intrust

If Lara Croft© was franchised out to polities in order to create a pleasurable citizen-government agency interaction, kindly yet resolutely fielding your enquiries over the phone and on websites; if The Sims© were hired to act as your personal cicerone through the maze of state bureaucracy, tax filings, permit submissions, etc. would anyone complain on any other grounds than silliness?

That depends upon just what sort of authority Lara and The Sims¹ would be granted. The automation of citizen-government interaction is a touchy business.

Computer games are not silly – well maybe their story lines and characters are, but their systems architecture is anything but.² A modern computer game is first and foremost an artificial world with spatial and narrative boundaries that can never be transgressed. In the snowboarding game SFX, the ends of the world appear to be defined by laws of gravity. In snowboarding you gain inertia by going down hill and lose it when going up, the principle is familiar to anyone who has ever been on a ski slope. So the ends of the SFX world are never reached, only revealed as uphill and though you can see further your momentum can’t get you there.

In a modern game everything works, that is, every W1 object has properties and rules for interacting with other objects. In SFX there is obviously a great deal of snow and anywhere you run your board over it, the snow will be slightly deformed and show your tracks. The programmers don’t know or care exactly where you wander, they just assign snow certain properties and your snowboard certain properties and when they meet a computation will be made based on them; the type of snow – ice or powder, affects the friction of your board, and the size of your board affects the snow.

In the computer game Grand Theft Auto, you can hit, kick, shoot or run over any man, woman or child you come across. The programmers don’t know who it will please you to injure or kill, so every character must have a script for how they react when being injured or killed in a certain way. Further; windows, walls, lampposts, trash cans, and a host of other objects must be predisposed to act when impacted with any object in any fashion.

“Urban Resolve” is a computer game developed by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, is not all that different from Grand Theft Auto, or Counter Strike. It is about people trying to kill each other. Using massive computing power, it is capable of modelling the behaviour of nearly 1 million entities – soldiers, civilians, cars, tanks etc.

The game support around 30 human players, plus thousands of computer-generated robots who make their own decisions without human input: Some of these robots have very complicated personalities and require a whole Pentium processor on their own. The soldiers and the buildings in the system can be replaced with almost any characters or any physical structures in any type of scene, For instance, police could play Urban Resolve, in order to learn how to deal with riots, or deter hooliganism at football games.³

You cannot easily insert Lara Croft into Urban Resolve, even if her skills would be of a great advantage in the game, because Lara lives in another world, as does the car thief in GTAIII and the street-smart urbanites of the Sims: these worlds despite their graphical similarities are not compatible.

But humans are inserted into Urban Resolve, voluntarily through an interface that is provided for them, or involuntarily via various sensing devices that garner our movements. It is apparent, as computing power increases and the capabilities of realtime computerized sensory perception become more sophisticated, that games such as these can be used not only to simulate combat but to engage in it; not only to simulate business and government, but to transact it.

The key to semi-real – semi-simulated games is in the statistical nature of impersonal interaction. Participating robots are not expected to pass the Turing test, but rather Tim Berners-Lee’s Semantic test; they must do the right thing. And the right thing is statistically determined.

A simulation is in some ways quite like any other dW3 representation that can be used in computation. The difference is that a simulation is dynamic, it reflects historic change over time and attempts to model the future through statistically derived probabilities.

// posted by Greg FitzPatrick @ 12:20