#AI is a Crapshoot (trope)

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

‘Kaboom!’ was set up to demonstrate what might happen if some megacorporation’s computers went mad, putting humans at risk.

If it were just a story about evil computers, that might have made a point, but including the hacker element actually subverted the original point of the tale.

[surumarssi]

Opal, Ruby, and Tiger Eye for the writing meme?

Thanks!!

The answers are under the cut, the post got kinda long

Firstly!! My current wip is set in the future/possibly an alternate universe where humanity hasn't quite figured out faster than light travel but has established itself all over the solar system. The main ensemble is the crew of a High Speed Cargo Vessel called Vertigo that's kind of a submarine in space. They're carrying something extremely important and dangerous from Earth to a neutral zone in the Kuiper belt. Except that even the crew doesn't know what the cargo actually is.

Opal: What motivates your protagonist to complete their goal?

The plan is to make this a piece of interactive fiction so I'm leaving figuring out the pov character last. They have a specific personality and specific goals but I feel like I have to make sure they're complementing the world and other characters so that they aren't a weird Chosen One. The point is for them to be just another chess piece.

The main cast's motivations I can talk about though! In short:

Olga Giallo (the captain): Just sort of wants to do her job well so she can get her paycheck. But like she is also kind of a patriot (Earth patriot) and she wants to make sure the macguffin doesn't end up on any other side of the cold war that's going on. Did I mention this is a spy novel?

Ian Ophrys (1st mate): He's a Venusian spy who has been tasked with figuring out what the cargo is. He's young and talented, he wants to prove himself.

Aleksis (chief engineer): Here for the paycheck, like Olga, but ze legitimately doesn't care about the action thriller part.

Psyche (AI/navigator): Here against its will, just wants to vibe and not be a spaceship. Is planning on getting revenge on its creators but doesn't want to kill the crew so it's stuck doing its job well.

Demian Garcia (nurse/chemist/I guess corpsman if this was a military ship): Wasn’t told about the cargo thing but can guess something is off. He isn't going to deliberately start shit but he would like it if the macguffin didn't end up in the hands of Earth governments because he lives on the Moon and they want independence.

Yasui Sachie (helmswoman): Last time she was piloting a spaceship something went horribly wrong and she was stranded for a while on failing life support. She's recovered from that physically and is trying extremely hard to recover from her trauma as well and continue the profession she loves.

Camille Anchusa (courier?): He's working as a courier for the shipping company that owns the spaceship but he’s also working as a courier/hired gun for an information broker who operates out of the neutral zone. He’s at least partly motivated by his nonspecific but very strong feelings about the information broker (he’s aro, it’s complicated).

Ruby: Is there any symbolism used in your wip?

Yeah but it's not too deep. I think the more interesting stuff will come in the second draft. Now it's basically just planet symbolism taken to extremes and subverted. Like, Venus represents beauty and luxury so it has a sleek aesthetic with flower motifs but it's also the planet with the most firepower and the culture is militaristic.

Tiger’s Eye: What are the tropes of your main cast?

They kind of form a Command Roster. That’s because I intentionally filled out the essential jobs on a cargo ship (not including boatswain/petty officer which would be redundant when the crew is just seven people plus one “civilian”)

Olga: The Captain, Opportunistic Bastard, Determinator if things escalate, kind of a Broken Ace.

Ian: Number Two/Communications Officer, Guile Hero, Pragmatic Hero (not the hero of the story though, everyone here is just vibing).

Aleksis: Mx Fixit, The Engineer, Consummate Professional with a hidden streak of Mad Scientist.

Psyche: The Navigator,  A.I. Is a Crapshoot but it’s more of an adam frankenstein situation, Caring Gardener since it has taken the responsibility of caring for a small hydroponics lab in the ship, which has made it appreciate plants quite a bit.

Demian: The Medic,  Workaholic, the kind of person to say things like “You Won’t Feel a Thing!”, professional Roadside Surgeon (if you go to marine engineering irl you’ll be taught things like how to insert a catheter or IV since you might need to keep someone alive until the medical helicopter gets to where you are. That’s not really possible within my worldbuilding so I’m giving them an actual expert to keep space travel somewhat survivable. This is Hard Scifi dammit), though because he’s Not That Kind of Doctor his main job on the ship is Boring but Practical, namely making sure the oxygen and water recycling happens.

Sachie: Ace Pilot though not necessarily in a combat sense, former Action Survivor/Sole Survivor, arguably a Working-Class Hero. It applies to Olga, Aleksis, and technically Psyche too but pretty much everyone on the ship outranks Sachie except Camille and the pov character who is the same rank as her.

Camille: Pretending to be a Beleaguered Bureaucrat, Actually more of a Hitman with a Heart.

Kaiser (that aforementioned information broker): Knowledge Broker, Femme Fatale (not a woman or especially femme but that’s the trope I’m invoking) also I’m trying really hard to make them a Magnificent Bastard.

[gibberishquestion]

various wall-e thoughts so i don’t keep spamming

-first off like i’m super critical of it. as i get older it gets easier to see the flaws with it. the writers may have stated the fatphobia nd ableism was unintentional but it’s PAINFULLY overt; the writers apparently wanted to make humanity seem infantlike (space odyssey, which this movie paid a lot of homage to, had the same idea and executed it way less horribly, by emphasizing the things ppl have to learn in space being eating walking and relieving yrself) which is already a fucking weird justification and reflects poorly on them, and like they literally just equate fatness + using a mobility device with moral failing. it’s not a good look. and the whole “big corporations bad” moral is rly empty coming from fucking disney, and some of the things they satirize are exactly what disney pulls — the scene where you catch a glimpse of toddlers learning the alphabet and hear “b is for buy’n’large, your very best friend” like. dude. disney putting on a family-friendly farce and engineering cozy childhood memories as a brand is EXACTLY that. i bet that’s why they placed more emphasis on the feel-good anyone can plant a tree type aspect of the moral.

-wall-e and eve have such. a good relationship. and they’re not straight.... personally i hc walle as any pronouns butch and eve as she/xe femme ^^ actually if i’m gonna get on my lgbt headcanons well john and mary are t4t and m-o is they/them gay and mccrea is bi trans.... cause i said so

-SPEAKING OF JOHN the dialogue when he meets wall-e is golden. “wall-e” “uh... john” (wall-e starts looking around) “eva?” “uhhh no. john.” (wall-e spots her and speeds off) “eva!!” “bye... wall-e”

-auto is one of the best homages to hal 9000 in fiction that i know of? i already talked abt this on a sideblog but like a lot of pop culture reduces the ai is a crapshoot trope to “what if a computer... was MEAN!!” and i have no problem with that cause it’s fun as hell. but auto is a well thought out reference to hal in that he goes rogue becuase he’s following orders too rigidly and beyond what was intended by his programmers. hal couldn’t reconcile “don’t lie ever” and “lie abt this thing” without doing something drastic like killing people so there’s no one to lie or not lie to, and auto couldn’t handle plain as day evidence contradicting his directive to not let humanity return to earth so he wound up going against everyone’s best interests (and disney death killing wall-e, twice,)

i have more but i’m gonna watch the movie now. i have so much to say about it because all 90 minutes of it have been burned onto my brain like a dvd ever since i was a child

[miloscat]

[Review] Conker: Live & Reloaded (XB)

Let’s see just how well this misguided remake/expansion holds up. This will be a long one!

Conker’s Bad Fur Day is my favourite N64 game. It’s cinematic and ambitious, technically impressive, has scads of gameplay variety with fun settings and setpieces, and when I first played it I was just the right age for the humour to land very well for me. A scant four years later Rare remade it for the Xbox after their acquisition by Microsoft, replacing the original multiplayer modes with a new online mode that would be the focus of the project, with classes and objectives and such.

First, an assessment of the single-player campaign. On a revisit I can see the common criticisms hold some water: the 3D platformer gameplay is a bit shaky at times, certain gameplay segments are just plain wonky and unfair, and some of the humour doesn’t hold up. It’s got all the best poorly-aged jokes: reference humour, gross-out/shock humour, and poking fun at conventions of the now dormant 3D collectathon platformer genre. I also am more sensitive these days to things like the sexual assault and homophobia undertones to the cogs, or Conker doing awful things for lols. Having said that, there’s plenty that I still find amusing, and outside of a few aggravatingly difficult sequences (surf punks, the mansion key hunt, the submarine attack, the beach escape) I do still appreciate the range of things you do in the game.

As for the remake, I’m not sure it can be called an improvement by any metric. Sure, there’s some minor additions. There’s a new surgeon Tediz miniboss, the new haunted baby doll enemy, and the opening to Spooky has been given a Gothic village retheme along with an added—though unremarked on—costume for Conker during this chapter based on the Hugh Jackman Van Helsing flop. Other changes are if anything detrimental. The electrocution and Berri’s shooting cutscenes have been extended, thus undermining the joke/emotional impact. The original game used the trope of censoring certain swear words to makes lines more funny; the remake adds more censorship for some reason, in one case (the Rock Solid bouncer scene) ruining the joke, and Chucky Poo’s Lament is just worse with fart noises covering the cursing.

The most egregious change, and one lampshaded in the tutorial, is the replacement of the frying pan (an instant and satisfying interaction) with a baseball bat which must be equipped, changing the control and camera to the behind-the-back combat style, and then swung with timed inputs to defeat the many added armoured goblings and dolls carelessly dumped all throughout the game world. This flat out makes the game less fun to play through.

On top of this, all the music has been rerecorded (with apologies to Robin Beanland, I didn’t really notice apart from instances where it had to be changed, such as in Franky’s boss fight where the intensely frenetic banjo lead was drastically reduced as a concession to the requirement to actually play it in real life), and the graphics totally redone. Bad Fur Day made excellent use of textures, but with detail cranked up, the sixth generation muddiness, and a frankly overdone fur effect, something is lost. I’m not a fan of the character redesigns either; sure Birdy has a new hat, but I didn’t particularly want to see Conker’s hands, and the Tediz are no longer sinister stuffed bears but weird biological monster bears with uniforms. On top of all this you notice regular dropped details; a swapped texture makes for nonsensical dialogue in the Batula cutscene, and characters have lost some emotive animations. Plus, the new translucent scrolling speech bubbles are undeniably worse.

I could mention the understandable loading screens (at least they’re quick), the mistimed lip sync (possibly exacerbated by my tech setup), or the removal of cheats (not a big deal), but enough remake bashing. To be fair, the swimming controls have been improved and the air meter mercifully extended, making Bats Tower more palatable. And some sequences have been shortened to—I suppose—lessen gameplay tedium (although removing the electric eel entirely is an odd choice). But let’s cover the multiplayer. Losing the varied modes from the original is a heavy blow, as I remember many a fun evening spent in Beach, War, or Raptor, along with the cutscenes setting up each mode.

The new headline feature of this release is the Live mode. The new Xbox Live service allowing online multiplayer was integrated, although it’s all gone now. Chasing the hot trends of the time, it’s a set of class-based team missions, with the Squirrel High Command vs. the Tediz in a variety of scenarios, mostly boiling down to progressing through capture points or capture the flag. Each class is quite specialised and I’m not sure how balanced it is, plus there’s proto-achievements and unlocks behind substantial milestones none of which I got close to reaching (I don’t think I could get most of them anyway, not being “Live”).

The maps are structured around a “Chapter X” campaign in which the Tediz and the weasel antagonist from BFD Ze Professor (here given a new and highly offensive double-barrelled slur name) are initially fighting the SHC in the Second World War-inspired past of the Old War, before using a time machine, opening up a sci-fi theme for the Future War. These are mainly just aesthetic changes, but it’s a fun idea and lets them explore Seavor’s beloved wartime theming a bit more while also bringing in plenty of references to Star Wars, Alien, Dune, and Halo; mostly visual.

Unfortunately the plot is a bit incoherent, rushed through narration (unusually provided by professional American voice actor Fred Tatasciore rather than a Rare staffer doing a raspy or regional voice like the rest of the game) over admittedly nice-looking cutscenes. They also muddle the timeline significantly, seemingly ignoring the BFD events... and then the Tediz’ ultimate goal is to revive the hibernating Panther King, when the purpose of their creation was to usurp him in the first place! It expands on the Conker universe but in a way that makes the world feel smaller and more confusing. It’s weird, and also Conker doesn’t appear at all.

On top of this, I found the multiplayer experience itself frustrating. To unlock the full Chapter X, you need to play the first three maps on easy, then you can go through the whole six. But I couldn’t pass the first one on normal difficulty! The “Dumbots” seemed to have so much health and impeccable aim, while the action was so chaotic, obscured by intrusive UI, floating usernames, and smoke and other effects with loads of characters milling around, not to mention the confusing map layouts, the friendly fire, the instant respawns, and the spawncamping. Luckily I could play the maps themselves in solo mode with cutscenes and adjustable AI and options.

I found some classes much more satisfying than others. I tried to like the Long Ranger and the slow Demolisher, but found it difficult to be accurate. The awkward range of the Thermophile and the Sky Jockey’s rarely effective vehicles made them uncommon choices. I had most success with the simple Grunt, or the melee-range Sneeker (the SHC variant of which is sadly the sole playable female in the whole thing). You can pick up upgrade tokens during gameplay to expand the toolset of each class, which range from necessary to situational. But ultimately it’s a crapshoot, as I rarely felt that my intentions led to clear results.

Live & Reloaded is such a mess. The Reloaded BFD is full of odd decisions and baffling drawbacks, while the Live portion feels undercooked. I’d have preferred a greater focus on either one; a remake is unnecessary, especially only four years on, but a new single-player adventure would have been ace. And a multiplayer mode in this universe with its own story mode could be cool if it was better balanced and had more to it than just eight maps. As a source of some slight scrapings of new Conker content I appreciated it to some extent, but I can’t help being let down. I guess it’s true what they say... the grass is always greener. And you don’t really know what it is you have, until it’s gone... gone. Gone.

Yes, that ending is still genuinely emotionally affecting.

[telephobos]

Trope x2?

A.I. is a Crapshoot

To say that Tartar went rogue would be an understatement. The AI became jaded and corrupt after seeing that the cephalopods were going down the same route that humanity was-- something that was part of his directive to prevent from happening. Seeing that he was unable to stop them, he snapped and lost it, creating the Kamabo Corporation as a result. 

The Cake is a Lie

Collect four thangs, and reach the Promised Land! What could go wrong? HA HA HA. 

[cgdbrd-blog]

“Trope”

FOR EVERY TROPE...

BENEVOLENT AIAI isn't always a crapshoot; sometimes an AI comes into being and has no desire to harm or subjugate anyone, and just wants to live in peace, do its job, and/or help humanity. 

although athena may have started out as a god ai, she has since allowed herself to be shackled and detained to protect the humans she loves. she did not put up a fight when the un shut down overwatch, though the fear of death was always near, and was “turned off” rather peacefully as the last watchpoint was condemned. of course, now that winston has brought her back, she’s ready to fight to protect her humans, her agents, and the allies they have gained throughout the years.

[dustxechoes]

trope trope trope trope trope!

AI is a Crapshoot

Big Fucking Sword

Attack! Attack! Attack!

Black and White Insanity

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

Things could have been much, much worse for the inhabitants of AceSpace,

if the Maneaters or social-media devices had any level of sentience.

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

In ‘The Arse of Good’, a simple people worshipped an artificial intelligence named Herma,

not realising that it had actually enslaved them to its own ends, and only the Inspector’s unplanned visit freed them from Herma’s control.

[inspectorspacetimerevisited]

Some robots are nice and helpful; others are pure evil.

That’s what makes it difficult to automatically judge races based upon their appearances.