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Robert Zubek Profile picture
@rzubek
Jun 12, 2020 • 3 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
Ouch that #TLOU2 review in Polygon.

But yeah, forcing the player into taking actions they don't want to take, and then making them feel bad about being complicit, feels like such a cheap trick.

And I'm *not* picking on TLOU specifically... 1/

polygon.com/reviews/2020/6… Image
It's a weird dynamic that AAA action games have with their players: they demand such complete submission from the player, in order to progress through the game.

The player might be a superhero, but if the game tells them to go somewhere and do something, they have no choice.
2/
So paradoxically, to enjoy those "morally complex" action games you have to desensitize yourself to the moral elements of the story.

Because you know you're never *actually* in control of the story. You're always Job, being set up and toyed with.

3/3 Image

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More from @rzubek

Robert Zubek Profile picture
Feb 12, 2023
A propos of this conversation from yesterday:


Here's a super quick sketch of how ChatGPT could be merged with an in-game conversation director, basically working as a human-language interface to the underlying system.

Some screenshots with commentary: 🧵
Imagine we had external conversation state machine which drives everything.

It would tell the LLM exactly what to say (but not how to say it), and use it as a kind of "translator" from unconstrained nat lang to specific speech acts like "i want to buy x".

For example:
(Intriguingly the system hallucinated an intent, but we'll roll with it.)

The state machine would move to the next state, tells the LLM what to say, and asks it to parse out communicative intent:
Read 15 tweets
Robert Zubek Profile picture
Feb 11, 2023
Amusingly, "AI for talking to NPCs inside video games by typing" was literally the topic of my PhD dissertation.

One of the main take-aways was that conversation flow *must* be highly authored, for design and experience purposes.

Just using an ML chatbot is going to... 1/
Just using an ML chatbot is going to lead to a couple of problems that players will notice.

1. NPCs need to reflect game state. ChatGPT doesn't know anything about the inner workings of your game!

2. NPCs need to be able to change game state. If you buy a sword... 2/
If you buy a sword, that needs to show up in your inventory, and the corresponding amount of gold needs to be subtracted. Again, not something ChatGPT can do.

3. NPC conversation needs episodic memory. If you insulted the NPC's mother they should remember it next time around. 3/
Read 5 tweets
Robert Zubek Profile picture
Jan 27, 2021
A lot has been written today about the $GME pump on /r/WallStreetBets from a financial angle.

But I think there's another angle - this it also works as a *multiplayer game* and one with an interesting design.

Don't believe me? Let's look at it structurally!

1/
WSB pump of $GME exhibits a number of gamelike elements:
1. resource mechanics
2. multiplayer social mechanics
3. progression mechanics
4. multi-system interactions
5. prediction complexity, and
6. a powerful player fantasy to tie them together

2/
1. Just by itself, the stock market is an engrossing game (for those who can afford the time and money). It's got a variety of simple resource mechanics (buy / sell stocks), more complex mechanics (buy / sell options), super complex mechanics (would you like some futures?) ... 3/
Read 23 tweets
Robert Zubek Profile picture
Dec 6, 2020
@MatthewGuz Hi both @MatthewGuz and @onlinealchemist! So just to continue our previous conversation, here's a bit more worked out thread - curious what you'll think!

And I'll number replies so it's easier to deal with, given Twitter's terrible threading 1/

@MatthewGuz @onlinealchemist (And first of all, terribly sorry if I came off as a bit curt in the last thread! I was just trying to reply quickly on a weekend morning, which was probably a tactical error. ;) And then lack of threading made it into a hash.) 2/
@MatthewGuz @onlinealchemist So here's a TLDR: what I think makes games unique is not that players have different experiences (that's trivially shared with other media as you mentioned), but that players have aesthetic experiences of their own agency in the artificial world. 3/
Read 15 tweets
Robert Zubek Profile picture
Sep 20, 2020
These tweets about Twitter photo cropping have been going around:



So I started looking into how it works. It's interesting and a good example of how AI tech can produce results that look biased, even when the building blocks don't seem to be. Thread! 1/
We know how it works, because Twitter fortunately published the implementation details here:

blog.twitter.com/engineering/en…

(It's from 2018, but I'm assuming it's still in operation.)

The algo is actually refreshingly simple - and interesting.

2/
The photo cropping algo doesn't look at faces, etc. It has no idea what it's looking at. (Obviously ;) )

Rather, it's trying to predict what are the "interesting" parts of a photo, that a human might want to look at & focus on those.

So - how does it know what's interesting? 3/
Read 19 tweets
Robert Zubek Profile picture
Aug 31, 2020
Doctorow's monograph response to Zuboff's "Age of Surveillance Capitalism" is making the rounds again.

AoSC is easily one of the best books of the past decade, so I figured I would check out his commentary.

It's worth spending time on, *but*...
1/
... first off: as a *rebuttal*, as such, it's not quite there. The essay takes many of the points previously made by Zuboff and integrates them into its own argument, which is great because they're good points, except it also wants to position itself as a rebuttal. :)

2/
But ignoring the positioning vis-a-vis AoSC, it works great as a standalone piece.

His focus is on monopolies specifically, and how monopoly status is a force multiplier for abuse of surveillance - it's a great observation that needs to be a part of the discussion.

3/
Read 6 tweets

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