Reality Crowd

A new film premiering at the South By South West (SXSW) Film Festival in Austin this March will explore virtual worlds and the real people who inhabit them. Second Skin explores several different Massively Multiplayer online games (such as World of Warcraft and Everquest) as well as virtual spaces such as Second Life. As these worlds become more and more realistic people are choosing to spend more time in them than in the “real” world. The film examines this phenomenon and what it means for society at large. The questions asked in the film will only become more and more important as our technology advances and the line between real and unreal, virtual and reality becomes increasingly blurred.

The filmmakers sum up the movie nicely on their site www.secondskinfilm.com

Second Skin takes an intimate look at computer gamers whose lives have been transformed by the emerging genre of Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs). World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Everquest allow millions of users to simultaneously interact in virtual spaces. Second Skin introduces us to couples who have fallen in love without meeting, disabled players who have found new purpose, addicts, Chinese gold-farming sweatshop workers, wealthy online entrepreneurs and legendary guild leaders - all living in a world that doesn’t quite exist.

and here is the trailer for the film:

Links:

Second Skin Site
Boing Boing Story
BBC Story
Second Skin Blog

Researchers have successfully taught a computer AI system to play the game Ms Pac Man using evolving rule sets to maximize the success rate. Simply put, the computer plays the game with a set of rules to follow (ie - run away from ghosts, eat ghosts when possible, don’t backtrack, etc) and then prioritizes those rules based on success or failure in the game. After playing several times the computer learns what rules are most effective at achieving the highest score in the game. AI programs using this method were found to be much more effective at coming up with successful strategies than ones where programmers would try to “hand craft” a winning strategy.

While the computer AI eventually developed a strategy that was better than it’s human counterparts, the researchers noted that certain human strategies never developed in the AI:

While the AI agents showed they could hold their own against human players, the researchers noticed that humans sometimes used different tactics. For example, humans sometimes tried to lure the ghosts close to Ms. Pac-Man so that they would all be close by before making them edible, allowing Ms. Pac-Man to quickly eat them. The researchers noted that this strategy didn’t evolve in the AI experiments. Humans also calculated the time remaining in the period for eating ghosts, as well as approximate the future positions of ghosts - both abilities that the AI agents did not demonstrate.

Link to original story on Robot World News
Link to the Boing Boing article about the study

Read on for some videos of robots that have been taught to play games

Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes even the virtual reality of video games can cause us to question what exactly reality is. In a video game world you are presented with a character or avatar to move around in a virtual space. Rules are defined and “winning” is determined by completing a certain predetermined set of actions. In the original Super Mario Brothers game for the Nintendo you accepted the rules that you only existed in two dimensional space and jumping on top of various creatures was the best way to stay alive.

Anyone who purchased the Game Genie soon found out that these rules in the virtual world were alterable. You could make yourself jump higher and become invincible. But that was just the beginning… all sorts of weird effects were possible just by playing around with the codes a bit.

Well, in this video (by way of boing boing), Japanese hackers have changed the rules for the game even more. In place of a controller, a ghostly hand moves Mario along. Then suddenly there is not one, but a sea of Marios struggling to make it to the end of the level. This drastic shift in reality is rare in the “real” world, but happens all the time in the virtual one.

Got another example of a re-imagined game being played in a totally different way? Post it in the comments!