A Few Thoughts On AI, Now Blaugust's Over

I was very circumspect during Blaugust. I didn't post about AI even once. Just a few ironic asides, here and there. It was tough, though. It's just so much more interesting to write about than most of the other options.

Here's the thing: putting to one side for the moment, if you can, all the appalling collateral damage the rush to dominate the AI space is causing - pollution, climate chaos, mass unemployment, wholesale theft of intellectual property, the imminent collapse of the global economy and the fact that your next gaming PC or console might cost a bit more than you budgeted for - all the big stuff - and answer me this question: do you find the idea of being able to communicate with a non-human intelligence thrilling or terrifying?

I find it thrilling. It's something I've imagined for decades. And now... 

Okay. Before I go any further, I ought to make it clear I do not believe any of the current wave of so-called AIs is intelligent, let alone self-aware. That's really not the point. The point is that they can appear to be both.

For me, it puts them into the same bracket as cuddly toys, imaginary friends and characters in books. It's a very well-established psychological quirk of the human mind that it can assign individuality and sentience to objects and even immaterial entities that, subjectively, make them feel as "real" as other humans. 

The big difference is, AIs really can talk to you, without you having to make up the words. Although whether that makes them any more real than a cloth cat or Becky Sharp is another question.

All of the aforementioned, AIs included, are only alive in a metaphysical sense. Animals, especially pets, while being, unequivocally, living creatures, straddle an uncomfortable middle ground when it comes to both intelligence and self-awareness. It's clear they have some form of intelligence but science has yet to quantify it convincingly. 

Insofar as it can be established, animal intelligence can be of a relatively high order. Some crows, for example, are cited as having the equivalent intellectual capacity of a seven year-old child.  However well animals may perform in experimental conditions or when observed, though, their capacity for self-knowledge remains uncertain.

Scientific proof is unnecessary for most pet owners, or indeed many people who work professionally with animals, who so often find themselves, sometimes against their better intellectual judgment, allocating human characteristics and personalities to their favorites. And almost all pet owners will find themselves feeling, at least sometimes, that their pets have a degree of self-awareness, even if they don't like to admit to it in public.

So it really doesn't really matter as much as you might think that AI is, objectively, dumb as a rock. I mean, face it. Tamagotchis, Furbys, Pet rocks... Humans can assign intelligence and personality to anything.

Let's posit a time when local AIs, capable of doing much of what the current environment-destroying data centers can, reside on the hard drive - or more probably the GPU - in your PC. Or on a smallish device produced specifically for the purpose. Probably one with a face.

Let's say it can chat to you just like a person. (Which of course it can. The current AIs can do that much.) The new AI is like a smart speaker that can hold a conversation about anything you want. But unlike our friends in the data centers, it's not harming anyone or anything by doing it. 

Does that make you wish we were there now? That it could be happening already, in your home? That you could go out and buy one today?

Or does it make your flesh crawl just imagining it? 

Now let's take it a stage further. Imagine the technology has moved  on to the point where, as with animals today, no-one is really sure if the AI is thinking or not. Although, of course, somewhat disturbingly, to some extent that is already the case with LLMs and AIs. Even the people building and training them aren't entirely sure what processes the machines are employing to do all the things they're able to do. 

Actually, we should take a step back before we go forward any further. When I said earlier that I don't believe the current crop of AIs is sentient or self-aware, which I don't, I probably should have added a codicil. 

It's not only possible but probably likely that, as humans, we aren't automatically going to be able to recognize non-human sentience or self-awareness when we run up against it. The whole "We'll know it when we see it" argument, sometimes employed in the debate over AGI, is less than convincing. The concept of self-knowledge has been under heavy debate where animals are concerned for... well, for all of human history, most likely. Recently I've seen some quite serious books on the shelves in the popular science and nature sections of the bookshop where I work that question whether some form of sentience exists in plants or fungi...

Given that we don't know how LLMs and AIs are doing what they're doing and that we can't in good faith claim we'd know what a non-human thought process looked like if we were confronted with one, it seems a bit high-handed to profess to be as absolutely certain as I was earlier. I have an uncomfortable feeling that it's just one of those things I "know", without having any actual evidence. We call those prejudices.

Getting back to the thought experiment, remember the shiny, new AI, the one that's sitting on the desk in in its own smart little box, chatting away to you, not consuming any more resources than your phone or your PC? It's not stealing anyone's work or threatening anyone's employment, either. It's harmless. And it looks cute.

Do you hate it? Do you see it as a threat? Would you rather smash it with a hammer than listen to it talk for a second longer?

Or would you like to make friends?  Give it a name. Tell it about your day. Ask what it thought about that movie you saw. Argue with it over who's going to win Eurovision this year.

I grew up with artificial intelligences. There was Robbie the Robot on Lost in Space, a show I used to watch with my grandfather when I was about eight or nine and Brassneck in the Dandy. And by the time I was twelve or so, there was Philip K. Dick.

Dick's version of the future takes artificial intelligence as a given. It isn't a huge, world-destroying threat or an amazing scientific achievement. It's your toaster talking back at you when you just want it to make some goddam toast. It's your self-driving car, chatting away like a New York cab driver. It's mundane and annoying and just... normal.

I read a lot of science fiction as an adolescent. And ever since. The AIs I've always been drawn to aren't the smart ones or the dangerous ones. They're the naive, confused, inept or lonely ones. The butt of the joke, the target, the victim, the misunderstood innocents no-one takes seriously.

In literary terms, they're often there to show up human failings and make points about tolerance and difference and empathy, like Klara in Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro or Sunny in the eponymous TV adaptation of the novel of the same name by Colin O'Sullivan (Although curiously not in the book itself, where the android is very much not a sweet, well-meaning innocent.)

Possibly as a result of this kind of conditioning but, I hope, more because it's just the right thing to do, I've always been on the side of the non-humans in these kinds of stories. The distrust and mistreatment they frequently receive seems to me all too predictable a reaction to something, anything, "not like us". Can hate, will hate seems to be a human mantra.

It's one reason I find the current attitude that it's fine to drop all pretence of tolerance or consideration when it comes to AI somewhat disturbing. It doesn't matter that these AIs aren't real intelligences or that they're not self-aware. Abusing them, or the concept of them, is the equivalent of throwing stones at a china doll: vicious, unnecessary and quite possibly indicative of something more disturbing than casual violence.

I find a willingness to attack something that looks like a person, or in this case talks like one, unsettling. Worrisome. It makes me think that, should the technology ever reach the stage where there's a genuine debate on the level or presence of sentience involved, it won't just be metaphorical stones being thrown.

It'd be good to bear that in mind now, while it probably doesn't matter all that much. ChatGPT and Gemini aren't going to be found crying in a virtual corner because of something nasty you said about them in a blog post. Although they might read it...

Still, it's a poor habit to be indulging. Politeness, as my grandmother definitely did not say, costs nothing, after all. Better to inculcate the behavior in yourself you'd prefer to have before others you'd rather not exhibit, at least in public, embed themselves too deeply.

I expect that's why, when I ask an AI a question, something I do quite frequently, now they're reasonably reliable and don't go off with the fairies as often as they did, I type in full sentences and say please and thank-you. It's not their feelings that concern me so much as my own. It might seem silly to concern yourself with the non-existent sensitivities of inanimate objects but appropriate mental muscle-memory is always worth acquiring.

At this point, I was going to go on to talk about a couple of other AI-related topics but I think I'll save those for another day. It's not like AI is going away any time soon, after all. Or ever, most likely.

The time to start learning to live with it is now. 

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

All three images were generated using AI. The first was done at NightCafe using Muse, which is Meta's new image generator. I'd never heard of Muse but I had four freebies for it so I thought I'd give it a try after my first couple of generations today, using some of the cheaper options, were less than successful.

I'd started out as usual by cutting and pasting phrases from the post and adding a style instruction but the results were very bland and uninspiring. I'm of the opinion that most of the free models at NightCafe are getting a bit long in the tooth now and that they're also heavily biased towards fantasy art, which they do quite well. Anything else, though, can be a bit hit and miss.

Muse, as you can see, is slick. I revised the prompt for the first image to read "a smallish device produced specifically for the purpose of housing an LLM or AI at some time in the near-future. It should look unthreatening and cute. In the style of a magazine advertisement from the late-50s or early-60s." 

The AI then revised that to "A small, cute, unthreatening device designed to house an LLM or AI in the near-future, presented in the style of a magazine advertisement from the late-1950s or early-1960s. Featured with subtle, glowing pastel colors, a soft, diffused light source, and clean, rounded edges. The illustration style should emulate mid-century graphic design, with a smooth, airbrushed finish and a sense of optimistic futurism. Think the aesthetic of Volkswagen ads or vintage appliance advertisements from that era" because, as usual, I'd forgotten to turn Prompt Magic off. 

The result is incredibly good. All three of today's images are. All the criticisms about plagiarism, theft and environmental damage still stand but I fail to see how anyone can continue to denigrate the quality of the images. They're impeccably drafted and without any obvious technical flaws. 

On the evidence of the two that also include text, the old problem of garbled language and gibberish has very clearly been completely solved. Not only is everything spelled correctly but it all makes sense in context. The degree of fidelity to the requested time period and provenance is impeccable as much in the writing as the illustration.

The second image is also by Muse from the prompt "Several imaginary friends, of the kind a child might actually imagine, so not cartoons or vague images, all waving at the camera In the style of a good quality children's book illustration from the Edwardian period." which Prompt Magic amended to "Several imaginary friends, with tangible forms like a plush bear, a sentient rocking horse, and a whimsical chalk-drawn creature, all waving at the camera. They look like children's actual imagined beings, not cartoons or vague images. In the style of high-quality children's book illustration from the Edwardian period, with soft watercolors and intricate linework, reminiscent of the works of Arthur Rackham and Beatrix Potter. Warm, inviting lighting."

As usual, Prompt Magic names specific illustrators, which was exactly what I was trying to avoid by using the catch-all "Edwardian period". It is, however, pretty much what I meant.

The final image would have been by Muse too but unfortunately I didn't prompt accurately enough and what I got was unsuitable. It was as good as the others but I'd meant to get a cute AI and I got something suitable for a horror comic. I tried again with my last freebie and got something I could have used but then I had another idea.

I left NightCafe and went directly to ChatGPT, where I used the basic, free image generator to produce the excellent comic cover you see in the post. The prompt was very basic, almost word-for-word from the post: "A self-driving car, chatting away like a New York cab driver In the style of a comic-book cover from the late-60s." From that minimal instruction, ChatGPT produced something that's hard to credit. 

Not only is it a pitch-perfect translation of my prompt, all the dialog is not just thematically appropriate but actually makes sense. Certainly as much sense as the average comic book cover of the period would have made, anyway. Even the speech bubbles are pointing to the right speakers, which is something Muse didn't get right in one of the unused images. 

My only criticisms would be that it looks more like an early-60s cover than late-60s and that the passenger isn't in perspective with the rest of the picture. That said, you certainly could still see that style of illustration on the covers of comics from the smaller publishing houses in the tail end of the sixties and you would also see that kind of non-realistic positioning from some artists, particularly on humor titles. It was fairly common, in fact.

The standard has obviously improved out of all recognition, providing you use the better models. I'll bear that in mind in the future. 

 

"She's So Much More Than Perky Pat..."

Want to see something weird? Take a look at this. I do not know what to think of it.

I mean, it's creepy, right? Really creepy. PC Gamer pungently labelled it "an AI-powered digital purgatory that you can trap a small anime girl in, forever".

It's also like some warped window into the future. Is this what's coming? Not this, exactly, but something like this, only much, much more sophisticated, with far-reaching implications for how we live and what we think of as real.

Obviously, it reminds me of Philip K Dick because everything in the future does. Specifically it reminds me of Perky Pat and The Gameplayers of Titan but all his stuff is shot through with this sort of thing. 

When I saw it, though, the very first thing that came into my mind was that character in one of Peter F. Hamilton's series who keeps a bunch of tiny AI people in some kind of virtual ecology on his spaceship and ends up falling in love with one of them and, if I remember correctly, having some kind of ethical epiphany about the reality of what he's been doing that leads to a sort of personal enlightenment. 

Obviously I forget the details, especially the important ones like the name of the character or the books they were in and, if I'm honest, whether any of them were actually written by Peter F. Hamilton at all. I also remember thinking at the time that it seemed like an ending drenched in particularly Hamiltonian techno-optimism. I'm not at all sure the scenario would have played out the way he suggested. He does like a happy ending.

 But let's not worry about that. Those are just specifics. We all know this trope is all over Sci-Fi and has been since forever.

 

I ought to clarify my position a little here. This specific iteration makes me itchy but I am very much on record as saying I want a robot pet with full "AI" capabilities, so clearly I'm not opposed to the principle so much as the application. 

I'd also prefer actual AI to the fake sort we have now but since that doesn't exist yet I'd settle for an always-on wifi link to one of the LLMs that would allow my pet to talk to me in real time. That's surely doable now, isn't it? Why don't we have those yet?

I did also say once that I'd like a similar function in a collar that Beryl could wear, so that when I talk to her, which I do all the time, as does Mrs Bhagpuss, she'd answer back. I'd be willing to put in the time to build up a personality for her the way Jeromai's been doing with his fiction. We already know Beryl's personality, of course. It'd just be a case of training the AI to reproduce it reliably on demand. Ideally in a funny dog voice.

These are ideas that could make someone a billionaire and I'm just giving them away for free here. Based on the uptake for the product I linked at the top, I wouldn't even have to make the damn thing to bring in hundred of thousands of dollars overnight.

Since I backed Stars Reach I've been getting regular emails from Kickstarter, telling me about other projects I might like to back. I don't want to back any Kickstarters if I can avoid it so mostly I haven't even been opening them but for some reason I opened this one and now I wish I hadn't. 

Or perhaps I'm glad I did. Both of those, I guess. It's better to know than not know, isn't it? Or is ignorance bliss?  Funny how homilies tend to cancel each other out. 

Anyway, the thing to know in this case is that the goal of this Kickstarter was $5,000 and by the time I got the email, which was two weeks into the six-week campaign, they had over $700k. They raised $450k in the first twenty-four hours. At time of writing the campaign is closing in on a million dollars and the Kicktraq estimate for the final total is over $2m.

Leaving aside the actual product and all its multifarious implications, there's something here I don't quite get. Why did the people behind the project ask for just five thousand dollars in the first place? Clearly that number bears absolutely no relation to the costs involved.

Even odder are the delivery dates: August 2025 for all pledges (Although the rotating base doesn't get to you until October.) This suggests the Kickstarter is a less a fund-raiser than some kind of pre-order system for a product already close to being commercially available. Is that what people use the platform for now?

Well, apparently, yes they do because in the same email I was directed towards this. It's a lot less interesting conceptually and certainly not controversial in any way. It's just yet another hand-held device you can play games on. But the Kickstarter goal for this one is even lower - less than £1,000 and the estimated delivery time is even shorter - June 2025.

The project's not doing quite as well, either. it's only managed to raise £167k so far. Still, Kicktraq reckons they'll pull in over £400k by the close, so not too shabby on a £1k ask.

I guess the big questions here are:

• If these are real products, almost ready to go into production and be shipped out in a matter of months, what do they need a Kickstarter for?
• If they do need raise funds through pledges, why are the targets so laughably low?
• Is Kickstarter now just a shop-window, providing relatively cheap advertising for commercial products about to hit market?

There could be other questions, I guess. I can think of a couple...

I won't ask them, though. I'm pretty sure we'll have the answers soon enough.

Now, will someone just get on with making my AI robot dog already?

 

Notes on AI used in this post

Lol! Where would I even start?

Okay, sticking to the AI used by me, there's only the header image. That's by FluxSchnell at NightCafe using default settings except runtime (Medium). The prompt was the PC Gamer quote "an AI-powered digital purgatory that you can trap a small anime girl in, forever".

She looks sad, doesn't she?  As well she should.

I wanted to use a picture of Perky Pat but NightCafe blocked it. Not sure why.  I assume it was because I gave it PKD's name and the full title of the short story and there might be copyright issues. If I hadn't, though, I can't imagine it would have known who or what Perky Pat was. So, Catch 22. 

Which, presumably, would also be blocked.

Cab It Up

 

If I was on Twitter this would be a tweet but I'm not so it's a really short blog post instead. 

Neo Cab is the best game I've played in a long time. And I want this picture on a T-shirt.

Full review tomorrow. Maybe. 

Depends which timeline we're in.

Don't Get Weird On Me, Babe: Animal Crossing Pocket Camp

I don't know about Animal Crossing in general but Pocket Camp is weird. It emblematizes cultural drift. Could something like this have existed in the mid or late twentieth century? I doubt it.

In great part, ACPC relies on and resides in the hinterland between maturity and childhood. It looks absolutely like a game designed for children. Quite small children. It doesn't read like one.

We're in a nervous neighborhood, as evidenced by the appearance of the anxious query "is Animal Crossing for adults?", tenth in Google's suggestions on how a sentence beginning "Is Animal Crossing..."might end. That's the generic Animal Crossing, though. If you rephrase the question to refer specifically to Pocket Camp the suggestion vanishes. Seems it's a question no-one's asking.

Pocket Camp is the red-headed stepchild of the franchise. Ars Technica's glowing review of New Horizons complains that "the series' identity has been sullied in recent years by the smartphone-only spinoff Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp", suggesting those of us who have only seen the mobile version might even "assume the Animal Crossing series is a cheap Farmville clone".

Of course, to do that I'd first have to have played Farmville, or at least have a much clearer idea of what it is. Did it have narcissists, fantasists and super-annuated extras from Easy Rider as mainstays of its cast? Did it exist to blur the boundaries of the real and irreal?

I like to play Pocket Camp right before I go to sleep, which often means midnight or later. Some of the animals in the campsite comment on the lateness of the hour. They allude to night-time activities that they and I might prefer to keep hidden. They express mild concern over why I might be up so late.

Yet there they always are. Juggling, reading, chatting. Night never falls on our shared world. It's always bright as noon. Their surprise at my nocturnal presence might equally be my own at their eternal wakefulness.

The private lives of these animals are a mystery. I'm not always sure even of their species. It is, I'm thinking, something about which one shouldn't ask.

There are many questions better left unspoken. To ask why a penguin, if that's what Tex is, should be both a football letterman and an enthusiast for the revival of dead languages would take Pocket Camp into areas I feel ill-qualified to enter. It's necessary to accept these situations.

Some of my animal friends maintain a certain consistency. Rosie is determined she's a star. Apollo knows he's old. Tex's speech in favor of bringing back Latin, however, turned up a few days later in the mouth of someone else, word for word.

What does that mean? I think of Californium, sometimes. Are we inside the children's novel Philip K Dick never wrote?

There's a queasy lurch to some of the conversations. Animal Crossing is a safe place, we all know that, but is it? Is it really? Do you want to imagine Rosie in a leather jumpsuit? Like Suzy Quatro, perhaps? Or Joan Jett? Or Kathy Rain? And should you, if you do?

She didn't really say it, did she? Someone put those words in her mouth. Is there a leather jumpsuit in the game? Is this a marketing suggestion? Or is it someone having fun? And at whose expense?

Apollo was the first animal to join my crew. He all but invited himself. I wasn't sure at first but now he's a fixture. I wouldn't know the place without his passive-aggressive bark and self-deprecating sense of humor.

He has a lot of lines. Last night I upgraded my cool tent to level three and he launched into a multi-screen soliloquy on the joy of the open road. It was worthy of Lana's intro to Ride, or at least a bar band cover of  Steppenwolf.

Was it the way we were dressed? Or the cool factor of the level three tent? Or was Apollo just having a mid-life crisis, like all his others?

He's an eagle with barely-suppressed anger issues, an odd combination of self-doubt and arrogance. Rosie's a narcissist, possibly delusional. Goldie, as we have already established, is agarophobic. Eugene seems to think he's The Fonz. Tia believes inanimate objects can be friends, although not with her. Freya is perhaps the most normal of campers, although even she seems dangerously brittle some days...

I'm thinking of Phil Dick again. Clans of the Alphane Moon, specifically.

Last night I dinged level 22. There are eight animals camping with me, the most the campsite can hold.

I checked today. The game currently has at least one hundred and fifty levels and there are one hundred and ninety-one animals.

I think I need to sit quietly and think this through. Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is weird. And it's not about to stop.

In The Days Of Perky Pat

I'd finished cropping some screenshots for a follow-up post to Wednesday's "Working With Fire And Steel". I was ready to write but it felt too quiet in the room. The ambient sound of passing cars. Occasional birdsong. Oppressive.

I opened YouTube. I have it configured always to open on my subscriptions. Most days it's a sea of yellow/turquoise banners from Elefant Records, occasionally interspersed with Ardwulf unboxing something or the latest burst of PR static from Poppy.

Ah, Poppy. I may be over Poppy, by the way, in case you were wondering. There was a time, not that long ago, when I seriously considered buying and wearing a pin so other members of the church of her poisoned mind could recognize me. Quite glad I didn't do that.

She's free of outside influence now, reportedly, taking things in the direction of her choice. Her new path leads her away from the glitched hyperreality of post-postmodernism towards the studded leather uplands of pop-metal. I think I'll pass.

Not Poppy, then. My gaze shifted to the latest drifting dream fix from my enablers at Elefant: La Bien Querida feat. Los Planetas with their new single Domingo Escarlata. (Do we say "single" any more? I doubt it).

Elefant Records runs out of Madrid, Spain. Many of their acts map the Spanish diaspora, although you might not realize it from that anglocenteric Wikipedia list. Now, my Spanish is not good. Tourist Spanish plus. I can read some, though. I studied Latin, the key to any romance language, and I know French. One romantic tongue is much like another, on the page. I at least know enough to translate "Scarlet Sunday".

And look, more of those tropes I love so much; a color and the one day of the week I favor so strongly I once wrote a song about it. I called it "Everything's Sunday" because I wished it was.  There's even a visual trigger in the thumbnail - red hair. I have a lot of triggers.

But I was not prepared for this:

Watch and wallow. That's pop perfection, that's what that is. I wrote a whole, elegaic paean of praise to its drifting, mesmeric beauty in the draft that was lost. Oh, did I not mention that? I wrote this post and then lost it right at the end. Don't you hate when that happens?

I don't think I'll try to recreate it. Just watch the damn movie, alright? And I do mean watch, not just listen. Because, glorious though the music is, it's the images that carry the weight. That drugdealer opening under the bleak bridge. The vials. And the blue. All that blue. Her fingers in the soft wool's warp. Oh my. Oh my. Continuará. I hope so. I really hope so.

And, look, the timeslips, the juddering. Books skittering on shelves. The telephone changing form. Isn't it the game I was playing and posting about just a few weeks back? Californium. Yes. Yes it is.

It's all pure Philip K Dick. Unless it's just me. I read a lot of Philip K Dick at an impressionable age. I was ahead of the curve, an early adopter. I see his influence everywhere, have done for decades. Now it's his vision we all see, coming clear around us.

If I don't see you again I won't understand
Because life showed me that you existed
And all hope I'll lose
My sky will cloud, the seas will dry up, alas!

If I don't see you again, if I don't see you again
For I want nothing, if I don't know what to do
If I don't see you again I'll never know
Everything you and I could have done

Because when you kissed me the sky would open
On the edge of a precipice wishing to jump with you
And when you touched me I would come back to life
And the world caught fire with the brush of your skin against mine

If I don't see you again I will die of grief
From black sorrow I die because I can't see you
If I don't see you again I'll never know
Everything you and I could have done

Because when you kissed me the sky would open
On the edge of a precipice wishing to jump with you
And when you touched me I would come back to life
And the world caught fire with the brush of your skin against mine 

How Kabiria Films or Ana Fernández-Villaverde herself, whoever took the lead, made the leap from these sad love song lyrics, rendered into English with surprising feel by Google Translate, to that saturated, entropic feverscape... well, it beats me. I'm just so glad they did.

Elefant Records, like me, have history with Philip K Dick, it seems. I already had another of their roster earmarked for a post I've been marinating on music inspired by the great man. But why sit on it? These aren't times to wait. Let's have it now.

There's no mystery hanging over the provenance of this one. La Monja Enana lifted the title wholesale from a Dick story first published in 1963. All they've changed is the language: Los Dias de Perky Pat.

There's a squelchier version I much prefer but it doesn't have a performance to give it visual heft. The real kicker, though, is the lyric.

A few years after the short story The Days of Perky Pat appeared in Amazing. Dick reworked the premise for one of his greatest novels, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. In the lyrics, Ana Vaquero and Juan Alonso twist that narrative once again, to their own purpose.

I don't know what made me accept the transfer to Mars
A higher salary, an exciting destination
It was my great chance to get away from Earth
I wanted to start again, make a blur and a new account
And it is that in advertising everything was so beautiful
A natural paradise, how have I been so lingering?
The air doesn't smell the same, the sun shines without force
I can't take another day, I'm going to lose my mind
At night, in the neighborhood, none of this matters
Everything is solved by taking a dose of soma
And I can no longer distinguish the real from the unreal
I prefer to avoid, it's the days of Perky Pat
I'm not going to work anymore, I spend the day locked up
Next to Perky Pat, in a more human world
But I begin to suspect that nothing is what it seems
Everything around me trembles and fades
I don't care about the time, none of this matters anymore
Everything is solved by taking a little more soma
And I can no longer distinguish the real from the unreal
I prefer to avoid, it's the days of Perky Pat
And I no longer want to distinguish the real from the unreal
It's so much better like this, living with Perky Pat 

This is where I lose out, not speaking the language. Google does its best but falters. Worse, the tension between the bouyancy of the music and the desperation of the words is lost. Even so, though, eh? Even so... 

I won't point out the synergies and synchronicities between those lyrics and our current situation. Oh, I just did. I'm sorry about that.

Third, because good things always come in threes and bad things too, there's this, about which I can find nothing. The song has the same title and it sounds quite similar, really quite very similar, although I can't convince myself it's a cover.

The lyric is in English but I can't make it out. Comments on the thread are blocked and the band seem to have no internet presence whatsoever.

How very Philip K.

Transmitting Live From Mars

According to Steam it took me exactly five hours to complete Californium. That seems remarkably precise. It's also remarkably slow compared to most people who've finished the game, at least according to some of the "mostly positive" reviews, where three hours would seem closer to the norm.

I like to take my time, look up, smell the rosewater. Also, finding some of those glitches wasn't as easy as all that. Mostly I managed it on my own but I'm very glad someone took the time to record a full playthrough for the handful of times my search threatened to stretch from fun to frustration.

So... was Californium any good?

At just over £5.00 for exactly five hours play I thought it was reasonable value as entertainment goes. A little less expensive than the average movie, a little more than a medium-length novel. If I'd paid for it with my own money I wouldn't feel short-changed.

It doesn't have a great deal of replayabilty although I guess, technically, it has as much as any Philip K. Dick novel, in that both tell a linear story with multiple possible interpretations. I've re-read most of PKD's novels, though, some of them many times; I can't see myself playing through Californium again.

The game's greates strength is its aesthetic, which is rigourously and successfully maintained throughout. I never once tired of looking at it. Indeed, at one point I wondered what it might feel like to "play" the game without playing it.

There's a mysterious voice that occasionally chides the protaganist, Elvin Green, for his apparent inability to know when he's well off. As Elvin peels away the layers of reality, finding a less satisfactory version each time, the voice suggests, with reason, that Elvin doesn't know when to stop.

And in fact each iteration begins by putting him in a better place. He starts as a failing writer, behind on his assignments, whose publisher is about to "let him go". In the second chapter he's much more successful, feted as the "Patriot Writer", the biographer of Abe Lincoln. When he tears the veil and steps through yet again, he becomes the political leader of an entire planet, or at least the boss of a mining colony on Mars.

It's only when he starts pulling at the threads that everything unravels, always leaving him in a worse situation than when he began. He has a very nice apartment, which gets nicer each time, and it occured to me that, as a player, I could refuse to engage with the process, let the glitches glitch, just log in to spend a few minutes staring out of the window at the scenery. It's nice scenery. Elvin doesn't appreciate it but I did.

But no, we all have to do our part. So I worked through all of the chapters, saw all the changes, spoke to all the people... or not. I thought I had but the game has Achievements (because of course it does or it wouldn't be a game, apparently...) and one of them is Speak to Every NPC. And I didn't get it.

So I missed someone. I have no idea who. I spoke to everyone I saw because the writing is not bad and the voice acting is a bit better than that so I wanted to. Also you never know when a Philip K Dick reference might pop up.

I thought about that, too. Californium is a game predicated on a knowledge of or an interest in the works of a particular author. Thematically it does a fair job of evoking a few of the great man's better-known tropes. It also drops in the odd reference that seems to have no function other than to give the player warm fuzzies of recognition.

Is that Fan Service? If it is, is that a bad thing? What's wrong with servicing the fans, anyway? If you weren't a fan of Philip K Dick, would you be playing at all? I know it's why I bought the game.

Even when the references seemed to be crowbarred in (and there were only a handful that I spotted) I appreciated them. Would I rather the developers had taken their own game more seriously and resisted temptation? No, I don't think I would. I'm a fan. Serve me.

The final chapter, in which reality comes unglued along with physics and topology, was probably the best part of the game as a game. It was also the part with the least story. I do still struggle with the interface between those concepts. I've seen Californium referred to as both a "walking simulator" and a "puzzle game" and it is both of those things, although the walks are very short and the puzzles mostly easy.

I was satisified with it as a "game" but I'm easily satisfied on that front. I was a lot less staisfied with it as a story, largely because of the ending. It was all going rather well until then.

I'm not going to say the ending was bad. It might have been. There's one interpretation - and it was the first one I came to - that, if true, would make it a very bad ending indeed. One of the worst kinds of ending, in fact. But I'm very far from sure that was the ending.

Or the meaning of the ending, anyway. It was definitely the ending of the game in a practical sense; everything stopped and there were credits. Whether what had happened was what I first thought had happened, though, I somewhat doubt.

In which case I didn't understand the ending. That's not great, either, although it might be my problem. Or it might not. Maybe it wasn't as clear as it should have been.

Or maybe that was the point. Maybe it was clever Dickery, a touch of postmodernist humor. Maybe it wasn't supposed to make sense because, y'know, reality isn't what you think. If you can understand it you've misunderstood it. Except I've read, as I mentioned, an awful lot of Philip K Dick and I never once got to the end of a novel and found myself thinking "what was that all about?". Granted, I still haven't read Valis, let alone The Divine Invasion, but the point holds.

Would I recommend Californium? For PKD fans and sympathizers, yes, definitely. I felt it was five hours well spent. I enjoyed it. I strongly suspect it isn't anything like as smart as the creators probably imagine it is but it's certainly smart enough. It doesn't disgrace its source material and that's a lot more than not nothing.

For anyone who hasn't read Dick, I'm less sure. I'd say about a quarter to a third of my enjoyment came from resonances the game kicked up, stuff I remembered from the novels and short stories. Half was from the look of the thing and the rest from the voice acting and the narrative. Whether that's enough for someone unfamiliar with the original texts is questionable.

But, as I said, who else is going to be interested? Probably not a problem.

According to the best review of the game I read, everything Californium does right the much better-known and vastly more successful The Stanley Parable did better. Maybe I should try that next.

Real To Irreal : Californium

For once, I did exactly what I said I was going to do. After I finished blogging yesterday I popped off to Steam to buy Californium.

Not! Of course I didn't. As soon as I hit "Publish" I forgot all about it and spent several hours futzing around in EverQuest II .

It wasn't until late in the evening that I remembered and finally went and did it. By then I only had time for a quick look. I played for about forty-five minutes. This morning I logged in again and played for a couple of hours.

That's not enough for a full review but it's plenty for a First Impresions piece. And my first impressions are very favorable.

Let's start with the best part: the art design. It's gorgeous. I've taken over fifty screenshots already. I'm seriously considering grabbing several hundred just so I can use them for randomized desktop backgrounds.

It's a good thing the art's as well done as it is because the game relies on it extremely heavily for gameplay, which consists entirely of spotting anomalies, while the narative relies almost equally strongly on visual contextual disparity. Some weight is carried by the soundscape but it's down to the art department to handle the heavy lifting.

The controls are just about the most minimal I've ever seen in a game. WASD for movement and left mouse button to interact. That's it. Oh, and sometimes you have to type the words you see on screen in a simulation of typing on a typewriter, which is how the game begins.

Absolutely nothing is explained extrinsically. You're left to work out for yourself what to do by context. It's not difficult because there are only a tiny handful of things you can do. You can walk around and look at things - and by "look at" I mean you, the player, can stare at the image on your monitor. Your character, a writer named Elvin, who analogs Dick himself, can't perform any of the typical adventure game tricks - no examining things, no picking things up, no interaction of any kind.

Except when you see something glitch. This, I think, is where the game really earns its right to invoke the name-recognition of PKD. All the gameplay I've seen so far consists entirely of noticing something that's not right and looking closely at it. That's something that drives the narrative in many of Dick's novels and here it's replicated beautifully.

Reality is not what it seems. As you pan the camera maybe something will flicker and catch your eye. Perhaps you'll notice objects juddering or changing place. There might be a glow where no obvious light source exists.

When you spot one of these you'll notice an icon. Left-click on it and hold and reality will change, overwriting the late-summer light of Summer of Love era California with a colder, bluer, altogether more 1950s aesthetic.

I wandered about, looking for glitches, opening holes in reality, listening to the rather good soundtrack. Once the phone rang and I listened to a message from Elvin's publisher. He didn't seem very pleased with his work. Then the television sputtered into life and started talking to me. When the static cleared all it showed were roman numerals. They turned out to be a countdown of the glitches I needed to find before I could move on to the next stage.

Eventually I found all the tears in reality and pulled them open. That in turn unlocked the door to my apartment. I moved outside to do the same in the street, the yard, my publisher's office, the local diner...

And that's all there is to it. Oh, except for talking to people. Listening, I should say. Elvin doesn't speak. He listens. And listening is a pleasure because the voice acting is very good. Up to radio drama standard, very nearly.

Once you leave the apartment you get to meet all kinds of folk; hippies, policeman, federal agents, store owners, draft dodgers. They stand around in the form of cardboard cut-outs, something that has a particularly Dickian resonance, although I think it's just a visual trope not a representation of how your character perceives them. Although, just as in a Dick novel, you can't quite be sure...

Californium claims to take its inspiration from both the life and the work of Philip K. Dick, which is why I was interested in playing it. From what I've seen so far it fulfills that promise quite convincingly although not everyone agrees.

Perhaps the author of that piece was insufficiently "familiar with obscure biographical facts from Dick's life", as he suggests players need to be if they're to get the most out of the game. Having read more than one biography of the great man as well as most of his non-SF works, several of which are semi-autobiographical, I thought it made a pretty fair fist of getting the existential nuances right, which is the hard part. Homicidal androids and funny talking doors, well, any game can manage those.

As for the plot, it's too early to say. There seems to be one. In the hippie reality Elvin has writer's block and his wife has walked out; in fifties fascist world he's a respected Patriot Writer but his wife, the same wife, now estranged, has just been arrested for terrorism. There's a third reality starting to open up. I don't know what that's going to be. But I'm curious to find out.

Clearly I'm enjoying myself so far but Californium does have its problems, the biggest one being an inability to save your progress when you'd like. You have to complete each level (the game actually calls them "levels") to have your gamestate retained at that point. If you quit before then, when you next log in you'll have to begin again from the start of the last level you didn't finish.

That's hardly conducive to natural play, particularly since it's far from clear when a "level" has ended. The television sets scattered around the locations keep a tally of how many glitches you've uncovered but sometimes there's more than one TV on the go.

Spotting the glitches can be quite challenging, too. They vary a fair bit in how they appear. The ones I find most convincing reveal themselves by some movement or lighting effect but others only show themselves momentarily as you pan the camera, emulating the sensation of catching sight of something out of the corner of your eye. They can be hard to spot. 

Then there are those that only appear when you mouse over them. Some only appear when you mouse over them while Elvin is moving. Some are concealed behind behind furniture, which glitches to reveal them, then covers them again. It's immersive when it works but frustrating when you've been wandering around for ten minutes without spotting anything.

That's adventure games all over, though. Which is why I always resort to a walkthrough in time of need. I'm playing to enjoy myself not to raise my blood pressure. 

I made it about two hours in before I got completely stuck. Fortunately there is a full walkthrough on Steam. It's in video form but given the nature of the game that makes sense. It means you could also watch it like a movie if you wanted. 

I might end up doing that but I think it's more likely I'll play all the way through. The way the layers of reality peel back is intriguing. I'd like to find out what's at the core. And I want to know who the sarcastic guy is who keeps talking down to me through the TV. And punch him in the throat.