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Video game thread.
Got sucked into a week-long Space Haven rabbit hole - a spaceship survival / colony sim game that had been in early access forever and is now out. I'm sure there are dozens like it. You start with 3-4 crew, build a ship, try not to die .. profit? Comes with a moderate depth of systems + some "The Sims" elements, like the crew forming friendships/relationships, and having personality traits. e.g. one of mine has "antisocial", which gives a passive -5 mood condition "did something I dislike" every time another crew member tries to socialize with her, which is often on a tiny cramped ship, especially when another has the "comedian" background and "charming" trait.
Anyway, turns out surviving in space is really hard: too much work to be done, not enough hands to do it. My tiny crew of 3 was living hand to mouth with almost no time to do anything beyond basic needs. After a month of this, the shiny "enslavement facility" upgrade in the tech tree was looking real tempting. Fine. I guess we're slavers now.
Using the element of surprise, we picked a neutral faction, the galactic military, bribed them with the last of our money and nearly the last of our fuel until they were friendly enough to let us board their prison ship. The initial plan was to steal some prisoners, but it turns out you can use drugs on allied NPCs without turning them hostile. Probably an oversight. We come back with a load of sedatives, drug all the guards, pick them up one by one, and shuttle them back to our ship, locking each in a separate room to be dealt with later so that we can deal with each 3v1 when they wake up.
Once we've abducted as many as we can fit, we spool up the hyperdrives and jump systems. The game informs me this is "kidnapping" and will turn the military hostile. No problem. Expected. I locked them all in separate rooms for that reason. Unexpected: for some reason jumping systems resets everything, meaning the guards all wake up and, crucially, the doors on the ship all unlock, letting them group up. What follows is a chaotic and destructive ~30v3 fighting retreat which leaves our injured crew locked (manually) on the bridge, and 23 surviving angry guards on the other side of the door. To solve this problem, we open the airlock vents, causing a massive amount of damage to the interior of the ship, but dropping O2 low enough that the guards pass out. We quickly close the airlocks, don spacesuits, take the guards prisoner and put the slave collars on.
That's the start of our problems. We now have 23 nearly-dead slaves, no money, little fuel, on a ship with most of its critical systems broken. We need to, in rough order of priority: repair/build more oxygen generators to support that many people, find a source of energy cells (each slave collar runs on a specific type of battery that needs to be crafted with electronics + power), heal the slaves and make sure they rest enough so that they don't die, expand the ship and get a farming operation running so that we don't run out of food given the expanded headcount, and source raw materials to support all that - this, in an already very resource-starved survival game, and having just made enemies of a major well-armed faction.
The adventures that follow are pure emergent gameplay, riding the tiger of our slave enterprise, evading the space cops, and trying to turn enough of a profit to keep it all together. Would recommend if you have time to burn and like this sort of thing.
I'm about 8 hours into Detroit: Become Human, a sort of choose-your-own-adventure game from 2018 about near-future Detroit where AI-based androids have become normalized in society, leading to mass unemployment and such. I have been shocked (though I shouldn't have been*) by just how bad the writing and world-building are, given the generally positive reception it got.
There was basically no attempt at thinking through the implications of how a world where near-human-indistinguishable androids are common would work. E.g. one of the 3 player characters is a detective android, who creates resentment among the human detectives for taking their jobs, instead of using them as force multipliers to solve/prevent more crimes. There's also no signs of android police being deployed en masse as street-level police thanks to their greater speed, strength, accuracy, and expendability. Other issues include things like each android model being built with the same face and specialty for that model, when, with computers, it should be easy to mix-and-match (assuming each specialty requires so much data that the android only has enough data storage space for a single specialty). They also lack any sort of "black box" and must be interrogated as witnesses, and their memory is gone when they "die."
Plot points strike me as nonsensical as well, including the use of a local TV station to announce a revolution well before anyone has even conquered a single block, much less the entirety of Detroit, and even less the entire United States and the world, or a human androids-owner just standing there and yelling at them while they rebel and tear him limb from limb. There's also a clear attempt throughout the game to depict the androids as a sort of "second class citizen human," but no effort was made to depict the androids as capable of having qualia, and so the whole thing just feels like playing make-believe with dolls. This came out 2 years after the TV show Westworld at least made a valiant effort at depicting androids as having qualities deserving of empathy, and this game didn't even go that far.
I'd give it a solid 2/10 so far. Solid, because the graphics, level design, and voice acting are quite good, the former especially for a game that's old enough to be in 3rd grade. I'd be curious how a modern remake, using modern AI tech as the guide for how future androids will make decisions, would look. It may be one of the last major AI-focused fictional media before the recent beginning of the age of AI in 2022.
* I shouldn't have been surprised, because the only other Quantic Dream game I played was also awful in terms of writing. This was Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit, a sort of urban fantasy mystery game that had an absolute banger opening scene (your player character, in a trance, murders a man in a diner bathroom, and then awakens to give you control to figure out how to get out of there without alerting the cop eating at the diner) followed by a good first 1/3, a mediocre middle 1/3, and god-awful final 1/3.
I played it shortly after launch. I think I only played the first third, which was boring enough to make me expect it could only go downhill from there.
I was also surprised by the mostly positive feedback the game received from players. The main sticking point for me was something you bring up: Why the f should we assume that these robots have a subjective human-like experience of being alive? This is supposed to be taken for granted in the game, but the qualia is never even attempted to be established. They look almost human - so they must be human inside their digital cpus? Really?
We play the game from their perspective. This is literally the necessary and sufficient condition to establish qualia, I think.
This is a bizarre perspective. That the medium in which a work of fiction is presented actually influences the facts about the fictional world is something I've never encountered and something that seems completely wrong. Controlling a video game character (or "character" or "object,") established that the person dictating the actions of the character has qualia, not that the character within the world does.
Even if we were to posit that it did work that way, this doesn't get around the problem that the game is filled with NPC androids who are treated by the game as if they have qualia. NPCs, obviously by definition, have no human controlling them, and so they fail to meet this sufficent and necessary criterion for having qualia. Thus, it would make no sense for the game to present them as having them, and likewise for the in-universe characters to do so. Likewise, NPC humans - the fleshy kind - lack a human controlling them, and thus they fail to meet this criterion. Yet the game presents them as having qualia deserving of empathy, and in-universe characters treat them as if they do.
I don't think this is a good criterion for this particular thing.
I mean, I don't know of any way to hard-prove consciousness other than experiencing it. That's the problem. We assume other people have it either because of religious dogma or by induction from each of us having it and other humans looking similar enough to us. This can extend to the NPC androids.
I don't think humans looking similar to ourselves is why we believe they have qualia. For instance, I don't believe that a wax statue has qualia, nor do I believe that a cardboard cutout of Harry Potter has qualia. I think there's something about the actual physical (biological) similarity to ourselves, not merely the appearance, that make us believe that other humans have qualia. Whether or not androids are sufficiently similar to us to justify such a belief is an interesting question that has been talked about in scifi at least since Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick, and I'd guess even earlier, and the only thing we know so far is that no one knows the correct answer.
You haven't explained the actual sufficient and necessary criterion you outlined, though. Could you explain the reasoning for why "being controlled by the player" makes sense as the one single criterion for a fictional character having qualia within their fictional universe? Would you say that, any game like a Walking Dead or Mass Effect where the in-universe characters and sometimes the game tone itself presents life-or-death decisions about NPCs as important is making no sense, since these NPCs definitionally have no human controller and thus no qualia to lose?
When I was talking about appearance I was implying also the biological similarity.
Within the fictional universe, no one but any given android can know for sure that this android has qualia. Just how a human can only know that about themselves. If you're wondering why others in-universe believe an android has qualia, I believe "anthropomorphization" is sufficient as an explanation. Some people think ChatGPT has qualia in real life. And it's not like everyone in-universe believes it, either - have you missed the entire status quo that assumes androids aren't people?
As for why the player should believe an android has qualia, that's what my argument is for. We see through its eyes and witness it breaking through its programming. That's the most evidence we could possibly get. If it's not sufficient for you, nothing is.
I'm not wondering why this, because I do find "anthropomorphization" sufficient. It's a separate criticism I have of the game, that this explanation isn't properly told or explored. It's a very minor criticism, though, since it can largely be just accepted as part of the premise. Though this, too, I thought was poorly done in terms of world building and making believable types of people in terms of their reactions to androids that appear nigh indistinguishable from humans even in behavior.
I'm wondering why the player should believe that all androids have qualia. I don't see how seeing through something's eyes and having it break through the programming is such definitive evidence of the in-universe android having qualia. Seeing through something's eyes merely tells us something about where the virtual camera is. The virtual camera is not actually something that's part of the world and reflects artistic decisions rather than some underlying reality about the world. Though it certainly can indicate that the director wants us to feel that we're experiencing the same things as some conscious being within the world.
Breaking through its programming is actually evidence, though that in itself isn't sufficient, as the discussions about modern AI show. It at least shows some level of free will and agency, and notably this is one major thing that Westworld leaned on to make its valiant effort to make the case that these androids have qualia. It wasn't good enough, because, as you've stated before, nothing is or could be (the problem of solipsism, perhaps). But the effort still counted for something enough to make the idea that these androids had qualia somewhat understandable. And even then, Westworld was reserved enough not to push into our faces sob stories about raped/tortured androids as if it expected us to automatically believe there was something to sympathize with (at least until season 2, which was largely a dumpster fire).
D:BH made no such effort, and it has been not at all reserved. It could have explored how the Deviants' behaviors could indicate a sort of qualia and presented a sort of believable version of events where every android was conscious but only Deviants had free will, or if normal androids lacked consciousness but Deviants gained it through some mysterious process. Or it could have gone full Star Wars and just made androids being conscious as just a premise of the story. But it didn't do any of these things (at least in my first 8 hours, which is enough), and the storytelling just appears as if the presence of Deviants is, in itself, enough to just convince the player that androids are all in a (ironically enough) I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream situation.
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Well, not really. Not anymore than how R2D2 in Star Wars acting idiosyncratically and agentically makes all the robots in that universe have qualia.
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My half-baked hypothesis is that some writers just don't have empathy for other humans or consider them as conscious beings that have inner experience similar to themselves; they only behave like they do because that's the "rules of society." As such, they think that, if they set up a new fictional world where androids appear as humans, then the same "rules of society" must apply to them also.
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