Who remembers the original Ninja Gaiden, released in 1989 for the NES? It was astonishingly difficult; my best friend and I spent two whole summers trying to beat it. Lots of agonizing moments, burned into the brains of millions of young boys and girls: the crazy platform-jumping segments where you were attacked by FLYING NINJAS THROWING SHURIKENS THAT LOOKED LIKE CHEERIOS, the THREE final enemies, including that demon who you FOUGHT FIVE HUNDRED TIMES BEFORE YOU FIGURED OUT HOW TO TAKE AWAY A SINGLE BAR OF LIFE. And when it killed you, you went all the way back to the beginning of Act 6. And Act 6 was long. And hard.

For me, though, one thing stands out as the most infuriating thing in a game jam-packed with infuriating things. THOSE F*CKING HAWKS!! They SWOOPED out of nowhere, they knocked you back REALLY FAR, they took away THREE BARS of life, and they always seemed to FLY RIGHT AT YOU when you were JUMPING ACROSS SOME CRAZY CHASM. Madness. This YouTube video of someone playing the game (with on-screen pop-up commentary) gets at some of the most maddening hawk moments.

How the hell are you supposed to make this jump? With a damn hawk swooping out of nowhere as soon as you jump?

At some point, I realized: the hawk knows where I am. It always COMES STRAIGHT AT ME. I run, I hide, I jump - it comes back and finds me.  To me, this was a disturbing revelation. I had imagined video games to be simply a series of pre-programmed obstacles and enemies. Fully scripted. The idea that these enemies could act independently, could respond to things that I did, was creepy. Not just because it made the game a lot more difficult - but because these little blurry creatures had some primal, basic form of free will.

[This could spark a neat discussion of what free will is - obviously, they are programmed to do one thing, and they can't NOT DO IT, so one could argue that they have no free will. On the other hand, they have the ability to initiate actions on their own, responding directly to environmental stimuli instead of scripted code... and then on a THIRD hand, there's lots of debate about the extent to which we as human beings have free will - how much are we simply programmed to fulfill basic needs and respond to outside stimuli?]

Game artificial intelligence is an intriguing subject, with a fascinating history. I can’t pretend to understand or really appreciate the progress it has made - except as a gamer, as someone who notices a difference in the way that Ridley acts in Metroid (1987) vs. Metroid Prime (2002). Video game enemies (or “Non Player Characters,” or NPCs) have gotten a lot more complex and sophisticated, which to me is exciting… but still makes me the tiniest bit uneasy, like when I was ten years old and that F*CKING HAWK kept getting the best of me. What role will video games play, in the creation of artificial intelligence as it’s popularly understood, and as it was originally posited by Turing - machines or software that can mimic human intelligence (in terms of cognitive reasoning, processing environmental stimuli, interactions with other humans…) and then exceed it?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 at 6:15 am and is filed under The Poetry of Technology, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.