Kireatic

I’ve recently had the pleasure of playing in the Star Trek Online open beta, thanks to a pre-order I’ve got on the game. I wasn’t aware before the pre-order if the game was subscription or not (it is), something most MMO’s are. I however find myself wondering if it has the right to ask for a subscription as the gameplay stands at the moment.

Me in Star Trek Online. Feeling a little lonely in my instanced mission.

My main MMO is is EVE Online, a space sandbox more commonly referred to by its players as ‘Spreadsheets in Space’. EVE is what I imagine in an MMO, a large, persistent universe which is truly massive, with all its players operating in one version of reality, where your actions are permanent, and there is a loss to your actions. In essence, a massively multi-player game in which what you do actually affects the game. This is only possible with persistence.

However, most MMO’s, most notably World of Warcraft, instance most regions of the game. An instance is a sealed bubble of the game which a small number of players go to do a mission or dungeon, and the what you do in the instance is kept inside that little sealed bubble – a new group of players won’t see anything you’ve done, and they’ll have exactly the same experience of the game whether you were there or not. Now, this is understandable for games like WoW, as they wouldn’t function very well without it.

With Star Trek Online, however, I find myself automatically drawing comparisons to EVE, and finding STO failing. STO isn’t an MMO – there’s nothing massive about it. You can only be interacting with around 50 players at once with the current instance system, and that is an upper limit. That’s not massive, I know two or three FPS games that have larger player counts in a round than that. I can understand that there are lag issues, god knows STO is laggy enough at the moment during beta, but EVE proves that this doesn’t need to be an issue, it just needs planning.

I say avoid instances where you can, MMO designers. Otherwise you’ll be less of an MMO and more of a single-player game with optional co-op mode.

I was browsing YouTube today, as I do, and looking at my recommended videos, which as per usual included some Miku Hatsune music. Those who know me will also be familiar with my fondness for the robotic singer, and her music videos. However, this video actually rather upset me, despite the song being quite pleasant to listen to.

The song details the end of Miku’s life, or existence as it were, and from what I can tell, is as she develops a fault in her program, and loses the the ability to sing, her thoughts and her memories, piece by piece. Brought a tear to my eye; but why so? She’s a robot, and not an intelligent one at that, the actual Miku is nothing more than a collection of voice samples. This was nothing more than the death of a persona, an avatar, of something which didn’t really exist in the first place. But it got me thinking.

Artificial intelligence, in my view, is an inevitability. The human brain is simply an organic computer, simply complex due to it’s inherently haphazard nature. Eventually electronics will be able to mimic the brain, and we will have digital conciousness. Putting a pause on the nature of conciousness, I’d like to focus on what a digital life would mean. Would it have the same rights as organic life? Or would that depend on the complexity of the consciousness? It probably would – we don’t all consider an ant to have the same right to life as a human, so a simple conciousness with only a small capacity to learn would probably be far easier switched off than one with a fully working personality on a human level.

So what if that Miku avatar existed like that. If she had feelings, and wants and thoughts on a level at least as complex as a human? If she developed a fault in her program, the obvious solution is to reinstall – like when you want to solve all Windows problems, you reformat, right? But that would likely mean removing her memories and personality development, and you’d be – for want of a better term – killing the entity that you started with and replacing her with a new one who just happened to have the same origin. Twins don’t turn out to have identical personalities. So how hard would that decision be? Should an AI have the same value to their life as a human? More importantly, could you do it?

When does a collection of computer algorithms start to be a person?

Come to that, when does a collection of instincts start to be human?