EPT![[image loading]](http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v485/thereisnosaurus/makeagamelogo.jpg)
In this edition of Make a Game of That we sidestep the serious side of games and take a plunge into one of videogaming's most enduring successes: creepy and super awesome artificial intelligences
Videogames aren't usually praised for their fleshed out characters, interesting plots and philosophical depth, and rightly so. Most games are about as aesthetically deep as a kiddy pool and just as dangerous to dive into. But one interesting side effect that has arisen from the programmer-centric world of the videogame industry is a fascination with artificial intelligence and computers that has led to some of the most memorable characters of that type not just in gaming, but in fictional history.
My first introduction to the world of freaky AI shit was the titular goddamned glitches of the game Starsiege, the precursor to the tribes series and one of the greatest mech games ever made. If any of you haven't played it, I encourage you to give it a try if you can find it and get it working. Really top knotch story, design and music for the period. I totally got hooked crunching over red mars wastelands to this sort of music.
Anyhow, the 'glitches' was a slang term for the AI enemies in the game, cybrids. They had a really awesome, fleshed out (giggle) power structure and they talked like robots actually would talk to each other, cutting out all the fluffy descriptions. The game was notable for having one of the snappiest opening twenty seconds of intro I've encountered, which you can watch on the tubez:
Just for a bit of background, the use of a children's rhyme going into that brutal finishing line is inspired. Children's rhymes have often had rather gruesome origins (ring around the rosie is thought to be an allegory for the black plague- we all fall down is literally 'everybody dies', check out the ending for the bells of saint clemens and don't even get me started on humpty-dumpty), so it really sets the mood for a hell of a game.
This has been followed by a procession of code entities that make Skynet and Hal want to go and cry in the corner.
Bungie's mad AI's of the Marathon series were perhaps only equaled by their even madder AI's in the Halo series. Who can forget the cheerfully psychopathic monitor and Cortana's growing god-girlfriend-worship complex when compared to the mono-dimensional human inhabitants of the series. There's even the Marathon throwback story between the forerunner supercomputers if you're not wiered out enough already
Half-life's Dog got a lot of love from fans as a robot AI done right, its cyberpunk mix body expressing not-quite-but-almost human emotion beautifully
Deus-ex plumbed the asimovian depths between human and artificial intelligences with almost more skill than the master of robots himself
And perhaps most notable of all, the two scariest (pseudo)women in my life and the ultimate please-god-do-not-ship-this pair in gaming, Glados X Shodan. Spoilers ho, by the way. If you ever wondered where they got the idea for Gladdy's voice, now you know.
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Yo, Andrew, imma gonna let you finish, but Shodan had the best reveal of all time, OF ALL TIME
I'm sure people will chip in with the many bots and botesses I have failed to mention. There really are too many to count, from robo in Chronotrigger to HK-47 in KotoR to the chip personas of Hostile Waters (yet another awesome oldschool game, though possibly only because it included tom baker)
It's rather interesting to see the trend. Where other characters are typically boring, bit players, when man meets machine in video games, the results are more often than not spectacular, compelling and powerful. We can learn from that.
