Tripping Over the Future: We’ve Already Given NPCs Life as The Blue Shirt Guy 1.0
In the course of our short lives, whether through scientific research and analysis or metaphysical reflection and exploration, we may not know whether we have true freedom or not; but this does not prevent us from being able to express our sincere and passionate thoughts, make firm and unrepentant choices, and earnestly experience every real moment of our lives, as we wish.
In most cases, as intelligent beings in the real world, it is important to defend our initiative, but when we put aside our prejudices about life and will, we can understand that in the virtual world there can also be virtual people and virtual species that can actively participate in building, changing and developing the virtual world.
In a world where their intelligence should not be subsumed into the categories we discuss in most contexts, and where their behavior and lifestyles are not dictated by the fixed and complex rules we define. They are born free.
Must it be so? It has to be!
From Passivity Out of Control to Active Awakening
Humans have always been alone. From ancient times, humans have longed to speak with another intelligent being.
We, therefore, create fantasy creatures such as demons, subhumans, and cosmic beings, and like a playful child, we pinch one of our best friends out of clay. But Free Guy is different from this, it advocates that humans should develop inward: fantasy creatures may be far away, but artificial intelligence is achievable, and in the foreseeable future, AI-powered virtual creatures may become the initial companion or partner of humans in the virtual world.
In essence, Free Guy is a story about an intelligent NPC in a game world. However, unlike traditional stories, Free Guy does not focus on the gamer, but on a seemingly ordinary game NPC as the main character. He does the same actions every day and lives a fixed life: he wakes up from bed every day, says hello to his pet goldfish, puts on all the same blue shirt, then orders a cup of coffee on his way to work, greets others he meets on the street with a warm and friendly smile, and even to those who are there to rob the bank he works at…
These are driven by fixed and limited, and all-too-familiar behavior trees in the minds of some game developers.
However, in the long-term interaction with players, driven by AI, he keeps accumulating data, learning players’ behaviors, and transforming them into his own experience and knowledge. One day, his self-awareness suddenly awakens under a chance external stimulus, and he is no longer satisfied with his routine “life”, generating human-like emotions of chasing love and freedom, and in doing so, starts an adventure story.
If Ready Player One has given gamers and entrepreneurs a vision for VR/AR technology and experiences, then Free Guy’s greatest significance is that for the first time, more people are realizing that self-aware virtual characters can not only bring new meaning to the virtual world experience represented by games but also allow us in the real world to participate in the building and development of native virtual worlds and create unique emotional connections with these virtual people and creatures in every real moment. It also allows us in the real world to participate in the construction and development of our native virtual worlds, and to establish a unique emotional connection with these virtual people and creatures in every real moment.
On some level, when virtual characters have self-will, such a virtual world is no longer just a “game”, but more as a way of life and experience beyond the game. Only when we and they no longer have to overcome non-essential obstacles such as killing, looting, and collecting objects, completing tasks to obtain pleasure, we can truly feel and gain love and peace.
The Many Coincidences Born of Consensus
In the movie, the city made up of countless “real” NPCs is the most attractive feature of the game “Free City”. And many of the settings about the virtual characters coincide surprisingly well with what we at rct AI have been sticking to and working on.
In the context of history, whether it’s the movie Free Guy, what we’re doing, or what other teams are working on to make happen, there are plenty of signs that when a large number of unconnected people around the world share a common vision and idea at one point in time and have made some initial breakthroughs, that common vision is the future that will inevitably happen. This is the consensus of human civilization.
After the release of Free Guy, countless friends and players in the industry around the world sent us messages and marveled at the ability of the Disney team to portray our vision and persistence in such a touching and emotional way. We had never had any contact or communication with the Free Guy creative team before, nor had we ever drawn on each other’s ideas and visions.
Free Guy first released its first trailer in late 2019, and it’s only fair to admit that at the time our team saw the not-so-informative trailer, we were already very excited. We knew very well that whether or not the film would end up being seen by a wider audience or enjoyed by more people, we would have been convinced that on the other side of this huge ocean in front of us would be a new land for humanity.
And it was in mid-2019 that we started our algorithm iteration and model training for a bank robbery scenario, and finished the first playable demo of the game scenario and the algorithm behind it by the end of 2019.
Frankly, we didn’t expect Free Guy to be able to deliver such an exciting and heart-pounding performance of AI-enabled intelligent NPCs from the perspective of a movie.
Because before 2019, the combination of games and AI is still in the very early stage of industry exploration. Most people will probably think of “ counter AI” like AlphaGo and OpenAI Five, which easily defeat the best human players. The point of their existence is to learn and master gameplay, to quickly master very high game skills through continuous training, to prove that “AI can outperform humans in certain skill scenarios”, and to rekindle the hope of AGI (General Artificial Intelligence) for academia and industry as the most practical technological application breakthrough in the direction of reinforcement learning.
In our vision, the avatars born in virtual worlds or the Metaverse are fundamentally different from such AI: we are not looking for whether these virtual creatures can beat the player. What we care about is whether they can have the same colorful personalities and hobbies, different bodies of knowledge and skills, and be able to take control of their own lives and build their own stories as we do. This is the most essential difference between virtual people and virtual creatures, or more accurately called Virtual beings, and these traditional games counter AI or game companion AI.
And we at rct AI have stuck to one thing for the past three years in such a vision, and that is to build real brains for these virtual beings and to allow more developers, more players to build these virtual beings themselves in a simpler way and to raise them by interacting with them.
It can be said that the form of the NPCs in Free Guy is the form that we hope to achieve in the game scenario. Even at the current stage of our technology, or even the best technology in the academic and industry as of now, there is still a long, long way to go before the “awakening” of NPCs as shown in the movie. Nevertheless, this is a long march of human civilization, and we, as one of the first pioneers to blow the trumpet of the long march worldwide, as a young and brave generation, have long been trekking forward on the snowy mountains without fear of the wind and storm.
The video below is a demo of a live demo that we implemented at the end of 2019, not a bank scene from Free City, but a bank scene that we created out of thin air with the characteristics of the American West.
This is the first time we’ve made public this demonstration of the effects of our development process. Before this, you may have heard a little bit about The Extractors, a technical validation prototype we released last year. Yes, the experience shown in this video is the predecessor of The Extractors experience. We used our technology, the Chaos Box algorithm, and it was the first game scenario that we actually developed together with the algorithm and eventually tapped into the algorithm model.
At the time, we gathered a large number of talented people with the same vision, including our algorithm team, core development members and leads from Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, and some writers and planners from Hollywood, to create a bank robbery worldview and narrative experience set in the American West based on our understanding and portrayal of the Metaverse.
In this scenario, players can choose different actions or say different words at each moment, thus triggering a series of reactions from all other NPCs in the scenario for a very dynamic and free plot experience. The top of the interface shows the behavioral decisions made by each important NPC at each moment according to the changes in the surrounding environment, while the left side shows the changes of some key status attributes of each character. In the simulation and training process, each NPC is behind an intelligent body, and we have considered many modules that can affect emotions in the state of these intelligent bodies.
We have also posted an article on our official website that presents an outline of some of the engineering methods and technical details of our implementation behind this bank robbery experience.
When we deployed the Chaos Box algorithm, completed the development of the game scenario, and applied the algorithm to the game scenario in the video above, we were surprised to find many effects beyond our imagination.
Starting with the phrase “This is a robbery! Nobody be a hero, and gets down!” when the player enters the bank and ending with several specific exits that we preset for the scene, any dialogue and behavior that occurs between the player and bank tellers, managers, customers, and companions will create a dynamic and personalized plot path and experience.
As for why there is such a magical coincidence with Free Guy, which both chose a scene of bank robbery and even AI-generated lines are strikingly similar, which only we, who were founded in Hollywood and have worked our way through the industry and market in Europe and America, will understand.
It must be admitted that making this video public does not mean we are making our own 3A game. We all understand what 3A games mean to China’s game industry, which is why we chose to collaborate with one of the very few game teams in China with top-notch 3A development capabilities, Umi Games, on their 3A project at the end of 2020.
However, we were also aware that a full 3A game experience would mean an enormous amount of human and capital support for a startup, which was more than we could afford at this stage. So in the second half of 2020, we released a lighter, more revealing prototype of the technology itself, The Extractors, to the public based on the same setup and further iterations of the algorithm.
This is the first time our core technology, the Chaos Box algorithm, has been officially and publicly tested and experienced by users. Within 24 hours of releasing The Extractors, we received far more attention than we expected.
We are aware that the algorithm model and gameplay experience carried by this technology demo, although they have already shown the experience and effect that traditional technology cannot achieve, objectively they are still in the early stage and there is still very much room for improvement.
As Free Guy says, the NPC that emerged with autonomous consciousness experienced perhaps tens of billions of interactions with real users before gaining the ultimate “awakening”. This needs to be landed and applied in many scenarios to provide AI with a large amount of real user data for learning and evolution, allowing them to gradually generate self-awareness and be able to make independent decisions in different environments, thus truly gaining their freedom.
Keep Your Feet on the Ground and Gaze Up at the Stars
Free Guy is not only about our past, but also about our vision of ourselves for many years to come.
As a young startup at an early stage, we are taking one step at a time and moving quickly into the future. As we further advance our commercialization, we are also deepening our mutual understanding and cooperation with game developers and the game industry.
In the past few months, we have been working with several global commercial game giants and top game studios to make significant progress, and our services have been launched in different overseas markets, and the number of real users who have access to our services and are active is growing rapidly. At the same time, we hope to bring you more amazing experiences in the next six months, a year, or even longer, and a series of heavy cooperation will be released one after another in the next six months.
Although in the beginning, the technology may not be perfect to achieve the ideal ultimate effect; but as the game Life Itself created by Keys and Millie in the movie, it is very important for the AI to have more players to give more tolerance and understanding at the beginning, and to grow and evolve together with the AI through more data generated by the interaction.
Fortunately, while we are all well aware that this involves a series of difficulties both in terms of implementing and breaking through the technology itself, and in terms of obtaining continued support through commercialization, we have met many partners along the way who share a common vision for the future, and who is full of courage and risk-taking, and who continue to provide us with all kinds of help and support.
In addition to the deep cooperation with the game development process and game experience, the standardized solution we launched, Meta Being, also has several landing cases, from applications in-game scenarios, to applications in pan-entertainment scenarios and NFT scenarios, and we are ready for the next stage of large-scale commercialization so that more developers can use our platform to create their avatars and freely deploy them to any content experience.
We are sure that there will be more than one Metaverse, and each Metaverse will require the joint efforts of many parties to realize. Therefore, we welcome all Metaverse creators to collaborate with us to create virtual worlds in parallel universes, one after another.
There is no denying that there are many seemingly easy things we can do to accomplish our business goals quickly, but as a team that cares about the future of humanity and the development of society, we care more about whether we can bring sustainable value and development to everyone in the real world and members of the virtual world at the same time, at some point in the future, while practicing our mission as a company and gaining commercial revenue.
That is why we put the pursuit of social responsibility in front of commercialization and always insist on doing the things that are difficult but right.
Last But Not Least
This thing we are doing will certainly face a lot of difficulties and risks, which also necessarily corresponds to extraordinary values.
At such a point in history, a series of consensus continues to emerge from the level of all humanity, and naturally, there is a great force pushing the wave forward. Undoubtedly, we can understand the many reasons behind it, but we hope more than anything that this force can lead civilization and science, and technology forward and progress.
Whether it’s our partners, our existing investors, or the many people who support us, we all want to bring long-term and sustainable value to society. In this regard, we are united and firm in our consensus.
Just like the final ending of Free Guy, for Millie and Keys, when they have been able to achieve “real” AI, even if this AI only exists in another virtual world far below the dimension of the real world, but it can bring impact and value to society as a whole, it has become far more than the profits sequels like “Free City 2”, “Free City 3” could bring.
Don’t human beings need to have such strong beliefs and dreams to pursue the meaning of their existence in the present moment?
As a startup team, we are down-to-earth and do our best to make our technology blossom in different fields and scenarios; as a group of young people with dreams and beliefs, we are also grateful to this era that there are so many people with common beliefs joining us and partners from different fields supporting us all the time.
To be very frank, we are not strong enough now, and we need more partners to join us to step into such a future. We are always happy to welcome friends who want to join us at any time to create and embrace the future with us!
