A Ghost Of A Chance - Is Sony Trying To Buck The AI Trend?

If you follow any gaming media at all, you've almost certainly heard about Sony's AI assistant, Ghost. I remember reading about something similar last year, when Microsoft was talking up its AI companions. I don't know how far along that project is now but Sony has just taken out a patent and the story's all over the gaming press. I got my heads-up from GamesIndustry but it's on Kotaku, IGN, Eurogamer, TechRadar...

It's a curious development in many ways. Any mention of AI still brings gamers out in hordes, waving their pitchforks and flaming torches, so it's relatively unusual to see any development in the field being received with anything less than complete revulsion. Reaction to this has been at least a little more nuanced.

According to Sony's press release, Ghost will provide "real-time assistance to a player that is encountering some difficulty with a specific scenario of gameplay" by "analyz(ing) a player's game state data to identify the scenario they are trying to progress through." Having figured out how to do whatever it is you weren't able to do from its intensive pre-training on Twitch streams and YouTube videos, Ghost would then "provide the player with visual illustrations of how certain game scenarios are played in order for the character controlled by the player to be able to achieve progress in the game."

This is being presented by Sony as a much more sophisticated and versatile alternative to what many players have been doing for years, namely looking stuff up on the web, reading guides, following walk-throughs, watching other players on video or livestream and then trying to copy whatever it is that works. 

Put that way, it seems eminently reasonable. I've been making the point, repeatedly, not just in my recent posts about Baldur's Gate 3, that an awful lot of games just aren't as much fun without some kind of online spoilers. Having the same information available inside the game without having to tab out or look at a second screen seems like it might be less intrusive and disruptive to gameplay.

Certainly , that's how Sony seem to be selling it. Underselling it, really. All of the linked articles use some form of Sony's formula "assistance during gameplay of a video game." Assistance is such an inoffensive word, isn't it? You'd feel like a jerk, complaining about someone else receiving assistance when they were having problems, wouldn't you? I mean, no-one wants to be the "git gud" guy in this scenario, do they?

I imagine Sony would like to avoid the kind of backlash that faces every company admitting to seeing value in AI. By presenting such an nonthreatening option, they presumably hope to get a partial pass. The gaming press seems, by and large, to be going along with the narrative.

The NME, not being a gaming journal as such, takes a somewhat more populist view. Their headline doesn't mention "assistance" at all, going instead with the much more click-worthy "PlayStation wants AI to play your video games for you." 

Which made me wonder, would that be such a bad thing?

Let's take one example: Wuthering Waves. I really like Wuthering Waves. It has a strong storyline and memorable characters. I'd like to keep up to date with it. 

And yet somehow I can't seem to manage it. I've caught up twice but in both cases it took so much out of me I immediately fell behind again and now I'm so far adrift I doubt I'll ever have the motivation to try again.

I've been thinking about just watching the story on YouTube, where I'm sure I'll be able to find both full playthroughs and cut scenes edited to make full movies. Alternatively, I could do what millions of people do and watch someone else play the game on Twitch.

If there was an AI assistant as capable as NME imagines Ghost to be, though, I could log into the game, set it running and sit back to watch my own character play the game. Of the various options - play the game myself, have an AI play it for me, watch recorded highlights or watch another player - I'd put having an AI play my character second out of the four in terms of involvement and immersion.

Playing BG3, I can also think of other ways AI might improve the experience without inducing the player to resort to online guides or videos. When I was running around the Goblin Camp for hours looking for those damn Warg Pits and getting nothing but vague, unhelpful responses from any goblin I asked, it would have made a huge difference if there had been a conversation option that would have triggered an AI-assisted search and generated an in-character response from whatever NPC I was speaking to. 

What's more, if any of those responses turned out to be hallucinatory, that in itself would just be entirely in keeping with the quality of information you'd expect to get from asking a random goblin for directions! It's a win-win for the AI and the role-playing player.

The ironic thing about the current knee-jerk opposition to the use of AI in games is that before this kind of AI existed, the accepted view for as long as I've been gaming had always been that one day we'd have this amazing technology that would let all the NPCs talk like real people, react to our characters in convincing and realistic ways and generally make games feel like they weren't games at all. Remember StoryBricks and all those unfulfilled promises? 

And now here we are, looking down the barrel of the future we all said we wanted and now we all agree it wasn't what we wanted at all. Are we quite sure about that? If a game appeared that did everything AI promises to do but managed to do it without using AI, would we object to that in the same way? Or are we just cutting off our own noses in an entirely understandable but self-defeating attempt to spite the billionaires' faces? 

 

Notes on AI used in this post

Two illustrations because what else was I going to use? Both done at NightCafe. 

The header image is by the ever-annoyingly-named HiDream |1 Fast from the prompt "PlayStation wants AI to play your video games for you." 1970s Comic book panel art. Default settings. The original has three speech bubbles, two of which were gibberish. I removed those at SnapEdit but otherwise changed nothing. 

The second image is by Google Imagen 4.0 Fast from the prompt "I was running around the Goblin Camp for hours looking for those damn Warg Pits and getting nothing but vague, unhelpful responses from any goblin I asked" 1970s Comic book panel art. 

In this case, the gibberish speech bubbles actually make sense. Well, they don't... they're gibberish... but goblin speech is traditionally rendered like that and it fits the context, so I left it in. 

It's worth noting that NightCafe calls on AI to expand on all prompts of fewer than sixty words. It's on by default but you can toggle it off, which I seldom remember to do. The full prompts, as gussied up by some AI or other, probably Gemini or ChatGPT I'm assuming, are as follows:

Image 1: A 1970s comic book panel depicting a retro-futuristic robotic avatar playing a PlayStation video game, with thought bubbles above the robot and a PlayStation console. The robot has a determined expression as it manipulates a joystick. Text reads "PlayStation wants AI to play your video games for you." Vibrant, slightly desaturated colors, bold linework, and dynamic action lines in the style of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.. 

Image 2: "A determined adventurer, clad in worn leather armor, navigates a chaotic Goblin Camp under a hazy, ochre sky. The adventurer is actively searching, with a slight frown of frustration. Vague, speech bubble-like glyphs emanate from bewildered goblins, conveying unhelpful responses. The art style is a 1970s comic book panel, with bold, thick linework, a limited, earthy color palette, and a slightly gritty texture. Inspired by the dynamic compositions and character designs of Jack Kirby and Bernie Wrightson. Dramatic lighting casts deep shadows, enhancing the sense of urgency and the grimy atmosphere." 

I really do need to remember to switch that AI assistance off, given how I go out of my way never to use named artists in the prompts. Maybe you can have too much AI assistance after all... 

Also, that second panel looks more like Wally Wood to me, although if you imagined Kirby inked by Wrightson...and the tails on the speech bubbles are all pointing the wrong way...