"Runaway Player" was released in 2021, telling the story of an NPC in a game who has self-awareness and finds itself living in a world of open games, so he wants to become a hero, rewrite his story, and grow up with "artificial intelligence" in the game. At the same time, Millie and the keyboard in the real world have to try their best to get their things back because of the theft of game secrets, and accidentally find that the "artificial intelligence" designed by them has worked in the game.
In the film, people who exist in the real world create "Liberty City", an open-ended game, where, like the real world, players control their own characters through computers. In "Liberty City", there are "jumping shoes" with buttons on shoes, "mechanical cannons" installed on the player, beautiful sports cars and speeding motorcycles and other cyber visual elements, but the most "cyber" is the "artificial intelligence" covered by the protagonist of the game in the film.
In today's world, although artificial intelligence (AI) has become ubiquitous in our lives, such an "artificial intelligence" in "Liberty City" that has emotions, self-respect, self-drive, and even changes the trajectory of her fate for the heroine has not yet been realized in reality. The film uses the large frame of the game to depict an ideal AI system. Imagine if AI has such "life" signs, with their own thinking, self-esteem, and emotions, then they will have their own independent "consciousness", and the evolved "digital life" has once again triggered human thinking.
Such a "game of life" has attracted the attention of scientists and computer scientists in the last century, and after their research and practice, they have found that computer programs will also "self-evolve", such a model is reflected in both real-world games and "Runaway Player" films, using the form of film art to reflect the progress of science and technology. Science fiction writer Liu Cixin described in his book "The Three-Body Problem": "There are two paths in front of human beings: one outward, leading to the sea of stars, and the other inward, leading to virtual reality."
In the film "Runaway Player", the protagonist Gai lives in a game world and accidentally meets the "goddess" he fell in love with at first sight, and he gradually has his own consciousness in order to find the "goddess", and finds that his life is all repetitive, and goes through the plan to find the goddess. Discover that the world you are in is just a game world, a world created by others, and that you are just a passerby character in this game world, a character that serves as a background for real-life players.
He felt amazed and a hint of frustration, and led other NPC characters like him to "awaken" together. In reality, the "goddess" Gai is looking for is the real developer of the game, the game has been stolen and used by others to make a lot of money, and his own results are hidden in the "reflection" of the game. In search of confidential documents, he accidentally discovers that the "artificial intelligence" effect he has developed has worked, and falls in love with his own game character. On one side is virtual, on the other side is reality, and the dramatic effect and collision between virtual and real are very outstanding.
Although the audience could not feel or experience the science and technology equivalent to the technical level involved in the film in real life, they had a more or less practical perception and experience of the prototype of these technologies. In such a cyber world, Gai's awakening and fighting for his own world triggered some thinking about the real world in the audience. In "Runaway Player", elements full of cybertechnology bring people visual impact, but there is no "AI rebellion" and "superpower destroying mankind" plots often depicted in previous cyberfilms, and Gai has no ambition to compete for the real world after awakening, and people in the real world do not eliminate the fear of AI.
On the contrary, the developer of the game is a bad guy, in a world where his interests are paramount, he will not hesitate to destroy everything and not allow innovative things to appear, and he wants to destroy everything for money. But at the end of the film, Guy informs the heroine that she was a friend who developed the game with her. His program is a "love letter" that confesses to the keyboard in a realistic sense, reflecting a certain pessimism. AI has its own consciousness, dignity, and even written down "emotional" programs, but it is still just "AI".
Living in the world of "Liberty City" never gets old, and it seems that you have chased freedom, but there is still no real freedom. This NPC originally thought that he had finally escaped the fate of "tool man" and eventually found himself still an "artificial intelligence". As the human beings who created this "world", we should reflect on the fate of the "human" emotions in the virtual world, and the way of drama integration is a point of view, and it is more necessary to reflect the expression of the inner emotions.
Different from traditional sci-fi films such as "Blade Runner" and "Ghost in the Shell", "Runaway Player" integrates comedy, romance and other elements, and uses technology to show the drama to the fullest. For example, when the protagonist Gai was chased and killed by the network administrator, there was no fight scene of sword and shadow in traditional sci-fi films, but combined with the scene transformation of the well-known game "Grand Theft Auto" in the process of chasing and killing, in which when the pursuer asked the "skin" of the protagonist, he was not talking about the skin of the character, but combined with the game appearance of contemporary gamers, in line with modern network language.
In addition, the final "Easter egg" of the film also carried out the "dream linkage" of superheroes, and the integration of IP elements such as Hulk, Captain America, Star Wars, etc., made the cyberelements of the film more prominent, and these IPs have their own artistic characteristics, using the IP elements well known to the audience to combine with the film to form an unexpected catalytic effect. Today, perhaps non-heroic characters can also take "heroic actions", or in the cyber world, there may no longer be good or bad. In today's digital world, human beings are no longer blindly worried about the future in the face of digital technology, and this art form reflects the transformation of the way humans and technology get along with science and technology that the author wants to express, using the emotional scheduling of virtual characters and heroes to show the contemporary drama style.
