Twelfth International Conference on The Image

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 algorithmic projection, plays a significant role in crisis management. This research is focused on artificial intelligence in playable media and playable pandemic narratives and the visual logic of algorithms. Video game play 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 a software architecture associated with data management, it also creates clear signposts of agency in its animated bodies. By reading embodied AI systems, by studying loops, cycles and environmental vectors, players gain control over playable space. As a case study of the interplay of AI, visuality and agency, this paper examines the AI systems of Naughty Dog, a California-based video game developer that has advanced this work across its most recent playable pandemic narrative, The Last of Us Part II. 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 paper argues toward a common framework for understanding how agency operates through algorithmic projection and points to the importance of holding onto both data and image in playable media.

Presenters

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