I am not a gamer, nor well-read on game design. As the form explodes in popularity and innovations in tech and game design emerge, I assume there are Deep Thoughts™ happening about how Gaming will evolve, the challenges and even barriers associated with different types of innovation, etc.
Within that context, how are long multi-path games framed? Is there a discussion about how they are a metaphor/illustrative example of Determinism? I.e., there is a clearly-bounded set of paths that a player is able to choose. Is it discussed that a challenge of games is to present the feeling of Free Will, even if the underlying code is bounded? Is a game evaluated in some way based on how “unlimited” it feels? Isn’t that supposed to be the appeal of that new buzzy game that No Man’s Sky, or why people are fascinated about walking to the end of Minecraft?
I was thinking about the whole “What if we are a simulation being run by a more advanced civilization?” recently espoused by Elon Musk. Since I am not involved in games, if I got the wording wrong, please let me know. But is the concept I am asking about a Thing?
In practical terms, it’s already possible to simulate characters in games whose motivations cannot be discerned from “free will.” We know, because we can peek behind the curtain, that their “decisions” are based on weighted tables of initial conditions, with pseudo-randomness tossed in. The Joker, in Arkham Asylum, is really just following a flow-chart.
But, playing the game, you can’t tell!
This will only get more difficult, as programs come closer and closer to passing the Turing Test (i.e., become so sophisticated that a person can’t know they’re talking to a computer program.) The Turing Test is already pretty close to passed.
Hey, thanks for posting. I was getting worried there! I swear, this is an interesting topic, darn it!
If what you’re saying is true - from a player’s standpoint, it is already available to lose the sense of limits and feel as though your character has Free Will - then it really is fascinating.
I would suggest that a game, programmed by humans, has a level of complexity that is a minor fraction of real life. If we can be immersed into such a “small space” and feel like it is our world, then many dystopian future scenarios seem that much more possible ;).
What’s more important to humans: the possibility, if you believe in it, of actual Free Will in real life or a semblance of it in a closed play space?
But that’s hardly free will. The Joker cannot decide to stop fighting and negociate with Bats. He can’t not inject himself with combat drugs at a given point of the fight. He cannot run away.
That’s doubtful. A *human *wouldn’t pass the Turing Test, because it’s impossible to tell a human from a sufficiently advanced chatbot.
…can I suggest that you play a couple of games by the game developer Davey Wreden “The Stanley Parable” and “The Beginner’s Guide.” Both tangentially touch on the themes you talk about here, but also talk about the relationship between the game designer and the player. If you want an experience that really makes you think then try them out. (Stanley Parable first.) Don’t get spoiled.
A human doesn’t need to pass the test; he’s human, by definition. That the chatbot can mimic humanity to the degree you say indicates that the bot passes the test.
I won’t have the ability to get up on games, let alone try these soon. Can you share how those games “function” in ways that invoke the questions I am raising? Do they give the player choices in a way to raise the question of Free Will.
Whether a Turing Test works is, at best, a part of the dialogue. We have seen with the absolute simplest chatbot, Eliza, we can get humans interacting in the deepest of ways with bots, and knew this decades ago.
But are they part of an overall ability to seduce us into accepting a severely bounded game reality as Free Will? They are part of the selling of that game’s world, sure. But I wonder what game designers have come to understand about how to “sell the feeling” of limitlessness? "If the world is X big, and is built to handle A, B, and C types of scenarios, then 90% of players will be “happy to be contained” within it.
That’s not really how it works. The Turing Test was proposed by Alan Turing as the Imitation Game, which considered that humans are good at pretending to be something they’re not, and that the ability to do so requires the ability to intelligently consider how people other than you think and act. In the original formulation, he considered a version of the game where men would be given a gender and asked to play it (sometimes matching their own and sometimes not), and would have to convince some third party that they were the gender they were chosen to play (through text, naturally, this isn’t some transgender passing test). They would have a relatively decent, but not perfect success rate.
So too, Turing thought, would be a good test of a machine’s intelligence. If a machine could convince a person they’re human at the same rate a man could convince another they were a woman, or a person could convince someone they were a chatbot, it would be indicative of a type of intelligence relating to how humans operate. It’s not a necessary or sufficient condition for intelligence, merely one form intelligence may take.
The idea isn’t that a computer be indistinguishable from a human, but rather, that it’s smart enough to know what a human acts like, and thus be able to convincingly pretend to be one.
I hadn’t understood that context for the Turing Test. But that isn’t central to the OP. Having credible characters in a game world is an ingredient but not the only thing underlying a human’s ability (willingness) to accept a comparatively severely bounded gameverse as limitless.
…The Beginners Guide is a game about game design, and the relationship between the designer and the player. As a “non-gamer” there is a possibility that the whole thing might go over your head. But you wont IMHO get a better exploration of gaming and game design. Its a very emotional journey. Whether or not it answers any of your questions: I’m not quite sure.
But if you won’t be able to play it, then watching a “Lets Play” is the second best option. There are plenty to choose from, but this particular one is my favourite because of the reaction of the “Lets Player” at the end of the game. Watch the first ten minutes if you can, and if that grabs you then watch the rest. If it doesn’t, will I tried.
I’m not sure I understand your question here…and I was a Philosophy major.
I grew up to be a university librarian, and as it happens my research area is the use of games to aid library instruction/orientation. So I’ve done a fair amount of reading on game design and have seen conference presentations by professional game designers. It’s not my impression that exploring the question of free will vs. determinism is of particular interest to most game designers. But it is generally considered poor design if the player keeps running into “you can’t do that” messages while trying to do things that seem like they should be possible in the game world.
Just to make up an example, say the player needs to break a window to escape from a locked room. They have a baseball bat in their inventory, but the game will only allow them to smash the window by throwing a brick at it. If they try to use the bat they get a “you can’t use that to break the window” message. This is likely to annoy the player. It’s better to either tweak the game to allow the player to smash the window with any likely object, or to provide some in-universe reason why they can’t use the bat. Perhaps it’s a valuable collector’s item signed by a famous ballplayer and you don’t want to risk damaging it, or perhaps the player shouldn’t have the bat in their inventory at this point at all. If it’s already served it’s purpose it could have been left behind before the player entered the locked room, or if it won’t be needed until later the player could find it later.
That said, in modern games it’s also usually considered poor design to allow the players so much freedom that they can blunder into a dead-end situation without warning. (This was more common in older games – see TVTropes on Unwinnable by Design.) For instance, if the brick is the only way to smash the window, it should be difficult if not impossible for the player to wind up trapped in the locked room without the brick in their inventory.
You are answering the question! Thanks. You are describing how game designers avoid weird dead ends. I guess my question is about those types things they’ve learned over the years.
But while you say that game designers don’t care much about free will - and I am sure you are right - it sounds like avoiding weird dead ends is kind of a form of simulating free will. If you as a player can’t access anything but a brick to break the window, or you come to “accept” within the story that you would only be using a brick, then the designers have gotten you comfortable in a limited world.
A simulation of free will doesn’t need to open avenues to every conceivable action.
If I put you in a room with only two doors…you still have free will. It’s limited to which (if either) of the doors to open, but it’s still free.
Games can simulate such limited-option volition, and often do. The trick is to make it hard to tell if the choice is made by a person or by an algorithm. A good one-person game can appear as if you’re playing against a human opponent.
Chess programs passed that milestone a damn long time ago.
You really, really should play the Stanley Parable. The whole thing riffs on the meaning of decisions that are set up in an artificially constructed system, player agency vs designer intent, etc. Just watching a “Let’s Play” video won’t capture how well the game gets inside your head and screws with your expectations.
Plus it’s hilarious, if you appreciate a dry sardonic wit.
It should be able to run on any vaguely modern PC or Mac. Even a 5-year old laptop with integrated graphics will be fine. And it’s quite playable even if you’re not an experienced gamer, since there aren’t any parts of the game that require a lot of skill or reflexes.
There’s a free demo you can try, just to be sure you can run it.
Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by “free will”. As a former student of philosophy I can tell you that just defining free will is more complicated than one might assume, and I don’t really want to get into a long argument about the meaning of free will here. But I would say that designing a game to protect players from making bad decisions is basically the opposite of simulating free will. It can be good game design (although you can go too far in that direction and make a game that’s too easy to be interesting), but if you’re not free to make bad choices then how free are you?
There are many types of games and many types of players so I don’t want to make an absolute statement here, but in general I’d say that players want the freedom to take reasonable actions in order to advance but not so much freedom that it’s easy to blunder into an situation where it’s impossible to advance.
lazybratsche and Banquet Bear, thank you. I have subscribed to this thread (duh) and have the need to check out The Stanley Parable on my active To Do list. I will check it out.
Lamia, yes, I understand I am tossing around a concept that, in the worlds of Philosophy and Religion, is rigorously parsed. I am not looking for that level of discussion, but appreciate how we can bump up against it. My basic point is that there is a “feeling” of Free Will as well as what might be rigorously defined as actually having and acting out of Free Will. The feeling is not the same as actually doing.
If a game is “helping a player avoid bad decisions” it sounds like it is promoting the feeling of Free Will while conspicuously limiting its actual presence.
I find the concept of promoting the feeling while limiting the practice really interesting, even if I haven’t fully figured out why.
Yes, but that’s hardly my point. The thing is that the win condition for the test, i.e. that a chat partner would opine “my interlocutor is human for sure” cannot be verified even for an actual human. To clarify : I cannot prove that I am a human on this here chatboard, and I cannot be sure you are one either. You could be copy/pasting something someone else wrote on another board for example, matching by keywords etc…
Ergo, the test is absurd.
