August 2015 – Page 19

Social Robots

August 17, 2015 by Belghast

On Introversion

Every so often I hear something that makes me stop in my tracks and evaluate my own personal feelings about something. For awhile now there have been a chorus of folks warning us about the evils of technology and how we are losing our ability to relate to other human beings by replacing face to face conversation with a combination of text messages and email. This has honestly disturbed me a bit, simply because my life is actually so much richer thanks to the ease of non-face-to-face communication options. You probably don’t think that someone who can rattle out a post every single morning is an introvert, but in truth I am happiest when in my home with only my wife, the cats and the ferrets to keep me company. I suffer from a truck load of anxiety when dealing with people out in the real world. I do fine in social situations, but I also suffer from an irrational amount of stress leading up to it. I know deep down inside that I will enjoy myself when we go out to dinner or a movie with friends, but up until the moment we are actually leaving the house… every instinct in my body is telling me to call… cancel… and stay in the comfort and safety of my home.

There are times when I get this irrational fight or flight instinct, and I have learned over the years how to trick myself into ignoring it. The problem is it is still there and no matter how minor.. face to face interaction and using the phone… both stress me out beyond reason. If I need to make a call, like something as simple as making a doctor appointment… I will put it off until I have almost run out of time to do it. So when I hear people talking about how non-face-to-face communication is degrading the fabric of society… I get more than a little defensive. The ability to chat with friends over instant messenger, or hang out with folks on Teamspeak… give me a way of reaching out and hanging out with people without triggering all of the anxiety of sitting across the table from someone. I am by no means frozen by my fears… because I get out every day and talk to people, and put on my best friendly southerner act. The problem is I can only handle so much of this before my buffer of civility is drained and I need to get the hell away from other people.

Social Robots

So while listening to NPR over my lunch break, I thought I was preparing for yet another speech on how we just need to sit down and hang out together more often. It was then when they threw me a curveball. This discussion was about how we are interacting more with devices and how folks love talking to things like Siri or the new Amazon Echo. They talked about how we are on the cusp of having “social robots” in our lives that interact with us. Largely the discussion was about the dangers of interacting with things that have no empathy can have no ability to actually care about us as human beings. They talked about a study where they introduced a child to a what they kept terming a “social robot”, essentially one that mimics and mirrors human behavior. There were technical difficulties and after a few minutes of interacting the robot shut down. The child saw this as rejection… as this device “not liking her” and was extremely distraught.

With more and more AI entering our science fiction, with movies like Her, and the television show Humans… this is going to come up and ultimately we are going to have to deal with issues we have never dealt with before as a culture. The problem I have with this whole line of thought though, is that she kept saying that robots were incapable of empathy. As a programmer by trade I think maybe I just have a different line of reasoning behind this. What is empathy but essentially our way of decoding a series of inputs from another human being. What we call empathy is realy not that unlike what computers do with every single decision they make. They read in a set of data points, and then make a decision based on a predetermined matrix of possibilities. Without realizing it we are doing this every time we determine what someone is feeling or thinking… we are unwittingly taking posture, facial expressions, vocal intonation, and comparing to our own experiences to break down that sequence of data into a “feeling” or an “emotion”.

Human Machines

I would go so far as to say that essentially we are machines in the most basic sense of that word. Granted we are exceeding complicated machines, but every single function of our bodies is a system built upon a system built upon the encoding that we received at birth through our genetic make-up. We consume nutrients to power the cells in our body that are then programmed to behave in certain ways just like the code of a computer. While we have yet to delve into genetic hacking on a large scale, it has been happening in the lab for over a decade to produce new medicines. While there are ethical dilemmas standing in the way, I feel like by the end of my life time we will be treating diseases by rewriting segments of our internal “code”.

All of this said… since we are basically machines running custom hardware, executing custom code, and reacting to a lifetime of custom data inputs… doesn’t it seem naive to think that robots will forever be incapable of empathy? Machines are good at analyzing data, making assumptions on that data, and then reaching a decision. Since what we think of as “empathy” is essentially us doing exactly that thing… I cannot believe that eventually we will have machines that can mimic those processes that we consider as “unique” or “special”. I know this is a strange topic for a gaming blog, but every now and then one of these topics happens and I want to write about it. For ages these topics have just gotten filed away in my head for a later discussion… that never actually happens. Since this is Blaugust the month of pushing people out of their comfort zone I thought to myself… go for it, post it. Futurism is a past time that I love to indulge in, and I had an excellent discussion about it while recording one of the Bel Folks Stuff episodes. I think dreaming and envisioning these ideas helps us to formulate ways to deal with it when it ultimately becomes a reality. I would love to hear folks thoughts about this… or honestly if you just want me to shut up about these side topics and stick to game blogging.

[Edit]

Real quick edit to embed the Aspen Institute talk that inspired this post.

Contract Killing

August 17, 2015 by Grace

Blaugust 2015, Day 17

If this looks like anything other than an utter nightmare to you, you might enjoy PvP

I’m a pretty big fan of WildStar’s contract system. It took me a little while after they were introduced to really understand what they were and how best to engage with them, but now I’m hooked. The system has been a great way for me to fill in some gaps in my gear, make a ton of money, and even get some sweet pets and mounts. Up until this week, though, I’d been leaving out half of the system: PvP contracts.

These 2 status updates pretty well sum up my experience

All that changed a few days ago, with the combination of my curiosity and a mini guild premade getting thrown together. I had done a bit of PvP in the leveling bracket, with my medic and stalker especially. But I hadn’t touched PvP in months, and had barely ever done any on my spellslinger or at max level. I walked in with no PvP gear and no PvP spec and it turned out about as well as you’d expect that to – I got murdered a lot. It turns out that very lopsided matches are fairly common, since the best geared, most experienced PvPers tend to form premades.

The real reason I want to PvP

In the end I had a fun enough time to keep going back for a few contracts over the past few days. I build myself a PvP action set and earned enough prestige to buy some gear so I occasionally get a kill or two in before my untimely death. I even had my first winning match, a Halls of the Bloodsworn that we won against all hope with about 15 seconds left on the clock. I think this might become a permanent addition to my daily “stuff to do” rotation, at least until I finish getting those sweet sweet PvP costumes and pets!

Sportsmanship

August 17, 2015 by Tamrielo

I went to a tournament over the weekend that reminded me why I like to play in tournaments. It was a great experience where I got to meet and play against a bunch of new, cool folks and test out my little group of toy soldiers against some other folks’ groups of toy soldiers. It was great.

I don’t, as a general rule, like competitive games. I like them even less when I’m playing solo against a single opponent. I get a lot more pleasure and fun out of working together with people to overcome some obstacle, rather than working singly against another person to defeat them. I don’t get a lot of pleasure in asserting my dominance over another person in any medium, and less so when it’s my friends. The closest I get is a sort of academic interest in seeing what the outcome might be, but I don’t really enjoy it for its own sake. It’s a little better when it’s team vs team, because then I’m at least working alongside people. It’s not my favorite thing, but it’s more fun than one-on-one duels.

All of this makes Infinity (and other minis games) a kind of odd standout for me. What I really like about minis games is that it’s two people playing out a big battle that looks REALLY cool on the tabletop, with groups of minis that can often reflect a bit about the person in terms of how they look and which ones have been chosen. My Warmachine lists paint a picture of a person who bides his time until an opening appears, then goes for a quick, efficient assassination. When I used to play Kodra, his lists displayed a person who liked to build efficient, effective engines with interlocking pieces that rolled across the battlefield. Our lists reflected a difference in approach and personality, but we were playing the same game.

I used to play Warmachine very competitively, and got frustrated with it. What started to frustrate me about Warmachine once I started playing it very competitively was that I stopped having friendly interactions with my opponents. They were civil, polite, amiable interactions, but there was no give and take and no real sense that we were both trying to make the game fun for the other person as well as ourselves. The game was about making my combo work and stopping the opponent from doing the same. It was fun when my combos worked, and not fun when they didn’t, and it often felt like a zero-sum game. It was something I grew to miss from playing it very casually early on with a smaller group of close friends, and I stopped playing it for quite a while as a result.

Infinity revived my interest in minis games because it demanded that I play with a certain amount of give and take with my opponent. Every action required both players’ participation, so both people were engaged the whole time. It’s a stark departure from the my-turn-your-turn setup in other games, and it means that I always have something to do, and always have a chance to make something work out in my favor, even if the odds are long. At the same time, it means that I have to stay on my toes if I’m winning, there’s no point in the game where victory is basically assured and I can just do as I please. On top of all of that is this layer of exciting action– there are a lot of cool things you can do in the game as both the active and the reactive player, so there’s always a chance for your one troop to be an unexpected hero instead of a casualty.

Because there’s so much engagement on both sides of the table at all times, there’s a lot of casual etiquette that comes up with the game. It’s perfectly reasonable in Infinity to say “I’m going to walk up here but stay back far enough so that you can’t see me,” and only the most curmudgeonly player will respond with anything other than “Okay, you can get to about… there, but any further and I’ll be able to see you.” It means that games are frequently won and lost on tactics and strategy and a couple of important die rolls rather than precision eyeballing and “gotcha!” moments. I won a lot of Warmachine games through simply being better at eyeballing distances than my opponents; I have not once ever won an Infinity game on that basis, and I like it a lot more.

I’m not catching my opponent’s off-guard with an attack angle that they thought was safe but ever-so-slightly misjudged, or some combo that they didn’t see coming, or some rules interaction that they weren’t expecting; I win my games on tactics and a bit of luck, and I feel good about my games whether I win them or lose them. I also have opponents genuinely take the time to thank me for fun games in Infinity and exchange more than polite, rehearsed “Thank you”s and handshakes. It’s something that rarely ever happened in other games I’ve played, and a big part of why I’ve stayed in Infinity and love to bring new players into the fold.

That last bit is kind of important to me. There are plenty of games that I like that I wouldn’t recommend to other people. Infinity is a game that I like that I would recommend to other people, particularly people who’re into sci-fi and want to try a relatively inexpensive minis game. My experience with the Infinity communities is that they’re welcoming and generally really great folks. The people who I don’t enjoy playing against are rare, and tend not to last long in the game. It takes a certain amount of adjustment, because it’s a very different experience than a lot of one-on-one games, but I like it all the better for that.

#Blaugust Day 17: Mystara Monday: The Beginning

August 17, 2015August 17, 2015 by Thalen

Many years ago, when I was but a lad, my best friend came into possession of the newly published Second Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks. We were fascinated by the system and the concept, and I wanted my own copies. At Waldenbooks an employee suggested I might want to start with the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, which would be an easier introduction to the game. I bought it, and the rest was history. It's because of that choice that instead of Faerun, Oerth or Krynn my favored game world, the one that I return to time and again, is Mystara.

#Blaugust Day 17: Mystara Monday: The Beginning

Mystara in its earliest form, from the D&D Expert Set

Over the years, I played and ran a lot of games of Dungeons & Dragons set in Mystara (originally just called The Known World) and I built up a large collection of adventure modules and supplements. I had come in at the perfect time, as TSR had recently begun to actively detail the setting through a series of Gazetteers that detailed each of the major nations of Mystara in turn. Dave Arneson's Blackmoor setting was incorporated as the distant past of Mystara, prior to a great nuclear apocalypse. The world was revealed as hollow, with ancient extinct civilization preserved within. The great airship Princess Ark crossed the world and even reached the moon (which is populated by samurai cat people). A worldwide calamity stripped Mystara of magic for a full week.

Eventually TSR decided to retire the Dungeons & Dragons rule set and only support Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. For a short period, Mystara continued to be supported and new AD&D supplements were released for it. After only a few however, Mystara was retired as well. It's mentioned every so often in newer editions, most recently in the 5th edition books as one of many campaign worlds that exist, but there hasn't been an official Mystara supplement published since 1995.

Every Monday I plan to bring out an item from my collection and show it off a bit. I'll talk about what it is, where it fits into the setting as a whole, and maybe tell a few stories about games past. Next week I'll be starting with the very first Dungeons & Dragons books I ever owned, the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rules.