Westworld is a cautionary tale about photorealism and video game murder

A theme park without consequences isn’t so farfetched

by Nick Statt@nickstatt Nov 3, 2016 via The Verge

But it seems Sizemore is on the losing side of this argument. Why stand in the way of technological progress when it could mean truly sentient androids, lacking basic human rights, and controllable by code that allows humans to play god?

Like many of Westworld’s early themes and motifs, this debate has its parallel in the video game industry. Sizemore’s argument against realism is increasingly unpopular in gaming circles, as the steady march toward graphical fidelity and artificial intelligence lets us interact with lifelike virtual representations of people - mostly in violent ways. Sizemore wonders whether the park is trying too hard to offer a perfect simulation of reality, instead of an escape from it. Similarly, game critics and other industry figures are wondering whether we truly need to feel like we’re hurting or killing real people in games - and if so, why.

In Westworld, guests are invited to indulge in violent and sexual fantasies, using the regressive frontier backdrop to explore their wildest, darkest desires. William, a character introduced in episode two, chooses to see the park and its robots as an opportunity to show his moral fibre. Others, like William’s companion Logan and the mythic Man in Black, see Westworld as an invitation to be vile and malicious. Those men exercise the freedom of a world without consequences to test the limits of depravity.

That’s true in games, too. If we know something is fake — just a game, so to speak - we can act out without feeling any of the shame or guilt we’d typically associate with morally reprehensible activities. It’s why we can go on murdering sprees in careful re-creations of American cities in Grand Theft Auto without feeling like something is wrong with us. Those people on the screen are just pixels. They’re poor simulations of the real thing, guided by intricate physics systems and complex code, but lacking the realism required to provoke empathy. And because it’s an open world with no consequences, our actions don’t necessarily reflect our capacity for violence - or our desire for it.

That situation may be temporary. As games continue to approach photorealism, and as higher-quality virtual reality and sophisticated artificial intelligence become more common, the debate will only get murkier. The “It’s just a game!” defence won’t hold as much water when digital characters look and feel so lifelike that it’s impossible to tell them from the real thing, just as it’s impossible to know who on Westworld may secretly be an android. In a VR world, when you actually pull a trigger or swing a weapon, the feeling of harming real, human victims may only intensify.

HBO

Arguing against these advancements feels like an uphill battle

HBO

Rarely do games try to definitively stand for something

In the debut episode of HBO’s Westworld, narrative director Lee Sizemore makes a case that the futuristic theme park’s team should stop working toward increasingly lifelike androids. “Does anyone truly want that?” he asks. “Do you really want to think that your husband is fucking that beautiful girl? Or that you really just shot someone? This place works because the guests know the hosts aren’t real.”

Games let us act without consequences

On the other side of the debate are games that embrace the art form’s reliance on purposefully non-real imagery. Think of indie developers who use pixel art for aesthetic effect or the cartoony nature of Nintendo’s Mario and Zelda franchises. These are games that do not attempt to replicate real life or pass for Hollywood cinema. But then, they’re also marketed in part to children, and companies like Nintendo tend not to take risks when it comes to incorporating adult content.

But there are games that communicate adult themes through violence and graphic imagery without shooting for photorealism. The ultra-violent title Hotline Miami, from two-person indie team Dennaton Games, rewards players for horrific murder sprees, with letter grades at the end of each stage judging the eloquence and speed of the carnage. Instead of high-def imagery in a first-person viewpoint, the game uses a top-down view reminiscent of ‘80s games, with retro and pixelated graphics and a pulsing synth-heavy soundtrack. The game glorifies violence through rewards and uses its lack of realism as a shield. Yet it also counterweights the theme with subtle narrative threads that paint its characters as mentally unstable. It implies that you, the player, might be burying or obscuring similar traits behind the same excuses.

It’s a good example of how a game can communicate controversial and high-level ideas while retaining the escapist qualities that make it fun. (Whether it succeeds at both is more the realm of game criticism.) Hotline Miami doesn’t have to paint its on-screen happenings with the same level of realism as GTA, Hitman, or Call of Duty, all games that simulate murder with frightening fidelity.

This same argument plays out in cinema in a slightly different way. The film industry is currently struggling to understand why high-frame-rate movies repel viewers when they’re supposed to render scenes more accurately than traditional-frame-rate films. They’ve been likened to taped recordings of a stage play, with obviously fake props and easy-to-see makeup. There are more pixels per frame and more frames per second, but in most cases, viewers describe the HFR experience as “too real,” or too distracting. As Daniel Engber says in Slate, regarding the upcoming 120fps Ang Lee film Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, HFR doesn’t help us escape into a world, it highlights that world’s lack of reality. It breaks the illusion.

“So a movie shot in HFR suffers from its likeness to less vaunted forms of entertainment: soap operas, sporting events, video games,” Engber writes. “For all its clarity and definition, high-frame-rate cinema comes off as déclassé. In the end, what’s most troubling about HFR is not the way it looks - I mean, come on, it looks fantastic - but what that look connotes. And Billy Lynn connotes, more than anything else, a high-end game.” Games, after all, run smoother and perform better at 60 fps. The faster the game runs, the smoother motion looks on-screen, and the more immediate the connection between your action and its on-screen counterpart.

The argument against video game photorealism and HFR cinema can be linked back to the problem of the uncanny valley. The phrase, coined by the robotics community in the 1970s, describes a level of human likeness in a 3D model or robot that elicits revulsion instead of human empathy. 

As androids or computer-generated characters become more lifelike, they provoke stronger empathy responses in viewers. Think Pixar characters, or high-res video game characters crafted using motion-capture techniques. But at a certain level, the gap between the real and the non-real becomes creepy. Looking at the Repliee Q2 humanoid robot, or the ill-fated film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, it’s easy to see how something can look lifelike, yet profoundly wrong.

Westworld’s androids have made it to the far side of the uncanny valley. That’s because they’re played by real human actors. Early Westworld bots - like “Old Bill,” seen talking to the park’s creative director, Dr Robert Ford, in the opening episode — looked noticeably fake, like animatronic Disneyland props. Guests might not have gotten the same thrill from shooting one down in a gunfight. And they certainly couldn’t have enjoyed all the sexual fantasies the park advertises. But it appears Dr Ford (played by Anthony Hopkins) doesn’t believe in a sweet spot. His intentions are unknown, and his moral convictions are murky, but the show establishes early on that he doesn’t acknowledge his creations as anything but technology. That leaves the door open to forward progress, regardless of what guests or Sizemore might actually prefer.

For me, this Westworld parallel evokes the post-apocalyptic game The Last of Us, which came out in 2013, and featured some of the most sophisticated enemies AI the industry had ever seen. The game puts you in the shoes of Joel, an older man looking after a teenage girl named Ellie, who possesses a possible path toward a cure for the zombie outbreak that devastated society. As Joel, you’re able to commit all sorts of gruesome acts, from clubbing scavengers with lead pipes and nail-equipped 2-by-4’s to using molotov cocktails on other survivors.

In some situations, the enemies in The Last Of Us beg for their lives when cornered, disarmed, or beaten down. Some ask if you can work something out, or if you’d look the other way and let them live. But the game encourages players to murder these people. If you let them live, chances are they’ll revert back to aggressive mode and attack you again. Killing them also lets you take their weapon-making supplies, and you’ll want the advantage going forward.

Beyond this unsettling AI, The Last of Us was also one of the most realistic-looking games for the PlayStation 3 when it was released, late in the console’s life cycle. I still remember those brutal execution sequences, and even now, I’m uncomfortable with the notion of a game with enemies that plead for mercy in such a disturbingly real way.

But that conceit did wonders to set the title’s ultra-serious tone. It also felt like the dawn of a new age, when pixels on a screen took on a new, morally ambiguous awareness. In Westworld, the androids are prevented from realizing that they aren’t human, just as the most realistic video games tend not to break the fourth wall. The simulations are real enough to bleed, feel pain, and beg for their lives when cornered. Yet by design, they’re kept from realizing their futile fate as playthings.

Violence and photorealism are hallmarks of the industry. And still, for any given half-dozen forgettable shooter titles, there’s one rare gem that uses technical advancements to craft a real masterpiece. But it’s still worth asking what viewers, consumers, and players prefer. How many people actually want an 8K television in their home, or are willing to pay $25 to see a film in 120 fps? On the more extreme ends of the spectrum, who would actually buy a VR serial-killer simulator, or a game with photorealistic torture, or one featuring an interactive version of the kind of sexual violence highbrow television like Game of Thrones is currently peddling?

As far as we can tell, there is no ceiling on a game’s graphical fidelity. Years from now, we will undoubtedly have experiences, both on TV screens and likely in VR, that may look and feel no different from the real world. Sophisticated AI could ensure that, like Westworld’s bots, these characters speak, react, and act out scenarios just as humans would, down to the tiniest details.

“This place works because the guests know the hosts aren’t real,” Sizemore says. But what happens to us morally when we don’t know that? It’s one of Westworld’s more profound questions, and co-creator Jonathan Nolan has revealed in the past that his show has no intentions of answering it, at least not in full. “I don’t think the show is really teaching anything,” Nolan said at a press roundtable prior to the premiere. Instead, he and fellow showrunner Lisa Joy want to shed light on issues in gaming and provoke their audience as much as possible.

In that, we have yet another game industry parallel. Rarely do video games try to definitively stand for something, to convey a message that players are too vile, violent, or capable of evil. Yet in games, shallow violence is how we most often interact with our virtual counterparts, whether they’re humans across the country, or AI guided by code. It’s the medium’s single biggest source of contradiction. Unlike Westworld, violent games rarely, if ever, help us “live without limits” or “discover who we really are.” They mostly just redefine what can be considered fun - shooting people in the face, hitting pedestrians with cars - and how we spend our time.

Perhaps as games look and feel more real, and their inhabitants become more lifelike, technology can expand the horizons of what games can communicate and convey. There will always be murder simulators, war games, and the zombie apocalypse. But perhaps violence won’t entirely define games as an art form in the future.

Because if Westworld succeeds at anything right now, it’s as a cautionary tale. “How different are we really from these theme-park guests?” it asks. Right now, not very much at all.

How the press is distorting the Breivik trial to make video games central to the narrative

By Cory Doctorow at 8:00 am Friday, Apr 20

On Rock, Paper, Shotgun, John Walker tears into the mainstream press's treatment of mass-murderer Anders Breivik's video-game habits. Breivik's gaming has been prominently mentioned in press accounts, and the Norwegian prosecutor also called attention to it. Breivik himself described his World of Warcraft sessions as a "martyrdom gift," a "sabbatical year," and stated that he played to unwind after a difficult stretch of work in planning his atrocities and writing his 800,000 word manifesto.

Later, Breivik talks about using Modern Warfare to prepare for his massacre, calling it "a simple war simulator." But as Walker points out, Breivik's description of what he did with the game in order to train for his assault doesn't actually jibe with the way that the game works -- Breivik describes doing things that the game doesn't do. Walker points out that most of Breivik's statements about his motives and inspiration are treated skeptically by the press and prosecutors, but where Breivik describes using games to prepare for slaughter, his statements aren't just taken at face value, they are enthusiastically amplified and elaborated.

Walker shows that this reporting slant is widespread, across different news entities with different audiences, from CNN to The Irish Times to Al Arabia News. It seems like the press has already made up its mind about what role games play in social violence, and will cherry pick and even distort facts to support that narrative.

That’s not what Modern Warfare is, or lets you do. The scripted corridors, nor the multiplayer, offer no useful practice for any such actions, and don’t allow you to simulate practising killing policemen in the manner Breivik describes. There is of course the infamous No Russian airport level, in which you play as an undercover agent with terrorists, and are able to shoot (or not shoot) civilians and policemen, but I think it’s unreasonable to suggest that it offers what Breivik claims. Of course there are many other shooters out that that would let you create your own specific scenarios, attempt to rehearse escaping from armed forces, and so on. But Breivik, in keeping with much else of his rhetoric, doesn’t make much sense here. It is very unfortunate that while a sceptical press has been enjoying picking over his comments about being a member of the Knights Templar, and disproving them, they see no need to question his remarks on using Call Of Duty as a simulator for combating armed police in real life. Instead here it’s assumed he’s being honest and clear-headed. It’s also important to note that Breivik’s memoir makes it clear that he only played MW2 after he had entirely planned the attacks, and it was in no way influential on his decision to kill anyone.

The same Times report then explains how Breivik named all his guns, citing El Cid for having done the same for his favourite sword, but oddly doesn’t then condemn the learning of history. Instead, astonishingly, it just reports the names for all the weapons, and doesn’t even mention the possible concern that he was in possession of them. They also don’t mention the enormous detail written in the manifesto about how these guns were legally and illegally acquired, and the enormous amount of time he spent at shooting ranges, practising firing them. Factors that, you would imagine a journalist reporting on how he had trained for his attacks, would think relevant to bring up. But no, instead, only Modern Warfare and World Of Warcraft are mentioned.

Yet again I feel compelled to repeat the refrain: were gaming genuinely a dangerous factor, something that could cause someone to become a murderer, we would want to know about it, and you can damn well believe we’d be reporting on it. What more serious matter could there be for gamers than to be aware of this? This is not about defending gaming, but about defending truth, and truth in reporting. And it is woefully lacking in the so-called respectable papers over this matter. The headline in the Times bears no relation to what is actually said by Breivik. It obfuscates the year he spent playing WoW to give himself a rest with the couple of months he spent with Modern Warfare, and it ignores the huge amount of time he spent actually practising firing real weapons. While taking massive amounts of steroids.

Breivik Testifies About Gaming, Press Ignores The Facts

Sound Librarian

I recently stumbled across this website after seeing Stephan Schultz give a lecture on Why Sound Matters on YouTube [click here to view his lecture in 5 parts]. In it he mentions his project "Sound Librarian" a great, free sound library for schools and amateurs. Below is the text from their Home page. Please check it out, it is an amazing body of work, a great resource and the result of a passion for helping students to learn how to utilise sound.

Welcome to Sound Library a free online audio resource centre with over 17,000 high resolution sound effects. Sound library also includes tutorials, equipment reviews and a blog that spans five years and three continents.

My goal is to create a large online audio resource centre that is beneficial to all users from students and amateur users to casual professional users and large studios with a regular need for high quality material. By offering the entire library free in its download format as well as offering DVD sets for purchase I can provide a high quality resource for students and casual users to access free, while professionals gain instant access to the complete library for well below the average cost of high quality professional sounds.

There are two main motivations for creating Sound Library in this way,

Firstly I am tired of living in a world where people produce poor quality goods and services and still charge top dollar for them. I am proud of the work I do and I will stand by its quality. I will always make all the content I record available at its highest quality free to download. It is completely impossible to protect digital data from piracy anyway so rather than waste time and effort trying to prevent the unpreventable I would rather spend my time creating useful assets that people can use. If someone wants to access digital data without paying for it they will, if however they feel they are getting good service and a good quality product I believe most people will appreciate the value of that service.

The second reason for Sound Library is to create the kind of resource that didn’t exist when I was studying. I want to create a large, useful, high res sound library for students, teachers or anyone interested in audio design.
The site will continue to grow regularly with more sounds (at least 100 a week), new tutorials, gear reviews, journal entries as well as exhibits, video journals and projects logs. I would like to create a community around the site that can be a useful educational resource for audio for film, TV, radio, games and media production.

This is what I do, and this is what I love doing. Sound and music recording, design and creation are my passion and if you are not doing something you are passionate about then you may be wasting your life. I have created Sound Library to give people the tools and some of the knowledge to help them create their own audio material. Sound Library is available for everyone, both amateur and professional to access and use in project production.

Grand Theft Auto no different to Cinderella, rules US Supreme Court

From: AP , June 28, 2011 8:06AM http://www.news.com.au/technology/gaming/grand-theft-auto-no-different-to-cinderella-rules-us-supreme-court/story-e6frfrt9-1226083215803

Think Mortal Kombat is gruesome? The bad queen in Snow White had to wear red hot shoes...

RIPPING out your video game opponents' spine is akin to Hansel and Gretel baking their captor in an oven. That's the message sent to gamers by the US Supreme Court yesterday, after it refused to let California regulate the sale or rental of violent video games to children. California's 2005 law would have prohibited anyone under 18 from buying or renting games that give players the option of "killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being". That means that children would have needed an adult to get games like Postal 2, the first-person shooter by developer Running With Scissors that includes the ability to light unarmed bystanders on fire. However, governments do not have the power to "restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed", the court ruled, despite complaints about graphic violence.

On a 7-2 vote, it upheld a federal appeals court decision to throw out the state's ban on the sale or rental of violent video games to minors, saying the law violated minors' rights under the First Amendment. "No doubt a state possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm," said Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion. "But that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed." The California law would have prohibited the sale or rental of violent games to anyone under 18. Retailers who violated the act would have been fined up to $US1000 for each infraction.

More than 46 million American households have at least one video-game system, with the industry bringing in at least $US18 billion in 2010. Unlike depictions of "sexual conduct", Justice Scalia said there is no tradition in the United States of restricting children's access to depictions of violence, pointing out the violence in the original depiction of many popular children's fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella and Snow White. Hansel and Gretel kill their captor by baking her in an oven, Cinderella's evil stepsisters have their eyes pecked out by doves and the evil queen in Snow White is forced to wear red hot slippers and dance until she is dead, Justice Scalia said. "Certainly the books we give children to read - or read to them when they are younger - contain no shortage of gore," Justice Scalia added.
And there is no proof that violent video games cause harm to children, or any more harm than another other form of entertainment, he said. One doctor "admits that the same effects have been found when children watch cartoons starring Bugs Bunny or the Road Runner or when they play video games like Sonic the Hedgehog that are rated 'E' or even when they 'view a picture of a gun", Justice Scalia said.

But Justice Clarence Thomas, who dissented from the decision along with Justice Stephen Breyer, said the majority read something into the First Amendment that isn't there. "The practices and beliefs of the founding generation establish that "the freedom of speech", as originally understood, does not include a right to speak to minors (or a right of minors to access speech) without going through the minors' parents or guardians," Justice Thomas wrote. Justice Breyer said it made no sense to legally block children's access to pornography yet allow them to buy or rent brutally violent video games. "What sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting the sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?" Justice Breyer said.

Video games, said Justice Scalia's majority opinion, fall into the same category as books, plays and movies as entertainment that "communicates ideas - and even social messages" deserving of First Amendment free-speech protection. And non-obscene speech "cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them", he said. Tim Winter, president of the Parents Television Council, said the decision created a constitutionally authorised "end-run on parental authority". "I wonder what other First Amendment right does a child have against their parents' wishes?" he said. "Does a child now have a constitutional right to bear arms if their parent doesn't want them to buy a gun?"

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/technology/gaming/grand-theft-auto-no-different-to-cinderella-rules-us-supreme-court/story-e6frfrt9-1226083215803#ixzz1QWSVTccX