Coprolites are fossilized dinosaur poop. They help us understand the diet of prehistoric animals and reveal the predator/prey relationship between them. They aren’t my favorite kind of fossil, but they are a solid number two.

People online are fond of telling you how you are having fun the wrong way. Sony has recently come up with an idea for a new way to make games more accessible. They have an application for a patent to add AI controlled “ghost players” to video games. Most gaming news I see casts this in a negative light, saying it will reduce player participation and cheapen the experience. Taking the other side, I say it will make games more accessible and approachable for a wider variety of players.

If you're a video game enthusiast, you've probably stopped playing a game because you found it too difficult or just couldn't figure out what to do next. Maybe you just got bored with it and gave up without ever getting to the ending. There are probably even acclaimed games that you'd love to play to see what everyone is raving about, but the game just isn't in a genre you feel particularly excited about, or requires skills you don't possess.

Sony's idea for ghost players isn't trying to bypass the player experience. It's about letting players choose the parts of the game that matter to them.

People engage with games for a variety of reasons. Some people will enjoy the entirety of a game's experience. Others enjoy only parts. An AI taking over and completing parts of a game you don’t enjoy will make more games attractive to wider audiences. Players will be able to pick and choose which parts of a game they want to play.

The classic breakdown of player motivations comes from Richard Bartle in 1996. He described players using his experience working on MUDs, an early text-only online roleplaying game. His taxonomy puts players in relation to their motivations and their preferred ways of interacting with the game and with other players.

Bartle goes on to explain how the different archetypes interact with each other and encourage each other to continue playing the game. There have been extensions and criticisms of the structure over the years. For instance, few players fall completely into a single category. Most will get varying amounts of reward from different aspects of each player type. For the purposes of our discussion about AI, the takeaway is that people have different motivations for playing games.

We don't like cheaters. When people claim achievements and accolades we feel they didn't earn, it seems to cheapen the achievements of others. Climbing to the top of Mt. Everest wouldn't be the same achievement as getting dropped off in a helicopter. Yes you made it to the top, but you probably shouldn't call yourself a mountaineer. We don't like people who lie about their achievements or break the rules to get advantage over others. When found out, cheaters are ostracized or banned from the game they're cheating at.

Sony's patent is a way for people to get hints or completely bypass challenging sections of a game. Some people are going to consider this cheating. This kind of thing has been around for a long time. Hint books, cheat codes, and outright skip buttons have been part of the games industry for decades. Even the first video game I ever wrote code for, Crimson Skies, let you flat-out skip a level if you failed it three times.

As another example, I’m not very good at battles in the popular video game Total War. But I do enjoy and play Total War because it gives me the ability to skip most combats, using some behind the scenes math to determine the outcome. Without the ability to skip combat, I would have put the game down a long time ago and never gone back to it or any of its sequels. I would have missed out on the story, characters, and game mechanics locked behind a task in the game that I find tedious and frustrating. Of course, I do miss out on the battles themselves because I'm not playing them, but I still get to enjoy the rest of the game.

Coming back to the Sony patent, should we consider it cheating if an AI completes some, or even all, of a game for you? The answer is "Probably, yes." Although in most cases I wouldn't use the word cheating. In a single-player game, if someone is getting some kind of aid, whether by looking up hints online, calling in a parent to solve a particularly difficult section of gameplay, or getting an AI to complete a section of gameplay, the only person really being impacted is the person playing the game. It's possible someone using these techniques will claim the achievement of having completed a game, possibly devaluing the achievement of others. But this isn't enough for us to start policing how people are spending their free time.

As with a lot of the talk around AI right now, it's not so much the thing AI is doing as it is the scale and methods used to do it. As it currently stands, if you beat a game, it means you (or someone you asked to help you) probably at least pushed the buttons necessary to get to the end of the game. With AI pushing the buttons, it's now a question whether even that's true or not. Perhaps every achievement will need to come with additional proof or an asterisk.

When I was making video games, accessibility was hardly mentioned, except for maybe mitigations for color blindness. Now the video game industry has made great strides in accessibility. A broader awareness has led to new kinds of adaptive controllers and a plethora of customizable settings in popular titles. Now, removing the need for a controller at all could help more people engage with video games and their social benefits.

Video games are not just about shooting aliens. There are a lot of great stories inside them. Games like Among Us and Baldur's Gate 3 get into public consciousness and become cultural moments. People who can't play the game, either due to lack of skill or physical ability, get left out of an engaging form of media and excluded from the conversations around it. We don't accept excluding people from television shows and movies. We require captions and encourage audio descriptions. Video games should be no different.

We shouldn't accept excluding people from video games because of a disability. Including as many people as possible is the right thing to do and makes good business sense. Something like what Sony is proposing, if built at the platform level, could better allow people to engage with games and everything great about them. Increasing the number of people who can play games means more wallets that can open to buy your products.

The whole discussion around this patent reminds me of a commercial for Uncharted where the girlfriend wants to watch her boyfriend play because she thinks it’s a movie. Using AI to bypass game mechanics will make more games an activity everyone can participate in without having to master every mechanic. We already accept skip buttons of in-game cinematics for the players that are just there for the mechanics. AI ghost players could be a new kind of skip button for the type of player who wants to engage with the game's story and social aspects.

I'm not all in on AI like a lot of people. I wrote about how AI isn't fulfilling its promise in an earlier post. I think AI is a tool. Like any other tool, it can be applied well in some cases and poorly in others. Sony's proposal to make games more accessible and less frustrating is a case where it can be used well. I recommend ignoring anyone lamenting games becoming "too easy" or the achievements won coming at too low of a cost. People who are telling you that you're having fun the wrong way should be ignored.

For more on the Sony patent and player motivations, check out the links below.

The chimegalodon is a titanic ocean dweller featured in drunken sailor’s tales and the final, hasty scribbles of ship logs. Vast tentacles coil and uncoil beneath the waves, each thick as a ship’s mast, while its three heads cast about with gazes ranging from hunger to unfathomable cunning. It's dim form is longer than any ocean vessel beneath the waves. When it surfaces, the sea seems to boils as it lashes its tentacles.

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