It's Real If I Say It's Real

Yeebo dropped by the comment thread on the last post I wrote about Blue Protocol: Star Resonance, to mention how he'd started playing Honkai Star Rail a while back and was somewhat enjoying it, until he spotted a sale on Neir: Automata, which he'd heard described as "one of the best games ever created by humans". And that was it for his time with HSR.

That got me thinking about a lot of things, some of which came up in my reply, like how I really never get on with the combat in Honkai Star Rail and how any combat that isn't really easy puts me right off any game these days. Then I got to thinking about my gaming habits in general and how they've changed, both over the whole of my life and more specifically in the last few years.

I was going to write something quite specifically related to that today but then before I got down to it, I read this article at NME about a large-scale survey commissioned by French music streaming platform Deezer to find out if listeners really can tell the difference between music made by AI and music made by humans. And this one at GamesIndustry about the absence of player pushback over the use of AI in mobile games. And this one from the same source about Nexon suggesting everyone should assume every game company is using AI...

All of which made me think even more. Which is why this post is all over the place. I'm still thinking. But I have to start somewhere...

Let's begin with the shift from MMORPGs to Open World RPGs and Open World Survival Games, which for simplicity's sake I am going to lump together. I could also have linked a bunch of articles on that but I'm going to stick to my personal experience and some general observations because why do proper research when you can just wing it? That's how all the best columnists do it, anyway.

It seems hard to argue that these kinds of games, gacha or otherwise, haven't largely eaten the MMORPG sector's lunch. Still  as Sony/NCSoft's announcement of the in-development Horizon MMORPG, Steel Frontiers, proves, there is still a degree of interest in and commitment to the genre outside of its established, specialist niche market. MassivelyOP, who always nitpick over genre tags, were very keen to point out the acronym "MMORPG" appears right there in the title screen. 

And it is something worth mentioning. A lot of developers and publishers in recent years have gone out of their way to call their games anything but MMORPGs, believing to do so would harm their chances in the wider market.

Is that true? No idea. How would I know? Certainly, every new AAA game that claims to be an MMORPG seems to attract a million players on launch day. But then 90% of them are gone in a month and the rest a month after that. 

Was it because the games weren't MMORPG enough? Too MMORPG? Just not very good? Or were most of those people only there because it was the Big New Thing and a Thing can only be Big and New for so long?

Search me. No idea. And neither do the devs, apparently, because it keeps on happening.

What I can say, though, is that the naming of things is important. We should all know that as fantasy fans. To know a thing's name is to control it. 

Why, though? Why does a name, a true name, hold so much power?

It's all about authenticity, isn't it? That elusive, nebulous, indefinable quality that we know when we feel it. The Massively editorial team knows when a game is an MMORPG, regardless of what the press release they just received tells them. Just like we all know an NPC we're listening to was voiced by a human, not by AI. 

Except, do we? I can't help but think of the old Coke vs Pepsi test. That wasn't a notional thought experiment. It wasn't even something set up in some side-room in a University somewhere. It was an actual, physical test you or I could try for ourselves, when we went into town to buy an album or some new trainers.

If you search "Pepsi Challenge" you'll get the idea it only happened in America but I remember seeing the van parked in the shopping precinct near the bus and railway station in a city where I lived. I just can't remember which city... 

I didn't try it myself but I was always absolutely certain I could tell the difference. Pepsi is a lot sweeter than Coke, to my taste at least. Now, if it had been Coke vs Canada Dry, my all-time favorite cola, I'm not so sure. 

Which is kind of the point. Maybe I can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. Certainly, to me, they don't really taste all that similar. Between Coke and Canada Dry cola, though? Those two are so close I wouldn't like to put money on it.

Whether I can tell or not, though, I think I know. Do I want to put it to the test? Not really. Why would I want to find out I was wrong? How would that make my life any better?

I have listened to a lot of music in my life and until very recently all of it was made by humans. There wasn't really any other option. Despite that intense and continued exposure, I don't doubt that, like 97% of the 9,000 people Ipsos tested for Deezer, I would not reliably be able to differentiate between music produced by AI and music produced by humans.

Mrs Bhagpuss says she can. She really likes the music I've made with AI but she says it all sounds "pink". She can hear the pinkness in it the way some people see auras. I cannot hear the pinkness. I did think about playing her something extremely similar that was made by humans to see if she still thought it sounded pink but that's an experiment that's going to stay firmly in my thoughts only.

She also says the vocals sound "too perfect".  I hadn't noticed that but after she pointed it out... I still couldn't hear it. What I think I can hear is the AI being imperfect on purpose sometimes, which isn't the same thing at all. And I certainly couldn't pick an AI singer out of an audio line-up based on perceived flaws.

But then, the AI vocals I'm listening to, the ones in the songs I've caused to be made, like a Renaissance artist overseeing a workshop filled with talented but anonymous craftsmen, are my vocals. The imperfections are frequently my imperfections, replicated as though they were intended.

I remember Tipa, who also uses Suno, mentioning a while ago that, while she liked the music she made with the software, she hadn't found much she wanted to listen to by anyone else there. I'd go further than that. I haven't heard anything there that I haven't found intensely irritating. The app defaults to playing the next tune on some playlist or other if you don't stop it, so I've been forced to hear snippets of lots of AI tunes and there hasn't been a single one I haven't almost broken the keyboard trying to silence.

But is that because they don't sound like they were made by humans or because they're just terrible songs? I could do much the same on YouTube and many of the tunes would be "authentic". They'd just be awful. A lot of people who can't play an instrument or sing also have terrible taste in music. Suno lets them share their lack of talent with the world, too. AI is really egalitarian that way.

What are we really lookng for when we listen to music or look at images or play video games, anyway? Authenticity or entertainment? Is a real, bad thing better than an artificial, good thing? And anyway, what even is authenticity?

At the moment I prefer Open World RPGs to MMORPGs and I prefer Eastern games to Western games. I'm not saying this is a permanent change or even a lasting one. It's a snapshot, like all preferences. It may stick or it may slide.

Looking at that preference as objectively as a person can observe a subjective preference of their own, I'd question some of the assumed positions on authenticity that come up repeatedly when games and especially RPGs are being discussed. There's long been a trend in the discourse over automation. It predates any queasiness over the use of generative AI, although that does seem to have intensified the and polarized the debate considerably.

MMO players in the West have tended to react very negatively to many of the things that are currently drawing me towards both open world RPGs and mobile ports and which a few years ago led me to appreciate a number of imported games that were calling themselves MMORPGs.  

One day I'll write a proper post about why I like these sorts of games but for now, here are a few of the more obvious reasons. 

 

I like the brighter colors and the flatter surfaces of the graphics, for a start. I like the cleaner textures. A lot of older or more traditional MMORPGs look gritty, somehow. Dirty, even. I can deal with that look but I'd rather not have to.

I like the stories, which seem a lot more modern and relatable than those in Western games. The characters are younger and more enthusiastic. The themes are stronger; the emotions clearer. 

There's a tendency to call them "anime" games but they could as easily be called "YA" games instead. I read a lot of YA novels (The acronym stands for Young Adult, marketing-speak for what publishers used to call "teen fiction".) and the characters in many of the games I'm now darting between remind me very much of the ones I meet in those books.

Ironically, these games, clearly aimed at a younger demographic than the traditional Western MMORPG, also tend to have a lot more time and respect for older characters. In most of the MMORPGs I've played, the characters are much of a muchness when it comes to age. 

The Elves all live forever so they're ageless. The dwarves are all old even if they're young. The humans are inevitably somewhere in their 30s or 40s. The anthropomorphic races (And the gnomes.) tend to be child-like. Mostly, though, unless a character has to be a specific age for a plot point, age barely even rates a mention.

The open world rpgs and anime games give me stories across the full age range, from small children to the elderly. And those stories frequently reflect the kinds of concerns real people in those age ranges would have. It's not all gods and mosnters. Sometimes it's homework or rivalries at work or the way your hip doesn't want to let you climb the stairs like you used to.

That feels more authentic to me but I'm betting it's a black mark against authenticity for anyone looking for the traditional, high fantasy MMORPG experience. Still, a lack of authenticity in the story is nothing compared to what happens in the gameplay. 

As I said at the start of the post, I bounced off Honkai Star Rail partly because I found the combat too much like hard work. I dropped Genshin Impact because I literally couldn't beat a boss to carry on with the story. Not all of these games have Combat For Babies enabled. Just the ones I like.

After a quarter of a century and more, I think I can say I'm officially over finding combat in MMORPGs fun for its own sake. I never liked it that much but it did used to have its moments. Now, it's almost always a means to an end. The easier it is, the better I like it. I like one-shotting mobs. All of them, if possible.

The received wisdom is that making combat too easy turns players off. They get bored and go somewhere else if the challenge isn't there. Not me. I get bored and go somewhere else if the challenge is there. One of the things I like best about BP:SR is the auto-combat. I use it in every fight. It's even better than one-shotting mobs because I don't even have to press a key.

Except I do press some keys, sometimes, because that's fun, too. I dodge a bit now and then. Jump about. Change position. Not sure if it makes any difference but it makes me feel like I'm involved. Because you want to feel like you're doing something, don't you? You just don't always want it to be true. 

Authenticity is in your head. There may be an objective reality out there but you do not have access to it. You think Coke tastes better than Pepsi because your eyes tell you so when you see the label on the bottle. Your taste buds have no say in it.  

That NPC you hear, the one that sounds so flat and uninflected? It might be AI. Or it might be a voice actor who isn't doing such a great job. That song you like? The one that came up on that auto-generated playlist that's by someone you never heard of before. Are you sure it's a real person singing? 

Yes, you know. Of course you know. But how are you ever going to know?

And what about the fun you had, playing that game?  No, wait...   

I won't say the fun you had. You may not have had that fun. I'll say what about the fun I had, playing that game where the AI (Different kind of AI, of course. The old, good kind.) did all the fighting for me. It even did the running, there and back. All I had to do was take the quest and hand it in. Did I really have fun or was I just imagining it?

Maybe I was having more fun all those times I spent an hour trying to beat some stupid boss in a Guild Wars 2 Living World instance. One of those times I lost so often all my armor fell off and I had to give up and leave. That time I had a headache for an hour afterwards. When I felt like uninstalling the damn game, I hated it so much. 

That was some authentic gameplay there, right?

Yeah, I don't miss any of that. What is authentic isn't the experience but  how I feel about it. If the game feels like it was fun, it was fun. If the song sounds good, it's good. If the voice acting is convincing, it's convincing. 

And that would appear to be why I prefer the games I prefer just now. They're authentically entertaining. Whether they're any good...

Well, that's an entirely different question.