So You Think You're Free?

Disclaimer: This posting contains science, maths and philosophy, some (or all) of which I may have misinterpreted, miscalculated or misconstrued in various ways. I profess that I am a poor philosopher and an even worse scientist and mathematician. Feel free to pick apart my argument or examine holes in my logic. But if Philosophy of Science has taught me anything it is that it is better to say what you think and look stupid than to simply keep quiet. :)

Video games are only just beginning to experiment with the idea of player choice. In the past, the vast majority of games followed a single pre-determined path: You played the game, beat the final boss and that was it: Job done, roll credits, put the game back in the box and onto the next one. But we are currently in the midst of a slow but gradual revolution in games design, where the ending is not absolute and your choices will influence the course of the game's events. Gameplay is beginning to introduce a number of limited aspects of player choice into our gaming experiences, and more detailed, intuitive and realistic choices are only just around the corner. However, at the moment the nature of the choices and the way they have been implemented into games is creating an unnatural, false sense of reality, where all choices are made along a defined probability axis (otherwise known as Black vs. White, Renegade vs. Paragon, etc.). This determined, strictly controlled reality is a dangerous trap to fall into, because it will very soon limit the degree to which the player can ever truly interact with a gaming environment, or influence the plot. Now is the time to fight to preserve genuine player choice, and prevent our freedom from slipping away. French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said that "man is condemned to be free". Let us stop being condemned to be determined within our games. This is why I believe that we must bring new principles into games design and this is how I intend to make video game history: By positing the creation of video games which are completely random. How can we achieve this? The answer to that is quite interesting.

Before we can understand how current iterations of player choice can constrict gaming freedom, we must first recognise why a gaming environment has always been a determined one. As GLaDOS once said, let's look at a real world example. When you walk down the street, random events of which you have no prior knowledge are likely to happen. A man could for example run out of a shop saying that his wife had just hit him with her handbag and you would have no prior indication that that event was going to happen. As far as we are aware (assuming the world itself isn't determined) it was a random event. Now we can look at video games. If you walk down a street in a game, and a character runs out of a shop saying his wife has just hit him with her handbag, the chances of that event happening are never going to be random: They have been determined from the beginning. Either the event is definitely going to happen (often called scripted events) or the event has a definite chance of happening, but might not ('random' events, although this is a very bad misnomer). An example of a series of scripted events could be the beginning of Half-Life 2: Dr. Freeman starts off on the train, walks through the station and out into the plaza. No matter how many times you play the game, all of the characters will remain in the same locations and will always deliver the same lines, and moreover, Freeman must proceed along a strictly linear path. Chance, or so-called random events are best characterised by encounters in RPGs. Whilst wondering through the Mojave Wasteland in Fallout: New Vegas, you might meet a group of bandits who want to acquaint you with the finer points of their baseball bats, but equally you might happen upon a Bloatfly, or a Radscorpion. The chance of meeting an enemy is determined according to a probability equation, taking into account your location, enemies you've met previously, and player level. In this fashion, it is unlikely the player will ever be confronted with something which is impossible to defeat. The world is scaled to meet your expectations. Clearly, this isn't anything like real life.

So, games currently make use of both certainty and probability in their design, and a combination of scripted events and chance encounters inevitably make up much of the gameplay experience today. Depending upon the game in question, the percentages will alter upon whether you are playing a predominantly scripted or more a randomised game. But is it possible to have a game where the player is truly free? Where nothing has been planned by the games designer, aside from setting the stage for the game to play out from? I believe that this will, at some point in the future be possible thanks to one of the most important scientific breakthroughs of the 20th Century: Quantum mechanics. At the moment, computers can use pseudo-random number generators (and hardware random number generators) to approximate a "random" choice, but neither of these is fully random. If you know the algorithm and the conditions in which it was set in motion, you can predict the results. Something truly random cannot be predicted. Our universe at the quantum level is truly random and chaotic: Things happen at such a speed and complexity that we still understand very little of it. Is it possible to take the principles of quantum mechanics, the power of this randomised, chaotic universe and use them in computing? The answer is yes and research is already well underway to build and run functioning quantum computers. For example only last month the Lockheed Martin Corporation entered a contract to buy the world's first commercial quantum computer. These computers use qubits rather than bits to process information. Please don't ask me how they work because I haven't the foggiest, but if you're interested Wikipedia goes into some detail about them. So in the end my dream is quite simple: To have the world's first quantum computer game, playing on a quantum computer. I expect it will take decades or maybe centuries before quantum computing becomes commonplace, but I believe that it will happen eventually. And maybe, just maybe, then we will really be free.

If you're interested in further reading, here are some interesting articles:

Quantum Minesweeper: Scientific journal article in which Michal and Goren Gordon examine how a game of Minesweeper would work using quantum computing.

Will the QC Kill the PC?: Article in The Daily Telegraph which discusses various aspects of quantum computing, including application in video games.

Quantum Superposition in Video Games: Two great videos which demonstrate excellently the endless possibilities which quantum computing could bring to gaming.

A Brief History of Quantum Computing: Very readable history courtesy of Simon Bone and Matias Castro at Imperial College London: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_97/journal/vol4/spb3/