Hey guys. I debated writing this and honestly I may not post it or even delete it when I’m done. I just felt like I had to get some things off my chest that I recently experienced.
I was on youtube the other day procrastinating from writing a final paper for my psych class. I’d done all the research and just had to type it up but I didn’t feel like focusing on it. I was watching some football highlights and then switched to a Markiplier let’s play for a bit. When the video ended, one of the “suggested for you” videos was another Markiplier, but the other was a strange thumbnail that I didn’t recognize. It was two people dressed in old-timey settler clothes but animated in sort of a crude Pixar style.
What I could see in the small image, they both looked sad and depressed. The woman held flowers at her side and looked at the ground while the man was looking at her. Intrigued, I clicked the link. The page loaded and the first thing that caught my attention was the title. It wasn’t like a normal video title, but a collection of letters and characters. The only legible thing among them was “Croatoan.” The uploader was also a set of random numbers, letters and symbols and the profile had no picture. The video itself only had 4 views and the profile 1 subscriber so I wondered how it ended up in my suggested videos. Maybe he was running ads or something.
The lost colony AI video game started and immediately a game menu displayed on my screen. The background was a picture of an old pilgrim village. The menu only had options for “Start Game,” “Settings” and “My Characters.” Interestingly enough there was no option to leave game or exit. This did not look like a modern game, with the buttons and background image appearing in low resolution. The title “Croatoan” looked like it had been copied and pasted directly from Microsoft word. I glanced at the timer and saw that the whole video was only 5 minutes long.
A mouse cursor flew into the screen and hovered over the settings button for a moment before moving up to the “Start Game” option. So far the video had been completely silent, but when the player clicked, a single church bell sounded. The screen went black and then a few lines of text appeared. I haven’t gone back to look at it yet, but it said something to the effect of “This game uses generative AI. Developers not responsible for interactions with NPC’s.”
Interesting, I thought. I’d heard of some video game developers beginning to experiment with AI chat for their games, but it was still in the early stages of testing. I was surprised that such a low budget looking game already used it. The cursor clicked “Start Game” and the screen went to black. There was a long pause like it was loading and this bizarre violin-synth music started playing. It was like four long notes and it kept repeating over and over.
The screen finally faded back into the image of the town. There were four or five log cabins that stood along a dirt path. Beyond the cabins everything was shrouded in a light mist. Several people dressed in colonial outfits walked along the path, some talking with one another. I immediately noticed that the graphics looked to be very outdated. The menu screen was able to hide it with a single rendered image, but now that I was seeing how things moved, I could tell how old they were. The rendering itself was about on par with a PS2 game, but the movements themselves were what stood out the most. The NPC’s didn’t walk so much as they floated over the ground, with their legs moving arbitrarily. They raised and lowered their arms in static, jerky movements as they talked. It was weird, but I figured not terrible for a low-budget indie game.
The video had the player begin to walk forward and approached one of the NPC’s, a man wearing a pilgrim hat and holding a chicken. After years of playing Skryim, I expected him to do a standard greeting, but instead he just stood there, motionless. A prompt appeared on the screen asking “do you want to chat?” Curiously enough, the only option was “Yes,” which the player clicked. A dialogue box appeared and they began typing.
This was my first indication that something was off about this video. The player had no mic, so I saw the text silently appear on the screen. It said, “Do you remember me?” before hitting enter. The man remained frozen for a moment as the AI processed this question. Then a digitized voice said “Yes, I remember you. Welcome back.” I jumped slightly, not expecting the response to be vocalized as opposed to text. What was also surprising was that the mouth actually moved to speak the words. It was as crude as the rest of the animation, but seemed more or less accurate to say the words. Another dialogue box appeared, but the player moved away and it vanished.
They moved away and walked a bit further down the path. The mist that surrounded the buildings was so thick in some spots that you could barely see the ground. They approached a woman now and as they got close, the same prompt appeared to speak with only the option to say “Yes.” In the dialogue box, they wrote the same question, “do you remember me?” The woman remained still for a moment then said in the same digitized voice, just higher pitch, “Yes, I remember you. It’s so great to see you.” Again, her mouth moved more or less correctly to the words she was saying. In the response box they wrote “I wish you didn’t remember.” Clearly this wasn’t the guy’s first playthrough.
The woman stared at him for a moment, then said “It’s not your choice. Now I think it’s about time you got to work.” Through the digitized vocalization there was an intensity to her words I couldn’t quite place. Like she wasn’t asking kindly, but rather making sure he did was he was asked.
The player didn’t move for several seconds, the dialogue box cursor blinking. Then he slowly wrote, “Okay.” After the words sent, she smiled and walked away.
With that the player closed the dialogue box, turned away from the woman and opened his inventory. In it I saw a few items you’d expect for a game like this: some raw materials such as wood, metal and cloth, two rabbit skins with cooked rabbit meat and two weapons: an ax and a bow and arrow. He selected the ax. It appeared in his hand as he made his way further into the village. Other villagers walked past him. Some looked up to acknowledge him, others just kept walking. Up ahead was a kid playing with rocks in the sand. He looked to be maybe 7 or 8, but it was still hard to tell with the animation quality. The player walked up, raised the ax and brought it down on the kid’s head.
“No!” I said out loud, momentarily forgetting that I was watching a let’s play of a video game. A split second after the ax made contact, the screen went black. I thought for sure I saw the spray of blood in the brief moment before the video ended. I sat there gaping at my computer screen. The entire video was certainly bizarre, but it wasn’t until that last second that it had turned into something truly horrific. Talk about going from 0 to 60. And it’s not like I’d never seen anything like that in another video game. But something about this killing struck me. Maybe it was the suddenness of it and how the kid was just minding his business. Or maybe it was how realistic the blood effect was compared to the crude, blocky animation of the rest of the game.
To be continued...
Comments