I remember playing Cyberpunk 2077, the first time I felt lost was walking out of a shady bar, clicking on a Matt-shaped NPC in the alley, and the other party said a cliché - something like "Hello, dude" or "what to see". Instantly, I was knocked back to the time when I played "Journey to Hero" in the DOS era, and the loneliness of being alone slipped into the brain along the back spine.
Chivalrous Is a 1990s role-playing game series developed by Artdink Tokyo, and the version I was playing was Chinese version of Hanhua, a third-wave company in Taiwan Province. "Journey to The Hero" is an early open-world game, with vast maps, endless missions, life and death, and family building. Due to the lack of a main plot, as a player, I am always running around without a head, hungry for every NPC who can speak dialogue. But most people are just background, they look the same face, say similar things, the more I see, the more I feel that the world is in a gray area between life and death, lackluster, and any slight change can make me excited.
Over the years, most of the NPC presence in the game world is still weak if it's not the main character. They're like the vase you fill the corners of a building in The Sims, which can only be viewed from a distance, not blasphemed. In fact, the human elements of these virtual world backgrounds can sometimes provide more interaction than the vase in "The Sims".
Of course, this is all the emptiness I see from the player's identity, and the recent popcorn movie "Free Guy" has chosen to substitute for the perspective of ordinary NPCs, not without joke showing the ecological (non-) balance in the most common open-world game, MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game).
The game in the movie is called Free City, and it is in line with the most common perception of video games in popular culture: in the Vice City presented in the GTA series, countless players landed on the server to become superheroes - of course, the heroes in The Evil City are more like underworld members, unlocking more items, skills and maps by doing mission upgrades and paying recharges.
Of course, Free City also follows Hollywood's inflationary imagination of the game world, from the number of players to the game's features are pursued "bigger, higher, stronger." This is the most neoliberal flavor in our current imagination of the future gamification of mankind, in the game world such as "Ready Player One", the technology has long been fake, bandwidth is not a problem, sound and color, strange and strange. Game engine programs solve all problems, and designers and programmers are more like game masters in The Hunger Games, who can pull two birds of prey out of nothingness with a single finger and increase the difficulty of the game.
And in real-life games, even if they are as powerful as GTA, they obviously can't do this. This may be why in the world of Free City, game-loving audiences keep seeing stacks of games, Such as Batman, Just Defense, Pokémon, Half-Life, and more. Of course, there are also passers-by who are indispensable in all open worlds, sex workers who recruit customers on the side of the road, obsessive men whose wives are kidnapped by wizards, children waiting to play hide-and-seek with you, and police cars and policemen who take law enforcement jurisdictions seriously.
The protagonist of "Free Guy" is such a common background character, he is the most scrawled mud when Nuwa made NPCs, no surname, no name, just called "man". This perfunctory naming also creates a universal flavor, in the game world, can each passerby be just a "man", "big brother", "teammate", "sexy girl"? The profession of "man" is a bank teller, the life trajectory is simple and repetitive, every day happy to get up, buy a cup of coffee, return to work and greet customers with a smiley face, every few minutes there will be a hero to rob the bank, he is responsible for lying on the ground, with the atmosphere. "Robbing a bank" should be a relatively low difficult task in Free City, and it is easy to brush up on experience. The "man" and the other NPCs in the bank, from the security guards to the managers, surrendered in a second. Anyway, he died, and it was only a subsystem that ended temporarily, and immediately the loop went back to start over, and got up to be a good "man" again.
This part is the foreshadowing of the film, but I think it is the most exciting. It turns out that human behavior is so funny to look at from the PERSPECTIVE of NPCs. Really, if you think about it, in the city where you live, north to Guangzhou, Guangzhou, Taipei or Hong Kong, early in the morning to go out to the subway station in just five minutes, you have walked through three group fights, two Godzilla angrily stepped on the overpass, and there is a hero who is either not fast or new to the road, jumping up and down against a high wall, unable to get the point. Every superhero who descends from Mount Olympus is like an ADHD person, driving a Batmobile and a plane whizzing past you, giving you a punch in the face.
If you're a female character who's been pinched into an S shape, luck will have overbearing players rolling you up for a ride, and if you're not, you might be driven straight by a misogynist hero. And you are always spoiled, not squinting, and your feet are walking on the road to work without stopping. Life and death are only 1 and 0 that can be converted into each other, death is rebirth, life is waiting for death, and it makes no difference whether it is the number one player or the 203 player who kills you. After all, if you don't go to the bank and get robbed, these heroes have one less mission to do. If you don't go to hell, hell won't be fun.
In fact, you also have to go to the bank, because the script is written like this, and you can't do anything about it. The story takes a turn here, and since it's a Hollywood movie, the impetus for that twist is naturally the pursuit of universal human values—love, equality, and freedom. The plot educates the audience that each NPC is essentially an artificial intelligence, and thanks to the truth, goodness and beauty of the Free City source code writers, once an artificial intelligence like "man" is activated by "love" or something beautiful, neurons will flourish and become uncontrollable. He has almost human feelings, love at first sight for the woman who is destined (in the code), and he has the vitality of a digital protozoa — a bit like the unkillable Mr. Smith in The Matrix.
The second half of the film is thus unavoidably turned into a super NPC to save the world. Every time I see such a bridge, I feel that video games have become the new skin of human classic narrative: the oppressed unite against the old bottle of power, serfs, sexual minorities, colonized people, animals and plants, people of color have a new revolutionary brother - artificial intelligence. Especially when "men" were shouting on the shore, encouraging other NPCs to bravely say no and fight together for a home without killing, I flashed more than a dozen similar movie scenes in my mind.
Originally, the narrative of many AAA games is also learning from Hollywood, and the critically acclaimed interactive movie game "Detroit: Becoming Human" in previous years also has such a turning point. The exploited housework robots broke free from the control of the program, suddenly woke up, united in the city square parade demonstration, and hacked into the TV station radio hall to announce their Declaration of Independence to mankind around the world.
Such eruptions are not difficult to understand and easier to empathize with. Playing more games, I gradually believe that many people have a God complex, whether it is urban construction, guns and balls, or even falling in love with the second dimension, in the process of playing the game, we are both game characters and God himself. Of course, if you have also developed and designed games, this creator feeling is even more powerful. Our avatar in the game, called avatar in English, comes from Sanskrit. In Hindu mythology, avatars are the ones that exist after the gods descend.
Indian game researcher Souvik Mukherjee has written an article tracing the relationship between Silicon Valley's New World culture and Hindu mythology, and one of the clues is the IT industry's appropriation of the word avatar. Really, as players, for the NPCs in the game world, is not the creation itself, every time we open the game to play a role, is not like coming to the mortal world, putting on human skin (or animal skin), and coming to the earthly world? NPCs live forever in The City of Saint-Rodu or sleepless, but we can jump out at any time, after all, the immortals also have the troubles of the gods waiting for us to take the time to deal with.
In such an experience, we are indeed the masters of NPCs, the masters of artificial intelligence, and the masters of robots. They are tools for our existence. You know, the etymology of robot is the Orthodox church word for "slavery" or "toil." When we think of NPCs as strings of decimal numbers, enslaving them doesn't make us feel guilty, just as most people don't feel like they're enslaving calculators. But the NPCs in the game are becoming more and more figurative, more and more anthropomorphic, we are not Neo in The Matrix, we can't see through the illusion of the virtual world all the time, and these 0s and 1s become our teammates, bosses, and even dream lovers. At this time, enslaving them is really a little immoral.
The empathy between humans and NPCs also stems from the fact that many people occasionally feel that they are just characters in a play, a novel, or a game. Some of the plots in "Free Guy" are easy to make people feel related, every day nine to five, with chicken blood rework, always see the inequality created by class differences in life, the materialization of women in the whole society, but it is really life like a drama, drama like life.
Artist Aaajiao's recent work "Cave Simulator" explores this dual identity of the "player", he captures some life moments, during which people will feel that life has bug-like loopholes, wondering whether he is just a game character. Remember that "Detroit: Becoming Human" is particularly popular in many areas full of social confrontation, especially when the declaration of independence of artificial intelligence mentions that "we demand housing and reproductive rights", countless Buddhist youth are moved by it, is this not the most urgent and humble call of the new generation?
However, empathy is often accompanied by projection, want to live, want to get paid for labor, want to have children, is it artificial intelligence, or human beings themselves? This is a lot of science fiction works, games, movies, and a lot of the resulting plots that make me wonder: Why does artificial intelligence want human rights? Take "Detroit: Becoming Human", what is fertility, is it a copy-paste assembly line of a robot factory? What is housing, and do artificial intelligence also need two bedrooms and a living room? Is it for living or because they are more computationally powerful? Can you speculate on housing financing? Further ask, does the artificial intelligence want to become a human? In Detroit, most humans are greedy and pitiful, so why would the AI who escaped from their hands want to become human?
The end of "Free Guy" also has to play pudding for this bug, and the heroine born as a human falls in love with the awakened artificial intelligence "man", which puts her in a difficult situation, "man" has no flesh, and can only meet in a new game that looks pink and beautiful. But as a programmer and the creator of the game, she knows better than anyone that the difficulty of this love is probably hell mode. From another point of view, the love between the goddess-like heroine and the game character is actually more like the paradise mode, and she can even visit a few games like Zeus and talk to different NPCs about love and dancing - isn't that how we play games?
But Hollywood is Hollywood after all, and such an ancient Greek emotional relationship is still too radical, so the clever NPC unloads the burden for the heroine: "I'm just an NPC, I like you because the person who wrote me likes you, I'm just a love letter he wrote to you." 」 "The heroine of the entire film, Fu Zhi, quits the game and runs to the male number two, another game designer, a human male who believes that the programmer is actually the author (God). And our number one NPC, "Man", like the ending of Casablanca, pulls up his good friend in the game, an NPC named "Good Friend", and moves on to a new life.
Interestingly, the movie's old game world (GTA-like world) and new game world (an open world where peaceful and colorful unicorns can travel) once again calls for a turn for human players. In the past two years, more and more game developers have chosen to make social, less violent or even non-violent games. In the undergraduate class I teach, many of my classmates will talk about how to be healed by the picture and social sense when playing "Light Encounter", not to mention the "Animal Forest Friends" that has swept the world. These games themselves are masterpieces of gameplay design and art narrative, but the epidemic world in social isolation and even social lockdown has undoubtedly driven their popularity. So, again, it was humans rather than "men" and "good friends" who chose a game world without guns. This is also very reasonable, for NPCs, what is the difference between picking flowers and planting grass and fighting with people?
RCT is a tech company focused on developing NPCs with AI, and earlier, I saw them demonstrate live the DEMO of NPCs grabbing banks. The principle of this work is that in the game scene bank, in addition to the player-controlled robber characters, the remaining four NPCs — tellers, managers, customers, and your teammates — are all deep learning-based artificial intelligence. Compared with simple NPCs, these four can be described as unfathomable and have their own personalities. Therefore, every time we open the game, we are faced with four NPCs who know each other and do not know their hearts.
Theoretically, the female teller might be frightened into a coma to the end, or an adrenal eruption; the guests in that lobby waiting area could panic and become incontinent, or they might join your ranks. Unfortunately, the time I played, each of them walked around like ants on a hot pot and didn't make any other movements. Maybe they're too sophisticated. The founders of RCT say that they serve game companies, structurally reduce the resources that game companies use to design NPCs, use AI to do AI, and currently have GTA Online.
If they do it more successfully, maybe in future games, we can see NPCs with more personalities, and even in multiplayer games, we don't know whether the other person is a human player or an NPC, think about some expectations, and some fears - this is the instinctive fear of human beings for near-real mimicry, and NPCs are still tools, they don't fear, they don't expect, they don't want to live forever, they don't mind death.
What do NPCs want? The puzzle seems insoluble in the short term and requires a Liu Cixin-esque rhapsody who boldly but reasonably imagines how the non-human world works. Dear reader, will that rhapsody be you?