Blog - Artificial Life and Games
Friday, February 22, 2008Artificial life is a topic that interests me greatly. I'm a huge fan of the Creatures a game series that pioneered the use of A-life technology as a game, and have been part of the series' fan community for almost 10 years now. The use of artificial life technology for games has interested me because I feel very strongly that it could revolutionize games someday. It also helps that the remaining developers were the first contacts I've ever made in the industry, whom I'd like to maintain as a potential future employer.
I once wrote an essay for one of Brenda's classes on artificial life and games, and she encouraged me to get it published as an article for Game Career Guide. I ended up publishing the machinima one instead, although I've certainly considered at some point writing up the A-life one as an article as well. In any case, as just a taste of what I mean when I say that artificial life technology has great potential for gaming, consider the following:
One of my friends in the fan community had a website devoted to torturing and killing the game's "artificially alive" creatures. He received hundreds of death threats a day for this site over a pretty large span of time. He was even mentioned in a Wired magazine article at the time about the game, where he was quoted as saying something along the lines of "Many players care more about these virtual creatures than my real human life."
Think about that. Hundreds of fans wrote in death threats to my friend because he was torturing and murdering video game characters, whom those fans believed so strongly were actually alive.
And arguably, the norns of Creatures actually are alive, at least according to many definitions of life. Still, how many other game characters can claim to have that many players caring that much about the character's mental and physical health?
Not even film, or novels can claim that. Artificial life only works in software, and thus has the potential to take games to an emotional plateau way beyond what any other media could possibly produce. If only we research it more, that is.
In any case, I recently stumbled upon an old documentary someone put up on youtube about artificial life.
You can find it in a search for "BBC Horizon: Signs of Life [Artificial Life]".
It's broken into 5 parts.
If you know nothing of what artificial life is about, it gives a pretty decent (if highly outdated) summary of at least some of the basics.
I bring it up though for another reason. It has a large section on Conway's The Game of Life, and it provided an interesting new fact about the "game" that I didn't know about before:
It was non-digitally prototyped!
It seems Conway invented the game using dinner plates on his tiled floor.
However, it wasn't until it was later made as a computer application, therefore fast enough to witness more complex phenomena like the invention of the glider-guns, etc., that the real potential of The Game of Life was seen.
Even so, one should never underestimate the power of dinner plates as a gaming platform, I suppose...
Labels: artificial life, non-digital
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 5:06 PM
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