I popped into London’s Barbican Centre last week to see the new exhibition about artificial intelligence – AI: More than Human, it’s called. I considered myself peak target audience, not because I’ve read a couple of Isaac Asimov stories and not because I’ve seen Deus Ex: Machina, although that was a good film – Poe was great wasn’t he? It’s not because I’m a particular AI geek at all. It’s because of video games.
The AI: More than Human exhibition runs at London’s Barbican Centre until 26th August. Tickets are £15 through the week and £17 at weekends and on bank holidays.
We hear about AI in the games world all the time. Every year, it seems like we’re being promised the most realistic villagers ever, or the cleverest footballing opponents, or the most aggressive baddies with guns. “They will learn and adapt to style of play!” God, how many times have we heard that? So when I walked into the Barbican exhibition, I expected video games to be everywhere.
And I looked. And I looked. But I couldn’t find them.
I did find a racing game, elbowed into the corner, but I couldn’t figure out which one it was (there was no sign I could see) nor why it was there (on the Barbican website, there’s a picture of what looks like a four-player racing game, called 2065, but I couldn’t find it). Maybe it was the F1 game Martin really liked.
I did also play around in a room-sized game where you used your shadow to interact with giant Chinese letters falling from ceiling to floor, and in doing so triggered animations and music. “Gently interactive”, the lady on the door called it, and so it was – gentle nice. I saw something which looked like a video game simulating character behaviour in real-time, too. But nothing else. No AI director from Left 4 Dead, no roaming alien from Alien: Isolation, which, it only just occurred to me, has the initials AI! No apparent nod – and I was looking thoroughly – to this huge entertainment medium that we enjoy and that is so often on the crest of technological advancement. The entertainment medium so preoccupied with AI.
Books and films got a nod. Philip K. Dick got a nod, Isaac Asimov got a nod, Star Wars and Frankenstein got nods. So why not games – not important enough? Misunderstood?
But it would be wrong to say games didn’t feature at all. A great deal of attention was given to the iconic man-versus-machine showdowns we’ve had in centuries-old games chess and go (the Chinese board game) over the years: the Garry Kasparov versus IBM Deep Blue computer chess match in 1997, and the Lee Sedol versus Google DeepMind AI go match in 2016.
Otherwise, gaming as we know it was absent (OK, I tell a lie, there was a tiny model Minecraft golem and I did see Kinect cameras sandwiched under an installation I wiggled my body in front of – at least someone’s getting some use out of them eh?) and it irked me. It’s as if all the thought behind AI in games hadn’t amounted to enough even to warrant a mention – decades of hard work snubbed. And in favour of what? A retro-hairdryer-pod you stand in to smell an extinct Hawaiian tree from the ’70s? Yeah, bad example, that pretty cool.