Seventeenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society

Abstract

Crises reveal precarity and uncertainty, speak to evolving psychosocial and material relations, and lead to commercially and politically bound narratives that reconstitute society. Data, tethered to artificial intelligence and to algorithmic projection plays a significant role in crisis management. This research is focused on artificial intelligence and the algorithmic imperative in video game development and playable pandemic narratives. Gameplay rules and structures, the evidenced-based decisions that impact game outcomes, are made possible through a game’s underlying AI frameworks. Gameplay can be understood, in part, as a cycle of interaction that leads from information gathering and analysis to decision-making. While AI is formally associated with data management, it also creates clear signposts of agency. By reading AI systems, players gain control over playable space; by studying loops, cycles, boundaries and vectors players are able to “cheat” game systems. As a case study of AI and player agency, this essay examines the AI systems of Naughty Dog, a California-based developer that has advanced this work across two significant video game franchises: Uncharted and The Last of Us. While both game worlds are structured through common AI archetypes, the latter weds these object-oriented parameters to a character-driven pandemic narrative. To survive, to progress in The Last of Us, is to read embedded algorithms as overdetermined pattern agents. Writ large, pandemic culture fosters dependencies toward pattern recognition, to seeing (and mastering) contagion across a number of navigable geographic vectors. This essay argues toward a common framework for understanding how agency operates through algorithmic projection.

Presenters

Eric Freedman
Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost, Academic Affairs, Truman State University, Armed Forces Americas, United States