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Welcome to level up, where you can pick up new knowledge about games and level up as a gamer!
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27 OCT 2024 · [Introduction]
Have you ever harmed by verbal harassment in online multiplayer games? Are your game experience affected by too strict keyword filtering? Your troubles will be solved by AI in the future! In this episode, we're going to talk about AI tools monitoring in online multiplayer games.
Host: Aiqi Xu, the student journalist of University of Melbourne
Guest: Lucy Sparrow, Lecturer at the University of Melbourne in the School of Computing and Information Systems, specializing in human computer interaction.
[Transcript]
Aiqi Xu: Welcome to the Level Up where you can pick up a new knowledge about games and level up as a gamer. Here is Aiqi Xu. Today we are going to talk about the moderating of AI tools in online multiplayer games. And we are excited to have Lucy here and she is expert in digital ethics.
Lucy Sparrow: Thank you so much for having me on. I am Lucy Sparrow, so I'm a lecturer here at the University of Melbourne. My work is primarily in the field of human computer interaction.
Aiqi Xu: I'm curious about what made you decide on the research in the multiplayer gaming environment?
Lucy Sparrow: Yeah, so the main reason is basically that I love playing games.
Aiqi Xu: Yeah, I do.
Lucy Sparrow: You do?
[LAUGH]
Lucy Sparrow: I've always loved playing games since I was a really small kid and I thought I also really love research. So I thought, "Why don't I just combine two things that I really really like for my career?" And that's what I did, basically. Yeah, and I think they're just super fascinating worlds because I have this really strong belief that play is a really integral, an important part of being a human, of being alive. I think it's something that every single human being on Earth can relate to.
Aiqi Xu: We know where you are working on the AI tools, which is monitoring the game environments.
Lucy Sparrow: Yes.
Aiqi Xu: I'm wondering a question like, we know the strictness of different games, the modularization system is quite different. As a gamer, I find that we always rely on the keywords filtering, and the manual monitoring or the player reporting to protect the game environment. But for the AI tools, how can we determine the strictness of it?
Lucy Sparrow: Yeah, okay, so it gets quite complicated. So recently, I just presented a paper that I wrote with my team on AI moderation in multiplayer games, and particularly the ethics around it. And we found that basically people had quite different ways of understanding and viewing AI moderation. For some people, it was a really, really good way to make the game safer, because one of the benefits of AI over typical keyword kind of automated moderation is that, it at least claims to be better at detecting the context of a word. So it's not so important that say you say some kind of curse word, right? It might identify that curse word as problematic, but then look at it in the context of a sentence. And that could mean so if someone uses a word that it's contained within another word, or they use it in a positive kind of way, the AI technically is better able of detecting that than traditional keyword filters that would just say, "Hey, you used a bad word, and therefore..."
Aiqi Xu: So it can figure out the context of their conversation?
Lucy Sparrow: That's the claim. Yes, and that's what it's working towards. It's not necessarily always good at doing that, but because they're quite new tools, but the goal is that they get to a point.
Aiqi Xu: But what AI faced is also human, you know, there are some bad guys. They still try to produce some toxic contents, and they're always updating their words.
Lucy Sparrow: Yes, so that is, as you say, it's a really, really common thing in a lot of games. Gamers, players in particular are really, really well known for always trying to find a loophole, no matter what the rule, they will always try to find a way around it, right?
Aiqi Xu: There's kind of like the polyphone. They use another certain words, which pronounce similar to toxic words, like the beach, to the, that F word like this.
Lucy Sparrow: Yes, yes.
Aiqi Xu: So how do you feel about actions like this, to attempting to avoid being identified by AI tools?
Lucy Sparrow: So interestingly, when I was speaking to some AI, AI moderation developers, they said that they're aware of this issue, and it's an ongoing problem, right? So language is always updating so quickly, and people are always finding new ways to insult each other, basically, such that what they actually do is they hire social linguists, so people with a linguistic background to do research on the terms and the ways that people are using those terms online.
Aiqi Xu: So they try to predict it?
Lucy Sparrow: Yes, so they try to predict it. They try to be up to date constantly on the new words, and then they can feed the AI that information.
Aiqi Xu:I never think about that.
Lucy Sparrow: Yeah, it would be great.Yeah, I know. I was really surprised to learn that this profession suddenly has this new flavor.
Aiqi Xu: We look forward to seeing the AI tools actually using all over the world games. Like that. Thank you so much.
Lucy Sparrow: Thank you so much.
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[Background music]:
https://pixabay.com/zh/music/8-bit-music-on-245249/. Created by moodmode. CC-BY.
[Cover image]:
Create by Aiqi Xu.
27 OCT 2024 · [Introduction]
Have you ever met time loops in a game? Have you ever considered why the game uses such kind of narratives? It's actually narrativeized repetition in games, and this episode will talk about it with you!
Host: Aiqi Xu, the student journalist of university of Melbourne
Guest: Dr. Cass Barkman, senior tutor at the University of Melbourne in Media & Communications, specializing in the role narrative complexity plays in contemporary digital narratives.
[Transcript]
Aiqi Xu: Welcome to the level up, where you can pick up new knowledge about games and level up as a gamer. And here is Aiqi Xu. Today we are going to talk about the repetition in video game narrative. I'm excited to have Cass Barkman here. She is a doctor specializing in complex and passionate narratives. Welcome, Cass!
Cass Barkman : Thank you very much. I applaud as well!
Aiqi Xu: Today we're going to talk about the repetition in the video game narrative. The first time I came across a repetitive narrative was in "NieR: Automata," which is quite popular in China. It has quite complex story background; you will need to play through the whole game, going through the same mission, the same storyline with a pair of human-crafted and android partner. And the difference is, in the second time you play, you are controlling the one who with hacking function, which means you can have the ability to know more about the choose and the information of the story. So is this a narrativeized repetition right?
Cass Barkman : Yeah, I think so. I haven't played NieR: Automata myself so I can't speak to that exact experience. But I've seen it discussed a lot in video game context. It is a really interesting game in the way that it uses these repetitions and kind of narrativeizes right, like the active playing through the game is really really important to the narrative experience, you have to play it through it. Is it like eight or nine times to reach the true ending or something like that?
Aiqi Xu: Yeah. So the narrativeized repetition is really used flexibly and creatively in the game. So I'm curious about which game starts your interest in researching this kind of narrativeity?
Cass Barkman : Yeah, so the game I was initially introduced to this trend, I guess you can call it a narrativeized repetition in games, is this game that came out, I believe it was in 2019, called "Outer Wilds." I discussed it quite a bit in my thesis, and I am working on a publication on it right now as well. It's a game where basically you play as this lone astronaut in this solar system with all of these planets kind of rolling around the Sun. And the solar system is trapped in a time loop. So every single time after 22 minutes in game time passes, the Sun goes supernova, basically destroys the entire solar system, and you start again at the very beginning of the loop. So the experience of playing in the game is this really explicit form of repetition, where you essentially play it in 22-minute segments, going to different parts of the galaxy in each playthrough, building on your overall knowledge and understanding of what happens in the game world. So you're trying to uncover what happened to the previous alien species that was in the solar system, why the Sun is going supernova, how you can fix it, how you can break the time loop, so on and so forth. I found it a really meaningful and interesting game narrative experience in how it embodies this thing that is inherent in video games more generally. Like, repetition is a very normal thing, really mundane almost, in video games. Where we’re really used to it in the way that you might—oh, pardon me—where we’re really used to it in the way that you might save and reload saves to kind of play through the same sections over and over again, or when you die, you might replay through sections. So repetitions are really a normal part of the experience. But "Outer Wilds" takes that part of the experience and acknowledges it within the story world itself and makes it a key mechanic, which I thought was a really interesting sort of innovation. And it's an innovation that's been reflected in a lot of other video games that have come out, either both before it and since as well.
Aiqi Xu: Yeah, I have watched that game before, and the time loops sparked your curiosity since you don’t know what is happening for the first time you died and then you wake again. And the story is also about exploring the universe; it's full of physical things. So the time loops didn’t seem so weird; it integrates into the narrative. How do you think of the role of narrativeized repetition in video games?
Cass Barkman : Yeah, I think narrativeized repetitions play a really interesting role in video game narratives more generally because they've essentially narrativeized something that is already inherent to the medium. Like I said before, repetitions are a really normal part of video game experiences. And also, mainly what these games are doing—like "Outer Wilds," "NieR: Automata," and tons of other games—is acknowledging a way of playing the game within the story world itself. So that's essentially narrativeizing and sort of like almost meta-textually engaging with how video game stories function through this repetition, but making it a key part of the medium form. So I think, in many ways, they're almost like a really interesting intrinsic part of game narratives in that they are narrativeizing something that was already there in video games, but it just wasn't necessarily acknowledged in the story itself.
Aiqi Xu: So we can see that narrativeized repetition has quite a significant function in video games. I think that’s what we’re going to talk about today. And thank you, Case, for coming and sharing your insights.Thank you so much!
Cass Barkman : Thank you very much for having me!
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[Background music]:
https://pixabay.com/zh/music/8-bit-music-on-245249/. Created by moodmode. CC-BY.
[Cover image]:
Create by Aiqi Xu.
Welcome to level up, where you can pick up new knowledge about games and level up as a gamer!
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