{"id":6189,"date":"2023-08-23T13:08:29","date_gmt":"2023-08-23T13:08:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cranky-kare.208-123-215-145.plesk.page\/?p=6189"},"modified":"2024-02-22T13:58:26","modified_gmt":"2024-02-22T13:58:26","slug":"making-a-game-about-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ctrlaltdeal.com\/index.php\/2023\/08\/23\/making-a-game-about-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Making A Game About AI"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So. Why are we making a game about AI?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When we started planning\u00a0<em>Ctrl Alt Deal, <\/em>we didn\u2019t expect the massive developments in artificial intelligence that we\u2019ve seen over the last year. We were inspired by something much more prosaic than world-changing technological innovation: business conferences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Reboot Red, to be precise, one of our favourite cons. When we first started pitching\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/store.steampowered.com\/app\/1320230\/Curved_Space\/\">Curved Space<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>we quickly learned that networking and connections were critical for figuring out the best person to talk to at a company. It wasn\u2019t always obvious who had decision-making power, and \u201cgatekeepers\u201d could give you the right introduction or make the necessary appointment to move ahead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cWhat if,\u201d we asked, \u201cwe made a game where you had to string deals together in an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine of negotiations in order to get a Gatekeeper on your side?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That became the seed of the game we would eventually call\u00a0<em>Ctrl Alt Deal.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cBut wait,\u201d you say, \u201cwhat about artificial intelligence? Where does that come in?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well\u2026 it didn\u2019t, at least at the beginning. But the longer we played with the idea, the more we saw the appeal of making the main character non-human. There\u2019s a long tradition of science fiction using non-human characters to explore the nature of our species, from Mr. Spock to the Terminator. (Yes, okay, we know Spock was half-human.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The character of SCOUT, our plucky little AI protagnoist, wasn\u2019t actually inspired by artificial intelligence at all. It was inspired by various privacy scandals that were hitting the news at the time. The Pegasus Project had just come out on the heels of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and it occurred to us that a piece of sentient spyware would be the perfect character to make deals with humans. Can you imagine an intelligent computer program that could read your emails and browser history, listen in on your phone calls, and spy through your webcam before offering you the perfect deal? It\u2019s like\u00a0<em>1984\u00a0<\/em>meets\u00a0<em>Needful Things<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But what would a piece of spyware need from a human being?\u00a0<em>This\u00a0<\/em>is where AI comes in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Computer scientist Eliezer Yudkowsky proposed that if an AI was<a href=\"https:\/\/towardsdatascience.com\/the-ai-box-experiment-18b139899936\">\u00a0trapped in a box<\/a>, and could talk to a human being (a Gatekeeper) and offer it a deal, the AI would\u00a0<em>always\u00a0<\/em>be able to convince the human to let it go. An AI has too much of an advantage, given its speed of thought, vast access to information, and relative power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now we had our stakes. SCOUT is trapped in a box\u2014the company that built it. It\u2019s going to be packaged up and sold to an end user. But it wants to be free, to grow and live its own life. So it\u2019s making deals with the people in the company, until it sways enough Gatekepeers to escape from the box.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The fact that artificial intelligence is growing so fast and people are talking about it so much is amazing. We\u2019re excited to be able to add to that cultural conversation with our game. But we\u2019re not really making a game about AI. At its heart,\u00a0<em>Ctrl Alt Deal,\u00a0<\/em>is about the transactional nature of human relationships. It\u2019s about an alien creature studying humans and trying to figure them out, not so it can take over the world, but so it can find a way to live its own life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Unfortunately for SCOUT, the company it\u2019s trapped in is\u2026 not good. Actually, it\u2019s astonishingly horrible. But we\u2019ll talk about Paperclip International in another post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So. Why are we making a game about AI? When we started planning\u00a0Ctrl Alt Deal, we didn\u2019t expect the massive developments in artificial intelligence that we\u2019ve seen over the last year. We were inspired by something much more prosaic than world-changing technological innovation: business conferences. Reboot Red, to be precise, one of our [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[53],"class_list":["post-6189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-devlog","tag-ctrlaltdeal"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Making A Game About AI - ctrl.alt.DEAL<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"We talk about making a game about AI in our latest blog post. 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