In a post last week about Steam’s unhelpfully vague generative AI disclosure policies, Nic touched on “that most insidious side-effect of GenAI”, the culture of paranoia it has bred among players who find themselves peering at every remotely uncanny piece of video game art, hunting for signs of machine-learning metastasis. Given the lack of transparency about the latest genAI tools, these AI-watchers often do their communities a real service, but there’s the risk of art that is merely generic or worse, simply unusual being flagged as generated. The problem goes well beyond games, of course: I’ve been accused myself of faking whole articles because I’ve done counter-intuitive things with the framing that read a little like the output from a text scrambler.
I’ve been trying to think of an experience that captures this hypervigilance, and I guess it could be Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood’s old social stealth multiplayer mode, in which players hunt and kill each other on maps populated by their computer-controlled clones.
I don’t think Brotherhood’s multiplayer was ever brilliant, but I always found it fascinating, because at its best, it was an exercise in learning to act like an NPC and thus, a form of critical thinking about the intricacies of NPC design. Here’s an example of how a round of Brotherhood Free-For-All might go: I’m strolling through the marketplace with three of my clones – just four ordinary courtesans on a tour of the city, with absolutely no dark intent.
The crowds around us consist of identical blacksmiths, harlequins, barbers, footpads, knights and other courtesans, all wearing the same expression of surly bovine passivity. While my demeanour may appear similarly glacial, I am actually a frenzy of calculation. I am trying to do a number of things as we move. Here’s an incomplete list:
1. Walk at the same speed as my robot companions as they follow what I imagine to be invisible, branching patrol paths from one side of the market to the other
2. Look for places along those hypothetical paths where I can convincingly break formation and amble down a side alley, should any approaching “NPC” give me the willies
3. Stay in the middle of the group, using the others as cover
4. Avoid looking like I’m using the others as cover, by haphazardly straying to the flanks or taking the lead where my “path-finding” appears to call for it
5. Navigate close to tactical terrain fixtures such as closeable doors and rope lifts, in case I need to flee
6. Again, avoid looking like I’m doing this
7. Try my very best not to walk into anyone or anything and have to change direction suddenly, because it’s during such moments that signs of human hesitation or panic are hardest to suppress
8. Try to stay roughly in the middle of the road, because that’s where an NPC would walk, right? Hugging a wall to stave off attack from that side is what a person would do
9. Hug the walls, because staying roughly in the middle of the road is what a person who is trying to act like an NPC would do
10. Look for any opportunity to interrupt the line of sight from anybody else
11. Look out, belatedly, for the clones of my target, whose portrait glowers in the top right corner
12. As and when I see an NPC who could be my target, try to figure out how I can kill them unobserved by anybody I suspect to be human
13. Watch all passers-by constantly for signs that they are doing 1-12
In practice, a lot of Brotherhood multiplayer wasn’t nearly that tense or underhand. You had approximately the same parkour moveset as in single player, and when behind on points, spooked or simply bored, it was always hard to resist legging it up a wall or stabbing at random. The mood was also spoiled a little by the Animus interface, which (on regular settings, anyway) made its own inventory of the throng and nudged you towards the rival killers skulking amid their doppelgangers. I imagine Ubisoft added these HUD features in response to playtester confusion, but I’d much have preferred the experience with no Animus interference at all.
In general, it always felt like Ubisoft had no idea how to convert these social stealth mechanics into an online offering as compulsive as, say, Call Of Duty. Brotherhood and similar modes in later Assassin’s Creed games came with perks, streaks and other Modern Warfarisms that just felt, again, like white noise. Indie social deduction games like Brotherhood’s contemporary SpyParty were less encumbered by such triple-Aggravations.
Still, Brotherhood’s old multiplayer mode will always have a hold on my imagination. Brendy also used to be a fan: his face lit up like a Christmas tree when I mentioned it in this morning’s meeting. Graham, meanwhile, drew wistful comparisons with Ubisoft’s later Watch Dogs, in which you could pose as a citizen of another player’s world. It’s a tradition of multiplayer subterfuge Ubisoft have lost, I think, as they’ve joined the game-as-a-service goldrush and transformed Assassin’s Creed specifically into more of an open world RPG.
Did they ever consider bringing back Brotherhood’s social stealth modes for Assassin’s Creed Shadows? I doubt it, but it would certainly channel the prevailing mood about generative AI. Back at release in 2010, Brotherhood’s PvP offering spoke to worries about internet anonymity and especially, social media’s abundance of catfishers and sockpuppets. Nowadays, we have Among Us to help us vent and enjoy those anxieties. Instead, Brotherhood’s old PvP has come to feel like an eerily precocious staging ground for concerns and, perhaps, superstitions about undisclosed machine learning and AI hallucinations.
Its crowds of duplicates could easily be ChatGPT spawn running amok. Its premise of Templar killers honing their skills in a simulation made up of rich historical imagery reads like a prophecy for how today’s AI generators are “trained” on existing art and literature – often against the wishes of the original creators and, perhaps, in breach of their copyright.
With the good ship Live Service looking rather leaky, Ubisoft are currently trying to get in on the generative AI ‘boom’. They’ve come up with a “Ghostwriter” tool for features such as barks, and some prototype “NEOs” aka, “Newly Evolving NPCs”, which use InWorld technology to cobble together voiced responses to players on the fly.
InWorld’s AI tools rely on “information provided by users, website traffic, and potentially external sources like recruiters or educational institutions” – or so I am told by Google’s new AI Overview search tool, which saves me the labour of actually visiting their site. Imagine a Brotherhood-style multiplayer mode filled with Newly Evolving NPCs. Maybe they could flip the premise on its head, and have hundreds of humans stealthily scour the streets for a handful of generated assassins. Maybe this article, with its helpful tips on how humans think when they’re trying not to look like humans, will end up teaching those Newly Evolving NPCs how to slit our throats.