Abstract
This article offers a case study of a game designed to encourage its players to reflect on the implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by considering the impact that advancements in AI might have on them personally or on the world more broadly. Alive is a conversation simulator in the vein of the Lifeline series of games, where the player responds to messages from a newly created AI in a manner simulating the rhythm of a conversation vis phone texts. Player decisions directly influence how the AI develops over time and the values it chooses to adopt. Throughout the narrative, the game explores a variety of topics relevant to the creation of AI, such as the potential differences between how an AI and a human would view the world, the capacity of an AI to evolve or change over time, and the risks inherent in the creation of a self-aware AI. In this article, I describe the development of a working prototype of my game, made freely available to accompany this piece. After first establishing the basic principles of conversation simulators based on an analysis of existing examples, I chronicle the design decisions I made and offer my rationale for them. I also discuss the difficulties I encountered in covering this topic and propose what I see as helpful design takeaways for creating other games in a similar vein. It is my hope that this article provides practical tools to scholars and designers interested in both creating and interrogating complex topics such as AI through games.
Highlights
By following these strategies, designers can better achieve feelings of empathy and encourage critical reflection
By relying on a style of game similar to the Lifeline series that makes the dialogue feel more like an ongoing conversation, players become perhaps even more invested in the narrative experience than they would in a traditional interactive narrative
This, in turn, makes it more likely that the player will develop a sense of empathy and invest the energy necessary for critical reflection
Summary
On December 19, 2018, DeepMind’s AlphaStar became the first artificial intelligence (AI) to defeat a top-level StarCraft II professional player (AlphaStar Team 2019). Games like StarCraft II are often useful for AI development due to the challenges inherent in the complexity of their decisionmaking process In this case, such challenges included the need to interpret imperfect information and the need to make numerous decisions simultaneously in real time (AlphaStar Team 2019). Overcoming such obstacles only serves to make AlphaStar’s accomplishment all the more impressive. In order to play another game, even another real-time strategy game, the AI would need to be retrained to apply its knowledge to that particular domain These various limitations demonstrate the degree to which the success of AI remains largely dependent on the appropriate management of its human handlers. As Leetaru (2019) says, “for all its success, AlphaStar reminds us that the greatest advances in AI come not from AI itself, but from humans [...] discovering new ways of representing the world” (n.p.)
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