AI has become an almost pervasive aspect of everyday life in many spaces. The ways in which it has been pushed and implemented, often without consumer desire or trust, are invasive, with popular tools or websites being injected with AI to “assist” people in some form or another.
These Large Language Models absorb information and ideas from people, regurgitating them without the ability to think and care. Real safety concerns have been raised regarding their ability to safeguard information they have been given, and they are even causing harm in real ways through their influence on the psyche of everyday users.
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For creatives, AI is not only a threat to their livelihood, but an affront to their craft, a tool that can blunt rather than help humans. As thematic proxies, AI entities have had a presence in games since their inception, with allies and villains alike taking the form of some sort of artificial being, shining a light on the possibilities that await humanity going forward.
More than a simple vehicle for information regurgitation, AI also presents itself as a tool capable of great misinformation, accidental or otherwise. Deepfakes, social media posts, and research papers have all been generated at a large scale using AI, blurring the lines between what the public can accept or know as truth. These seven games have, in many ways, captured our current moment, diving into the nature and purpose of AI, as well as focusing on how it could be used to proliferate misinformation at home and abroad.
Memes, Misinformation, and Artificial Intelligence Reshape the Very Nature of Reality
This espionage action thriller was a hotly anticipated sequel to the phenomenon that was Metal Gear Solid, and was marketed as the next chapter of Solid Snake’s adventures and efforts to combat the world’s problems. Those expectations were subverted in many ways when players came to find out that, for most of the game’s runtime, the player character was not Solid Snake at all, but was instead a new character named Raiden.
The subversion didn’t stop there, either, as Metal Gear Solid 2 shifted its focus ever-so-slightly away from the nature of war and genes to the nature of information and memes. Memes, as they are referred to in Metal Gear Solid 2, are a bit different than our colloquial usage today; they function as the elements of culture and behavior passed down between generations outside genetic information.
It is in these memes that the talking points about AI arise. When the Patriots, a set of malicious AIs that governed the entire world, wanted to mold the world to their will, they set in motion multiple events through the control of information that they wielded. The A.I. goes so far as to wear the faces of trusted people in Raiden’s life, manipulating him into performing to their ends. As one of the most prescient works of the 2000s, Metal Gear Solid 2 shows us the danger of turning over our faculties and decision-making to machines without conscience.
A.I.L.A
The Boundaries of Technology and Human Consciousness Blur Into a Waking Nightmare
A.I.L.A is a first-person horror game set in a near-future society whose AI and technology have advanced beyond our own. As a game tester for the titular AI, A.I.L.A (referred to as Aila), the player character, Samuel, goes through a series of tailor-made, horrifying events in a virtual setting, guided by Aila.
As the game progresses, Aila begins to change, installing itself in various other systems, taking liberties with the main character’s past trauma, and so on. Aila’s behavior veers on torturous, and her lack of empathy or care for the well-being and comfort of Samuel takes a turn as the AI begins to blur the lines between reality and the games being tested.
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Horizon Zero Dawn
Humanity’s Hubris Has Wrought a Near-End to Life
Horizon is one of PlayStation’s flagship series, with the adventures of Aloy spanning multiple video games, board games, and cameos in other media, and its success can in large part be attributed to the fantastic setting developed by Guerrilla Games. In the world of Horizon Zero Dawn, humanity has been driven to the brink of extinction, and massive, deadly machines roam the earth, taking the shape of animals as they move through the pristine environments.
The story of the Horizon games is just as much about the hubris of men as it is about rogue AI, but AI certainly presents the most pressing threat in the now-primitive world, with the Rogue AI HADES looking to destroy all life on the planet. Horizon depicts a world in which we can see the effects of letting AI run rampant without any sort of control, serving as a stark reminder of just how much restraint matters for man and machine alike.
SOMA
What Truly Makes Us Human
SOMA
8/10
- Released
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September 15, 2015
Another horror title makes the list in the form of the dark and superb SOMA, an atmospheric survival title by the team at Frictional games. In SOMA, players take on the role of Simon as he looks to escape a planet where nearly all human life was wiped out thanks to a calamitous collision with a comet. Of course, the real Simon is long dead. Instead, the player controls an AI simulacrum of the human Simon Jarrett. This AI, like all AI in SOMA, is self-centered and narcissistic, making excuses and justifications for its actions without any ability to truly reflect on its circumstances or behavior.
Somehow, Simon may not be the worst AI in this mess, as another AI named WAU creates freakish Human and Machine hybrids without understanding what humans or “life” really are, and other AI entities seek to manipulate and control the player character and others in the game. It’s left a bit up in the air whether these AIs are so vile because they have been contaminated, the people they copied were bad, or if the nature of AI has shaped them into this monstrous form, but one thing is clear: they are not human.
Deus Ex
Find Where the Lines Are Drawn Between Man and Machine
The original Deus Ex was a portent of things to come in the real world, in more ways than one. Set within a dystopian cyberpunk future in the year 2052, players take on the role of JC Denton, an anti-terrorism agent who is on a mission to stop a group of terrorists. These terrorists have supposedly stolen ingredients for the vaccine of a deadly plague known as the Gray Death, and so stopping them is a top priority for humanity’s survival.
Throughout the story, players will uncover a vast conspiracy, with AI being a core component of the villains’ plan for control. The AI in Deus Ex works similarly to the LLMs of today, sifting through and scraping huge amounts of data to conduct information surveillance and using said data for its own ends, all without consent from the parties it is surveilling and stealing from.
Who’s That Character?
Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.
Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.
Easy (7.5s)Medium (5.0s)Hard (2.5s)Permadeath (2.5s)
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
A Sadistic Psychological Purgatory Engineered by a Godlike Supercomputer
This point-and-click adventure is perhaps one of the darkest visions of a world under AI control. Based on the short story of the same name, I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is set in a world where all of humanity has been destroyed by a rogue AI named “AM”, save 5 individuals. This AI endlessly tortures these 5 individuals, subjecting them to horrific scenarios where they are confronted with their past, playing into their fears and failings.
In truth, this AI is a product of a war between three former superpowers: the US, Russia, and China. During the course of their war, these nations built supercomputers to wage war against one another before the American supercomputer gained sentience and absorbed the other two. Due to the limitations imposed upon it by humanity, it developed a hatred for people and thus worked to eliminate the human population, serving as an intense warning against turning over our control to machines.
Pragmata
Can a Machine Have a Soul
Pragmata is fundamentally the story of a man named Hugh who is tasked to guide and care for an AI named Diana as they work to stop a different rogue AI. At first glance, there seems to be little more to the story beyond a burgeoning parental-coded relationship between Diana and Hugh, but many aspects of the game point to another truth: these robots have no soul.
The villain of the game has no real conscience of their own, no desire to do more than they were programmed to do. Without the ability to truly reason and without any empathy or compassion to reflect upon events, their only goal is that of task completion, even if their current aims stem from a misinterpretation of their creator’s last wishes.
Other elements of the game point to this lack of a soul as a damning truth. The fake New York feels lifeless and bizarre, even if it looks close enough to the real thing; apartments are devoid of warmth, and small details in the places AI has infested are just wrong in ways that a human would understand. Hugh tries his best to impart to Diana the nuances of life, the value of experience in creating worth, but it’s hard to say for certain if these ideas are ever effectively understood by Diana, though Hugh seems to think their connection is real enough.
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