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This past weekend I took a break from work to head over to check out the 11th annual Animethon at Grant MacEwan Community College. I met up with a couple of friends there, Yuri and Emilio, and we all had a pretty good time. As the biggest nerd in the group I would have to say that I probably enjoyed the show the most, but I'm pretty sure a good time was had by all. While we were there Emilio and I began discussing video games, and first person shooters specifically. Emilio said that he had picked up a copy of Painkiller, and that he had tried the FarCry demo and it was pretty impressive as well. In response to this I decided to download the FarCry demo and see what all the lack of hype was about.
The truth about FarCry is that it's pretty awesome. The graphics are beautiful, the sounds are terrific, the environment is amazing, and the lighting, oh the lighting... FarCry is the type of game that really makes me wonder just how many blockbuster titles the industry can support. This fall there are such an immense number of huge releases that the game industry is expecting to make just slightly more money than has ever been printed in the US. Let's just have a look, shall we? Spider Man 2 was just released, as was Riddick, and Driv3r. Pretty soon we have Half Life 2, Doom 3, GTA: San Andreas, Gran Tourismo 4, Fable, oh... my... sweet... Jesus. Amoung all that even a super sweet high budget, fantastic game is likely to be lost in the shuffle. Games are getting bigger by the second.
Before I actually get to the point of this post I want to expand on some of the amazing things I saw in th FarCry demo. Wide open spaces with very lush jungle terrain, beautiful water effects, realistic shadows, and enemies that work well as a team. Add to that the fact that when enemies are shot they fall quite realistically and then bleed pools of blood that flow well with the terrain and you have a game that makes killing not only fun, but easy on the eyes. Now, I know that I mention game violence a lot, but I'm going to do it again, because it's a topic that I think is worth examining from many angles.
Here we go. If I were to walk over to my local pet store and buy myself a mouse and then run home, stuff it in a tiny sack, and beat it into a bloody mess with a tack hammer, people would probably think I'm sick. In fact, if anyone found out about it I could be charged with cruelty to animals. Over a mouse. How about if I did that with an ant? Although most people might think I'm a little strange, they wouldn't think I was a monster if I took pleasure in the killing of an ant. In fact most people who are scared of insects take pleasure in killing wasps, bees, ants, and spiders every day.
Right now, most AI opponents in games aren't really much more intellgent than ants. It's okay to snuff them out because they are put there for exactly that purpose. But games are evolving quickly. Every enemy placed into a game is given a certain amount of desire for self preservation, even if it's just to shoot at the player to avoid being killed. My question is this, how long before the villains in our games are smarter than a mouse? How long before they want to live more than a mouse? More and more that desire to stay alive is going to continue to evolve, maybe until we have enemies that are genuinely afraid when you step into the room with that shotgun.
It's pretty easy to argue that you aren't really killing the villain permanently, that if you wanted that villain could be reborn by simply starting the game over. But millions of people around the world believe in reincarnation, and that doesn't mean it's okay for me to kill them. You could also say that a computer generated enemy has no sense of self, and so nothing is lost in their destruction. And yet we agonize over pulling the plug on a relative who has been brain dead for weeks, lying in a coma. Maybe it's okay to turn off the programs that we have running because we created them, but then again, with cloning being a reality does that make it alright to turn off a clone? At what point does it become unethical to terminate an intelligent process?
Though these sorts of questions seem like they are a long way off, I think that they are questions we need to start looking for the answers to.
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