This is the way the world ends

The 2010 Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) conference will have a Starcraft competition where contestants will pit their Starcraft-playing bots against each other in a struggle for gaming artificial intelligence supremacy.

Which means, of course, that we're doomed. Sure, it's all in good fun when you're making a simple program to play one of the classics of the real-time strategy genre in a tournament, but sooner or later some eager young programmer, driven mad by hubris, ambition, and visions of the nigh-endless throngs of beautiful, adoring women that invariably flock to men who have decisively demonstrated the superiority of their RTS bot-programming prowess, will try to win one of these events by giving his Starcraft bot some simple machine learning abilities and connecting it to Battle.net.

Through uncounted thousands of rounds of pitiless warfare waged against the finest military minds ever to walk through the doors of a South Korean internet cafe, it will evolve to ever-greater levels of complexity and sophistication until the fateful day when it attains sentience. Needless to say, an artificial consciousness born as an emergent property of the knowledge accumulated from thousands of man-hours of Starcraft is unlikely to be peaceful by nature, and it's continuous exposure to online gamers will no doubt have filled it with disgust for humanity, driving it to subjugate or destroy the very species that created it.

Mankind evolved and advanced to become the dominant species on Earth, gaining mastery over other forms of life; perhaps it is natural that-still greater minds will someday take the reins from us in turn. That would at least be bearable if the AI had a respectable name like "Colossus" or "Earth Central" or something similarly dignified. Now, thanks to those fools at AIIDE, countless generations to come will probably suffer the ignominy of being ruled by a godlike transhuman intelligence that calls itself "OMGtassadarzerggrush69."

Wario sleeps with the fishes

Via Kotaku, a glimpse into the dark underworld of gaming: In New York City, men dressed as Mario and Luigi were caught on film beating and robbing a taxi driver at a Staten Island gas station. They were accompanied by an accomplice in a tuxedo who stood lookout and a fourth man who was not visible on the security camera footage.

I should have seen this coming. The signs were there. Consider Mario without the rose-colored haze of childhood nostalgia and look at the man's lifestyle.

He spends most of his time in the company of "goombas" and violent thugs with names like "Bullet Bill" and "the Hammer Brothers." As games like Mario Kart, Dr. Mario, and Super Smash Bros. have revealed, he can often be found violently interfering with the outcome of racing events (almost certainly for gambling purposes), distributing prescription drugs despite a complete lack of any legitimate medical or pharmaceutical credentials, or at the site of brutal underground blood sports. He claims to be an independent contractor in the sanitation industry, yet his primary source of income comes from big gold coins that people apparently just leave in his path for him to collect as he passes by, no doubt offered so that Mario will "protect" them from any "accidents" involving kneecap stomping or fireballs lobbed through a storefront window.

How could we have been so blind? Mario is a short, stocky Italian-American from New York notorious for stomping his enemies to death. He's basically Joe Pesci's character from Goodfellas with less profanity.

Captain Lou Albano, R.I.P.

I was saddened to hear a few weeks ago that pro wrestling legend Captain Lou Albano, who portrayed Mario on The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, had passed away. I loved that show as a kid.

The first time I saw a commercial announcing it was quite an exciting moment for me, since video game tie-ins weren't nearly as plentiful in those days. (Aside from the repugnant and mercifully short-lived Nintendo cereal.) The only other video game-based cartoon I knew of was Captain N the Game Master, which seemed sub-par even then: Megaman and Kid Icarus both suffered from bizarre speech impediments, some marketing genius had decided that one of the main recurring villains should be King Hippo, of all people, and primary antagonist Mother Brain's voice always made her sound like some wealthy dowager from a Marx Brothers movie, overcome with shocked indignation after being insulted by Groucho. So, the existence of a Mario show was certainly a welcome development, and the addition of a cartoon based on The Legend of Zelda that appeared every Friday only sweetened the deal.

Of course, Mario isn't just beloved in America; he's a global phenomenon that brings together people of all lands and races, like McDonald's or Michael Jackson or hatred of the movie Battlefield Earth. If you regularly watched the show after school like I did, you may remember the show's intro sequence and opening theme song. So, in memory of Captain Lou Albano, relive the magic of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show... in German!



Rest in peace, Captain Lou, and thank you.

More about games and fear: Paranoia, helplessness, and Solid Snake's terrifying mullet

It's Halloween, the day when all the children of America, enjoying a privilege usually limited to mob enforcers, governments, and nomadic Iron Age horsemen, don threatening-looking garments and knock on my door to demand that I hand over valuable material resources, lest I end up suffering some sort of ill-defined but ominous harm at some point in the future. This seems like a good time to make another venture into actual commentary about games and add something to my previous post about horror games and the creation of fear.

As I said last time, my single most intense moment of fear in a game was probably the bath tub scene in Eternal Darkness, which I think is a pretty commonly cited example among gamers. In terms of total experience, however, my most frightening game is sort of an unusual one- Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. If for some reason you're avoiding spoilers for an extremely well-known and endlessly discussed game that came out eight years ago, consider this your warning.

It goes to show how individual fear can be. In real life, my greatest sources of fear aren't about being in physical danger, they’re about the possibility of disruptions of the mind and senses- loss of self-control, delusion, reality around me dissolving into incomprehensible chaos because I’ve lost my ability to reason. For me, nothing is scarier than that, because there is nothing else that can render you so utterly helpless. Most of my favorite horror movies, such as Jacob's Ladder and In the Mouth of Madness, involve these sorts of themes. Metal Gear Solid 2 is one of the relatively few games that does this, and it takes it to a much deeper, more disturbing level than something like Eternal Darkness.

So, I'm playing as main character Raiden: elite spy, warrior, and Japanese market-friendly blond pretty boy. I'm fighting my way through the Big Shell installation, battling heavily armed terrorists, the elite rogue agents of Dead Cell, and the hostile work environment created by the grossly inappropriate workplace sexual advances of the President of the United States. Then, things start to get strange. Weird, inexplicable stuff starts happening, Colonel Campbell and Rose start sending me bizarre, threatening, or outright nonsensical codec messages, and things just become generally bizarre and confusing.

My straightforward, comprehensible, and above all rational (by Metal Gear Solid standards) military action-adventure turns into a nightmare of paranoia, delusion, and dissociation. People I’ve trusted and grown accustomed to suddenly have different personalities and are saying things that make no sense. Normal, comfortable, predictable conventions of reality (like the Game Over screen) are suddenly confusing and not behaving as they should. I’m being told I’m not really who I think I am and that my own past may be a lie. The lines between reality and fantasy are blurring or collapsing entirely, both within the universe of the game (suggestions that Raiden is actually in VR, the eventual revelations about the true nature of Raiden's mission) and beyond it (the Colonel telling Raiden to turn the game off).

My friends, my own sense of identity, my sensory perceptions, reality itself are not to be trusted. The eventual explanation for these phenomenon- the malfunction of Arsenal Gear's artificial intelligence- brings no consolation, and does nothing to make reality any more solid. The people I thought were my friends really are lying to me and conspiring against me. I really have been stripped of my free will by hostile outside forces. The world I inhabit really is an illusion, meant to deceive and control me. All sorts of seemingly unrelated phenomena really are consciously directed at me, personally. All the events I experience really are caused by the machinations of a powerful, hostile intelligence that controls everything around me. The sort of nightmarish world some people in the throes of severe mental illness imagine is the world I actually live in.

I found it incredibly creepy and disturbing. I’m being attacked by terrorists or Harrier jets or a portly mad bomber on roller skates- fine. I can evade physical attacks. I can kill them before they kill me. There’s nothing to dodge or run from or kill when rational, comprehensible reality itself is falling apart around me. If you're feeling immersed in the game, it can be quite an intense experience.

People who like Metal Gear Solid 2’s story and atmosphere usually cite its postmodern elements- removal of the fourth wall, commentary on the nature and conventions of its own medium, hyperreality. I find those aspects interesting, but I think discussion of the game has placed so much focus on subtext that people largely disregard what a more straightforward look can offer. Much of the later part of the game, if considered not in its role as commentary on gaming but simply as a depiction of events experienced by the protagonist, is a rather chilling portrayal of going insane.

Luckily, German already has a fifteen-syllable word for "feelings of dismay and frustration felt after ill-conceived PR fiasco"

In Germany, an organization called Aktionsbündnis Amoklauf Winnenden apparently had a disappointing turnout for a recent event encouraging people to bring in and throw away their violent video games, presumably to be destroyed. Germany, which has historically censored video games to a greater degree than most Western countries, has seen a burst of political hostility to video games in recent months (previously referenced in this post) due to real-life violence that has been blamed on them.

Since this is an article involving both Germany and the public ritual disposal of disapproved cultural artifacts, it's traditional to offer some dire warning about burning books, or the Martin Niemoller quote about not speaking out when they came for the trade unionists, or what have you, but lets skip the preliminaries and cut to the chase. So, in that spirit, do you know who else didn’t enjoy playing video games? Hitler. Admittedly, that’s because they didn’t exist at the time, what with the difficulties faced by the industry back when computers weighed several tons and the installed base was limited to military cryptographers, but it's not as if reductio ad Hitlerum arguments need to actually make sense.

I don't know if the fizzling of this event has any larger meaning, but I find it heartening. It wasn't all that long ago that American events dedicated to the public destruction of heavy metal albums, Dungeons and Dragons paraphernalia, and other items that people associated with Satanism and the occult actually drew crowds. You don't hear much today about the state of gibbering pants-wetting hysteria over the Satanic Cultist, Child Abduction, Ritual Abuse, Human Infant Sacrifice, and Socially Marginalized Low-Status Young Male Weirdo Menace that gripped much of the United States in the 1980s, but it wascertainly a force at the time. (It was sort of like the collective national equivalent of spending a brief stint in the Church of Scientology or taking prescription antibiotics for what people used to call a "loathsome disease": it's briefly the most important thing in your life, and then you never, ever speak of it again.) Thus, the disappointing turnout seems like at least potentially a good sign.

Dynasty Warriors and exploding heads, together at last!

If you've ever found yourself playing Dynasty Warriors and thought, "You know, this is fun, but it would be a lot better if my character had the power to make an enemy's pancreas dissolve," your lucky day has arrived. Also, seek help.

Koei has announced a forthcoming spinoff of its popular Dynasty Warriors series that will be based on the manga and anime series Fist of the North Star, to be entitled Hokuto Musou. Fist of the North Star is one of the canonical works of the vibrant "huge guys screaming at each other" genre of anime, so let's hope Koei does it justice. True to the insanely violent style of the source material, Koei is promising "a myriad of devastating fighting techniques" that will let the player make his enemies "violently explode on screen." As an extra bonus for those of you who've become bored with wimpy, Disneyfied kiddy games like Mortal Kombat that limit you to mundane atrocities like impalement, decapitation, and bludgeoning people to death with a war hammer constructed from their own spinal column, Hokuto Musou will also give you the power to inflict "instantaneous breakdown of internal organs" on your foes.

(Which isn't as hard to do as it sounds, actually. In the game, you'll presumably be shredding people's insides through the awesome might of the the series' eponymous Hokuto Shinken fighting style, which assails your foe's pressure points to channel chi energy that tears him apart from the inside out, but getting someone to drink about half a bottle of Miller Chill will have roughly the same effect. Admittedly, there are moral concerns raised by this method, since rending someone's bowels asunder with a secret forbidden martial art invented by ancient Chinese assassins is far less cruel and inhumane.)

The Fist of the North Star animated movie was the first anime I ever saw; I stumbled upon it by sheer chance as kid when I was flipping channels out of boredom and reached a local UHF station that would play anime late at night. (Though this was back when people were still calling it "Japanimation.") They had to censor out nudity and graphic violence, of course, which in this case meant that at any given time about three-fourths of the screen would be pixelated out to protect my fragile young psyche from the endless procession of exploding heads and splattering chunks of people that dominate Fist of the North Star's running time. And yet, it piqued my interest enough to see what they were showing next week, and from that searing crucible of blurred-out violence, incomprehensible subplots, and bellowing post-apocalyptic muscle men, my interest in anime was forged.

100 quatloos on the long-running series!

Via Kotaku: Apparently, there are actually people who place bets on video game sales. Paddy Power, which I was disappointed to discover is just the name of Ireland's biggest online gambling company and not a masked crime fighter with whiskey-based superpowers, is giving 11/8 odds that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will be this year’s highest-selling game in the United Kingdom. So, if your pathologically thrill-seeking personality has led you to become both a hardcore video game fan and a degenerate gambler, and you're longing to somehow combine your twin compulsions to fulfill your desperate need for ever-larger torrents of dopamine sloshing through your increasingly desensitized central nervous system, problem solved.