http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2024-02-05T17:30:09Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com http://ranprieur.com/#e9d9507701e005704ac484bbb54fb9bc720c81af 2024-02-05T17:30:09Z February 5. Continuing from last week, I don't expect my AI game utopia to actually happen. The limiting factor is human boredom, and current games already have more than enough content for most players. What I really want is an environment, real or artificial, that continues to generate the feel of a great game. While AI could do that in theory, humans are now in a rare and strange position, in which we're using loads of resources to make artificial worlds for our eyes and ears and fingers, while our bodies sit cramped and dormant in a physical world that feels increasingly meaningless. We could do full-body VR, but that's just throwing more resources down a path that doesn't come out anywhere.

I don't want to call it a dead end, because we learn stuff from virtual worlds, about how we want the real world to be. Gaming is the closest I get, other than drugs, to feeling at home in a living world. And paradoxically, I feel most present in my body when I pretend I'm testing out a game avatar.

Zooming out to metaphysics, suppose there's something like reincarnation. Given how much fun wild animals are having, why would anyone want to be human? I can think of two reasons. First is the enormous variation in human experience. Being a dolphin is pretty much like being any other dolphin. But as a human, you could be anything from a Roman slave to a Medieval serf to a modern tech worker. I wonder if being a modern human is the many-lives equivalent of going to Disneyland. It's super-crowded, and more annoying than fun, but it's such a peculiar spectacle that everyone has to do it.

The other reason is imagination. Dogs can dream about chasing squirrels, and elephants probably have awesome dreams about elephant-like things. But humans, while fully awake, can go inside our heads and do dog things, or elephant things, or be wizards or space pirates, or do crazy stuff that no one ever thought of until this moment. And through storytelling and later books and now video games, we can share our worlds of imagination with other people. And if there is a more-real world outside this world, then maybe we're learning stuff here, about how we want that world to be.

]]> http://ranprieur.com/#04324c38bf41a02628073a0ee7c939993ac058ec 2024-02-01T13:50:56Z February 1. I don't know if my brain is resting this week, or if it's being numbed by playing Fallout New Vegas. I don't like the game enough to play it all the way through, but it's fun to enter that mind space, and now I'm wondering if video games are influencing popular philosophy. For example, I'm about to "intercept" the Great Khans at Boulder City, but I know that whatever time I happen to get there will be exactly the right time, because the game is coded according to relationships rather than timetables -- not unlike our own synchronicity. Games are making it easier for us to imagine reality, not as a fixed physical world, but as a vaporous potential that gets filled in according to how we look at it.

And Fallout isn't even procedurally generated. This is my greatest hope for AI. Imagine your favorite open world game, with no borders, just more of the same stuff, forever. The next challenge would be multiplayer, and I imagine a larger system that could take your choices in your game, and translate them into someone else's game to make it more real. So if I'm buying a sword in Hyrule, and you're selling a gun in Vice City, with a few adjustments, we could be each other's NPCs. Now imagine taking that farther, as far as it could go, and it's basically what psychonauts say we already have, a shared world that somehow puts each person at the very center.


It's too bad that musical taste is so subjective, because out of all the little projects I work on, the one where I have the most fun is making playlists. I'll kick an idea around for a while, and then at some point I get in full obsession mode, downloading songs, sorting them with Mp3tag, listening and cutting and resorting, and then as the final step, I post it to Spotify. It seems like most people use Spotify as a storage medium, so their playlist for a given category has every song they might ever want to hear. Because I do storage on my laptop, I can use Spotify for careful lists under two hours. My latest is Classic Rock Deep Tracks, with three songs each by Rush, Blue Oyster Cult, and Dire Straits, and two each by Queen, The Ramones, The Police, Violent Femmes, and Nirvana. I think out of all my lists, this one has the best transitions.

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