of the next two years of my life, even if a publisher were interested. I certainly think it could be a paper, and I could probably get the abstract done in class. In unpacking the problem, there are a few angles I'd like to explore, namely how to anticipate an AI, how a slave society conducted itself (and collapsed) in the Graeco-Roman world, how those paradigms are relevant to us, how the roots of this future problem are taking shape today, and what the proposed ethics of an AI-dependent culture would actually be.

Once we have them, how will it be ethical to use them for entertainment in games? Will we be compelled to ask them nicely to play with us?

From a game design perspective (to ratchet this all back), I often think the answer of "well, story (or problem X) is hard, but someday we'll be able to plug an AI in there, which will solve everything for us" is a lazy one. AI may not be the best thing to design for, and good designs may come from designing around the need for AI. Likewise, a human-like AI may not be the most interesting AI players will want to interact with: perhaps something closer to HAL 9000, or a complex system that seems possess everything but intelligence, like an ecosystem. Imagine building a game around the Gaia hypothesis, only rather than being a complex emergent system, there was some spark of volition behind it all?

Pulling back yet another step, this time towards answering what to make of the web and its impact on games, how do these intelligences change when we move them away from a purely playful space and put them in the context of virtual worlds and networks. We've spent a lot of time in the past playing with solipsism in our fiction as a culture, but are we prepared to anticipate networked solipsism, where liminal bounds break down, and once erased, the context for thought makes it impossible to distinguish the quality of that thought?

I'm not sure where I'm leading with any of this, except that there are a number of exciting areas I'd like to plumb a little more before I pick a direction. So I'd like to ask for recommendations on books, authors, topics, articles, and what-have-you in order to help get my head around the problem, and once there, I'll ask again about actually tackling it.

I already have Weizenbaum's book on Peggy's recommendation for a starting point, but I'd like to get as broad a sampling as possible. I am nothing if not a fan of syncretism.