DIY Kill-Bot: A.I. Plays Dark Souls PVP

Description: A screenshot of a giant headless rock creature (golem) kicking an
armored knight square in the butt. Heehee, butt.

The Dark Souls series is known for its punishing difficulty in single player mode (and making it even worse for pirates who accessed it early) and its cut-throat competition in player versus player strategies. One user on gitHub going by the handleMetal Crow decides to combine his love of programming, his passion for playing Dark Souls PVP and desire to have an AI do his bidding into making his own bot that can play Dark Souls PVP and shared it with the world.

What's really interesting to me, coming at it from a non-technical viewpoint, is how much of this project was complicated by the fact that for all the strategy talk surrounding Dark Souls, the system is a closed system, making it sort of akin to trying to peer into a sealed black box. As he explains, he had to pretty much reverse-engineer the game:

In order to have the AI do anything, i needed to be able to feed it data about the game state. The simplest and most direct way of doing this is would be to have it watch various variables in the game code, such as the enemy's x and y location, and then use that with the AI logic. However, since the game's code isn't open source, i needed to reverse engineer anything i wanted to use.

Ok, so maybe that doesn't sound that surprising, right? Just point a program at a game, observe it crunch some numbers, and you're done? As it turns out, writing a bot to play against a human is really tricky-- and not just because us humans can be highly illogical. Nope, Metal Crow had to teach the bot to avoid backstab damage, and he had to create a sort of neural network to do it. He explains:

{In PVP]...the primary combat isn't standard attacks, but the backstab metagame. This is a beautifully complex mechanic, which allows players to instantly damage another player if they manage to get behind them and close to their back. Unlike standard attacks, an AI cant dodge this very simply, because it is executed instantaneous, there's no windup the AI can see and roll away from. The backstab metagame with humans revolves around identifying if a person is about to go for a backstab, then dodging it or countering it ahead of time. Unfortunately, even though I can easily identify backstab attempts when I play, I cannot for the life of me translate it into discrete logic. Its just something I know from experience, I cant really explain it. However, it is vital the AI be able to detect and dodge backstabs, so I needed to figure out a way to teach it.

So how well does it work? You can watch a teaser video of it in action below:

Why Are MMORPG Players Dying So Suddenly?

The Guardian presents an in-depth article on the curious case of Chen Rong-yu, a League of Legends layer who spent nearly a full day at a Taiwanese internet cafe, playing nearly non-stop before he slumped over at his keyboard, dead of an apparent heart attack. Chen's unfortunate demise seems to be part of a marked uptick in many hardcore players of MMO games quite literally playing a game until they drop. And the causes leading to this alarming increase in player deaths have many different causes and complications all intermingling together. As The Guardian writes in its feature article:

It’s not a crime that can be easily pinned on any one person or thing. There’s Taiwan’s local economy and infrastructure, which promote the extended use of internet cafes. There are the natural conditions of the country’s humid climate. There’s the lack of regulation with regard to how long people can use these cafes and, of course, there are the video games themselves, which promote prolonged engagement through their elegant, compelling design. 

But there is another, more pressing, more interesting question that arches over all of these, one that is, perhaps, more relevant to the billions of people around the world who play video games and don’t wind up dead from doing so: why? 

What is it about this medium that encourages some people to play games to the extremes of their physical wellbeing and beyond? Why do video games inspire such monumental acts of obsession? Is it something within the game’s reality that proves so appealing or is it external circumstances that push certain people to take refuge in a cosy unreality? 

The entire article is a well researched peice, and offers an intriguing, if also perplexing and disturbing look at the darker side of risk-reward centered game design along with MMOs and isolation.

Is "Social Gaming" A Misnomer?

 

Leigh Alexander has a great article in The Guardian that delves into multi-player games as a social activity in general, and the recent beta of Bungie latest game, Destiny, in particular. An excerpt:

I watched a colleague of mine play through the beta of Bungie’s latest game, Destiny. It has all the beauty and heft of a massive, futuristic space opera, it has a gorgeous user interface, and it will be a high-end online game where friends can do missions together forever. It is a genius way to do business: create a game where the mode of participation is endless investment. As Destiny is a cutting-edge product you feel almost peer-pressured to participate. 

It is social in that business sense: you must collaborate with and keep up with your friends, ensure that your statistics and equipment – your fitness for competition – are ever increasing. You participate excitedly in this capitalistic metaphor.
Yet are people really playing “together”?

Jenn Frank tackles the idea of socialization-- or the lack thereof-- that happened between her and Ted (her fiance), and how utterly alien it felt for her (she was traditionally the sole "gamer" in a relationship) to feel like a so-called "game widow", especially when Destiny seemed to designed to be a constant, always-on experience:

Later, Ted tells me there is no “pause,” not in the sense where games often have a “pause.” He isn’t even playing multiplayer; he is on a solo mission. “I can’t put the game down,” he explains to me, helplessly. 

This, I do understand. 

I am not angry with Ted. I am furious with Destiny, however. Due to a design flaw—in this case, the flaw is with a game that cannot be paused—I am finally experiencing true relationship strife.

And while this phenomenon may sound most familiar to those who play MMORPGS like World of Warcraft and its ilk, Jason McIntosh wrote about a similar strain on his relation with another game that has no pause feature even though it's not always a multi-player game: Dark Souls. As he explains in "Dark Souls: Pain Without Pause":

But for most of the game your character is strictly alone in their world; you often see the flickering shadows of other players rushing past, but cannot interact with them in any way. And indeed, I never reached any true multi-player segment, so as far as my own experience is concerned, the lack of a pause button serves only as another tool the game uses to mold the player into the correct mindset for disciplined play... 

Whether it was bad for me just then or completely unworkable for me at all remains to be seen. I can offer none of this contextualization as an excuse for my behavior; I became an unpleasant jerk while playing this game, and that was awful and I never want to have that happen again.

Personally, while I've been on both sides of the divide over the years, I've seen a shift recently in that many AAA game companies try to design it so that they capture as much your your attention and investment of time and money that it can often end up having a detrimental effect on one's social life and relationships. Of course, moderation is the key, but a system like Destiny seems to be working very hard to upend that part of the equation.

What do you think, readers?

EA Expands Potential Social Network For MMORPGs, Finally Makes Shawn Fanning Rich

Shawn Fanning, best known for founding Napster, has a new job. He will be working at Electronic Arts, which is about to buy his social-network-gaming startup Rupture for $30 million, according to sources with knowledge of the deal. His co-founder Jon Baudanza will also join Electronic Arts. Rumors of a possible deal for just such a buy-out offer began swirling in early February when TechCrunch first broke the story, but did not know the identity of the buyer.

Rupture’s first product was a social network for players of the online video game World of Warcraft, but it only came out with a beta version and kept delaying its public launch.

Electronic Arts is buying the company for its technology, since it doesn’t have a lot of users (it was only ever in beta) and never launched the second version of its service. Presumably, creating social networks around MMORPGs is a key component of its online strategy. The company has not yet officially announced the acquisition, but it is expected to do so soon.

Rupture had previously raised only $2.5 to $3 million in an angel round last summer from investors including Ron Conway, Joi Ito, Reid Hoffman, and Baseline Ventures. Although this is not Fanning’s first startup, it is his first real payday. Napster helped change the music industry, but it went bankrupt doing so. And although he just sold his second startup SnoCap to Imeem, that was more of a pity fu mercy acquisition.