A Window On The World : Ninelives, EQNext

In the comments on yesterday's post Dahakha mentioned the proposed inclusion of the  Storybricks AI in EQNext. It was one of the many things that got a lot of people very excited around the time of the big EQN reveal. Can you believe that was two and a half years ago?

Since then a lot has changed. Okay, no it hasn't. The Storybricks team has been jettisoned from the project after, supposedly, having contributed as much as needed to allow the work to continue in house. Along with all the other invisible work being carried out by invisible people, invisibly, one assumes.

I'd forgotten about Storybricks. Indeed, the degree to which it had vanished from my memory can be measured by the fact that, even though ex-Storybricks developer Brian "Psychochild" Green was the very person to bring Ninelives to my attention, I still didn't connect the two until Dahakha reminded me.

There's a connection? Well, yes, in a way. Conceptually. Potentially. It has something to do with the discussion on single player RPGs, virtual worlds, immersion and authenticity.

It occurred to me while I was playing and enjoying and feeling part of and yet strangely isolated from the compelling world of Ninelives that we don't seem to have any virtual worlds that aren't games or gamelike simulations. We could.

A very long time ago, most likely in a Philip K Dick novel, I remember coming across the concept of living pictures. Art that hangs on the wall of your house but which shows not the same static picture but a moving image.

At the time something of the kind could have been contrived in the way video installation became a gallery staple in the 1980s. Today the technology is cheap and available enough to make moving pictures on the walls of your home an everyday reality. The most it appears to be used for thus far, however, is as a rather tacky replacement for photo albums and the old home movie projector.

What if, instead of photos of your dog and videos of the grandchildren, a screen on your wall opened onto an ever-changing vista of another world? How would it be if a roving camera panned across fields and plains, followed strange creatures through towering forests, swooped above the bustling streets of cities?

How would it be to watch them carrying on their imaginary lives without intervention or interruption? With the procedural techniques currently being employed to build vast enterprises like No Man's Sky and the artificial intelligence codices promised by Storybricks, could we not have something far closer to virtual worlds than anything we've yet seen?

What's more, freed from the costs and constraints of having to provide either gameplay or narrative, all of the development funding and effort could be directed at world-building. Sitting squarely within the visual arts rather than storytelling or gaming the result could be something designed to give pleasure, provoke thought and stir emotion simply by being observed and experienced, not by being played.

I'd Kickstart a project like that.

More Human Than Human

Sometimes it's not the main argument of a post that grabs your attention but a throwaway line here or there. J3w3l's been writing about Personality and Playstyle and as she discusses her psychopathic tendencies, killer instincts and Bartle scores she observes " I also hold no compunction with my virtual avatars dying either, I do form certain connections to them but not enough to worry about their demise. They’re more tools than anything, tools that I do get connected to but as good as their usefulness."

I can get quite weirdly invested in my characters. At work yesterday, having recently read the news item about a British MP tabling a parliamentary question on the possibility of equating the theft of virtual items with real-life theft, I was idly pondering a world where human rights had been extended not just to animals (for which, of course, there has long been a strong and active lobby) but to imaginary entities.

At first blush this sounds fanciful in the extreme but there have already been murmurs. Both intellectual property rights and copyright law have listed badly under the onslaught of digital technology and the struggle to right those ships is ongoing. A few years back there was a loud buzz around the possibility of digitizing actors. There was much speculation that we might see new movies from long-dead, iconic stars like James Dean or Marilyn Monroe.

That little moneyspinner has turned out to be a lot harder to pull off than early reports suggested but, despite the difficulties, the potential benefits that would come from building a bridge over Uncanny Valley are huge. Spurred on by a series of inconvenient deaths of high-profile and high-value stars, like Heath Ledger and Philip Seymour Hoffman, during the shooting of big-budget movies, development on the necessary technological innovation continues.

AS : Artificial Stupidity.

Much of the discussion on the supposed ethics of this practice, should it ever pass from wishful-thinking to practical reality, revolves around the intellectual property rights, specifically the personal image rights, of the individuals concerned, or those of their estates. Not every country recognizes personal image rights to begin with, of course, and what you or others can or can't do with your own image varies wildly across jurisdictions. Nevertheless, the concept is well understood, as is the concept of ownership of intellectual property rights.

It's not difficult to imagine a not-so-distant future in which this technology has reached such a degree of sophistication that it's no longer possible to differentiate the flesh-and-blood actors in a scene from their digital counterparts. Then add another layer: AI. What if those digitized actors now move and speak according to autonomous algorithms sufficiently advanced to allow them to improvise and ad lib? What if the lines they are delivering have no other author than the imaginary actor himself?

And now flip that back to gaming. Wilhelm and Isey have both been pondering the shortcomings of gaming AI of late. If we ever get our hands on EQNext we'll see the fruit of the StoryBricks project, which purports to be a step change in this regard. I'm not holding my breath on that one, but at some point, just maybe in the lifetime of someone reading this, we might see NPCs in video games that are impossible to distinguish from characters played by humans.

Grawl have rights too! Oh, wait..no they don't.

Now we're deep in the rabbit hole. If Mike Weatherly or some future analog were ever to get his way and the theft of items owned and traded in online games was deemed equivalent to the theft of items of equivalent value in what we call, with increasingly ironic inaccuracy, "real life", then, if the digital denizens of those games were by then indistinguishable under the Turing and Voight-Kampf tests or some newly-ordained legal equivalent, shouldn't the destruction of one of those characters be treated as murder?

This is one of those threads that, if you pull it, the world will unravel. At some point stuff like this is going to be an actual, ethical and legal problem for someone. I just hope that someone is never going to be me and won't have to be anyone at all for a good long while yet.

Until that time, I guess we can all carry on our merry way, slaughtering and robbing all before us as is our established custom. The qualms I occasionally have, sending certain of my characters into tricky situations, or the existential angst that grips me, when Mrs Bhagpuss clinically presses the delete button on a character that my characters knew as a friend, all of that can remain as it is now -  an idiosyncratic character quirk, arch affectation, self-indulgent fancy.

All the same I'd be a lot happier if they'd rename the "Delete Character" button to something less disturbing. "Gone To Live On A Farm", say, or "Retired To Grow Roses By The Seaside". That's what really happens when you press it anyway. Everyone knows that. Not that I ever do press it. Hardly ever.

Excuse me, I think I need a lie down.

Mail Call: Regnum, The Missing Ink

Checking some of my many email addresses yesterday I came across a message from NDG Studios, operators of Regnum Online (aka Champions of Regnum, formerly known as Realms Online, not to be confused with The Realm Online). Despite having one of the worst identity crises in MMOdom, Regnum (let's settle for that) seems to be doing rather well for a six-year old game that gets very little publicity.

I discovered it very late and first wrote about it just under a year ago. It seemed quiet then, although certainly not moribund but things may be looking up. I'd already noticed that each infrequent time I remembered to log in there seemed to be a patch, which I always take to be a healthy sign, and both the website and the launcher got makeovers which make them look very handsome, but the capper came in the mail: Regnum is now available through Steam.

Wanna race?

Being on Steam (provided your game actually works) can't but be a good thing. I don't know an awful lot about how Steam operates or how difficult it is for a game to gain access to the platform, but NDG were stoked about getting Regnum into the line-up, as well they might be. They were so stoked they thought they'd celebrate by sending me a Hyena.

They sent me a load of other stuff too - a lockbox, some elixirs, the usual festive package, but it was the Hyena that caught my attention. It's a limited-duration mount that lasts 30 days and it looks great. I had no plans at all to play Regnum this month but I'll be darned if my little fox-lemur is going to miss the opportunity to ride around on a mean-looking Hyena.

So, congratulations Regnum and thanks for the ride.

Not looking quite so bright, at least not yet, is the Kickstarter campaign for The Missing Ink. Pete at Dragonchasers has a piece up about Kickstarter that gives chapter and verse on some of the drawbacks. So far my hand hasn't entered my pocket for a Kickstarter campaign.

I've followed several and they've broadly broken into two camps: No Hopers and Dead Certs and

Adventure ahoy!

it seems pointless for me to contribute either way. In every case all I'm interested in is playing the game when it releases. I find most of the inducements and sweeteners are largely irrelevant and I don't suffer from the inexplicable desire many seem to have to "donate" to what are, after all, commercial businesses. About the only time I can imagine getting my credit card out would be near the end of a campaign where success looks touch and go and my contribution might have material significance.

The first tranche of MMOs I took an interest in on Kickstarter all failed hard, at least as far as their campaigns went. Storybricks carries on, in some mysterious way, behind closed doors. Dark Solstice also appears to have withdrawn behind a veil, leaving only this tantalizing glimpse of what may one day emerge in its place. Panzer Pets, it appears, took the Kickstarter hint and gave up. Their website remains but nothing has been updated since the campaign crashed and burned.

Glad you clarified that.

Red Bedlam and The Missing Ink start a long way ahead of any of those. They have a fully working and eminently playable beta up and running on the PC, which they are actively and effectively developing. The game is already fun and very well worth trying. The Kickstarter campaign is for additional funds to bring it cross-platform to iOS and Android (although the Kickstarter verbiage only mentions Android in the leader and then goes on and on about iPads...).

So far they have 29 backers and have made just over 10% of their very modest target. I foresee another limp failure. I hope I'm wrong, because not only do I like The Missing Ink very much, I'm pretty sure I'd like it even more on a Tablet. I just hope that if they do fail on Kickstarter it doesn't put paid to that prospect altogether.

Meanwhile the Old Big Beasts continue to maunder out of the primordial gaming swamps, drawing lost worshipers in hordes. For now, I'm happy to sit back and watch them fight it out.

Kickstarter - Sport of the Future.

With apologies to Lloyd Dobler. Hmm, now I want to go watch the whole thing.

Where was I? Oh, yes. Kickstarter, the crowdfunding website, has started to draw indie developers like Woody's MMO bug zapper in reverse. These are three I'm watching:

Storybricks

You probably know about this one already. It's the 21st Century equivalent of Gilsoft's 1980s masterpiece The Quill. No? Just me then. Designed by Brian Green among others, (you may know him from Meridian 59 and Psychochild's Blog) Storybricks aims to handle all the heavy coding and design lifting in the background, leaving you free to tell your own stories in any way that fits, from single-player RPG to dynamic, persistent MMO.

There's an "open alpha demo" on their website if you want to poke around. I fired it up the other day and it runs in a browser. Takes just a few seconds and you're in. I once lost a summer to NeverWinter Nights so even thinking about what could happen with this one makes me nervous!

Panzer Pets

I read about this one on Massively and it grabbed me instantly, the way Wildstar did. Kaozz at ECTmmo likes the look of it too. The opening line of their Kickstarter pitch pretty much sums up why I feel these guys deserve to succeed: "There are three things each gamer likes, collecting stuff, customizing characters and leveling up!" That's me sold.

The design aesthetic looks exceptionally solid and counter to what you might expect from an MMO focused on collecting pet robots and making them fight each other, the whole thing oozes worldiness.

I'm really, really not sure about that name, though...

Dark Solstice 

This one may well have passed you by. I've been following Dark Solstice for what seems like forever. Years and years. I was in the closed alpha for a while, although I rarely logged in. It was one of the straws that broke my alpha-applying camel's back.

I fear the candle I once held for this game may have burned too long. I'm not sure I'll be playing even if they do make their target, but I hope they make it all the same. They've been pushing this stone up the hill for so long they deserve to see it roll down the other side.

The competition is stiff, though. At time of writing Storybricks has yet to hit 10% of its $250k target and there's only two and a half weeks left before the cut-off. Panzer Pets has about the same, with three weeks to get the rest of their $85k. Dark Solstice only just started. So far they have one backer. They want $50k and they have a month left to get it.

I wish them all the very best of luck. I'm going to pledge something to at least two out of the three but I hope they all end up getting made even if the Kickstarter thing doesn't work out. If it  does, expect to see more and more small studio MMOs going down this route. If not, well, games got made before Kickstarter...