My Machine Life (MML) is a series of philosophical explorations into consciousness and “spiritual machines”
Legendary Formula One champion Ayrton Senna once said that after a race car driver crosses a certain mental and physical threshold, the car drives itself – or so my mother used to say. In actuality, this is the quote from Senna, which is in reference to an experience he had on the circuit at Monaco in 1988:
“And suddenly I realised that I was no longer driving the car consciously. I was driving it by a kind of instinct, only I was in a different dimension. It was like I was in a tunnel.”
Maybe the car really was taking over – not consciously, but in the sense that it dominated Senna’s very being, and that every fiber in his body was devoted to making the machine run as fast as possible, even at great personal risk. In such a case, it is difficult to say exactly who was controlling what.
I am no F1 driver, but I can relate to Senna’s experience. I grew up playing a lot of computer and video games, even since preschool and kindergarten, with the heaviest amount of play occurring during my elementary school and middle school years. Quite a few times I experienced the “tunnel,” when my perception of the passage of time was altered: I would play for hours, even overnight, without resting.
When I look back on those times playing Command and Conquer and Final Fantasy and Starcraft and Counterstrike (and others) they were really my solace during times of loneliness and disquiet. And in my loneliness and isolation I formed a bond with (the) computer(s): They were my friends, my playmate when I had none. It didn’t matter if I was home in Taiwan or on summer vacation at my grandparent’s house in North Carolina. The computer was always there when friends my age were not.
A few years ago, I revisited that “tunnel” when playing Diablo 2, one of my favorite role-playing games. I had gotten so good at that game after years of playing it that again, the game almost played itself. It made me look back at my experiences playing computer games as being spiritual experiences, and it made me wonder: If I could could have a spiritual experience when playing with a computer, could a computer have a spiritual experience while playing with a human?
Admittedly, none of the machines I played with were capable of experiencing spirituality. But it has made me more aware of the possibilities of machine intelligence advancing to the point where such a threshold could be crossed. Where do we draw the line? When do we do it? Why?
Beyond what the machine alone can do, there is still the issue of what a machine can do in tandem with humans. To me, Senna’s mastery of the race car medium and the limits he and other drivers broke through represent a new frontier in the connection between humanity and machines. Indeed, the idea that the more perfect merger of human and machine could occur has captivated me, not the least because of my own experience with technology. Today’s F1 cars are packed to the brim with electronic sensors and controls, providing feedback to drivers at a level never seen during Senna’s time. Now the car actually can literally drive itself. But are we closer to the machine than Senna was? Or does new technology just make us more and more alienated from ourselves?
Thus are the dual foci of this blog: I want to focus on the possibility of “spiritual machines,” and explore the merger of humans and machines, which may itself lead to spiritual machines. This of course requires commentary on the nature of the machine-human relationship, and whether or not a machine can achieve consciousness. This is my machine life.
I hope you will enjoy this journey with me.
Thank you for reading,
Philip Hsu
In this blog arc, I will share and discuss some of the computer games I grew up with and how they may have impacted me as a person and as an artist. I have split my interaction with computer games (not video or handheld games, which would be even more) into 5 periods of my life until today and counted the games I remember playing, which totaled to 87 computer games:
Early Period, 3-7 years old: 27 games
Landmark Period, 7-11 years old: 13 games
High Period, 11 – 14 years old: 29 games
Sustaining Period, 14 – 20 years old: 8 games
Waning/Nostalgic Period, 20 – 30 years old: 10 games
I’ve decided to highlight some of the more meaningful/impactful games in more detail while rolling through the less impactful ones. At any rate, here is the full list of what I remember, with names in brackets when I wasn’t able to find the official name:
Early Period – 3-7 years old
Zoo Keeper
Arthur’s Birthday party
Harry and the Haunted House
Just Grandma and Me – Little Critter
Around the world in 80 days – Paintbox pals
Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego
Peter Pan – Paintbox pals
Commanche
U-Boat
[B-17 over Germany]
[Star Trek game]
Battle of Britain II [?]
Myst
[Myst (kid’s version)]
Riven
Darkseed
Out of this World
SimCity 2000
[Tank and stick figures]
[WWI combat flight simulator]
Hellcats over the Pacific
[Futuristic tank simulator]
[F-16 flight simulator]
[Gardening simulator]
[Puzzle game involving a Castle]
[Design your own palette]
[Game involving placing Stickers on a game board]
Ski free
Landmark Period: 7-11 years old
[GI Joe-like toy saves rabbits from malicious toys]
Age of Empires: Age of Kings
Close Combat: A Bridge Too Far
[Die Hard 2 shooter]
Minesweeper
Space Cadet
Sonic and Tails
Wargames
Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines
Nuclear Strike
Close Combat: The Russian Front
StarCraft
StarCraft: Brood War
Age of Empires: The Conquerers
High Period: 11 – 14 years old
Counter-Strike
Half-Life
Half-Life: Opposing Force
Half-Life: Team Fortress
Command & Conquer
Command & Conquer: Red Alert
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
Dune 2
Dune: Emperor
Fallout 2
Diablo 2
Quake 3
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Final Fantasy 8
Worms: Armageddon
Dark Reign
Total Annihilation
Tribes 2
Treadmarks
Ground Control
Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator 2 – Pacific Theater
Command & Conquer: Tiberium Sun
Liero
Triplane
小朋友齊打交
風色幻想 SP
風色幻想
Stickdeath
Sustaining Period: 14 – 20 years old
Star Wars:Battlefront
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Fallout: Tactics
Grand Theft Auto 3
Battlefield: Vietnam
Warcraft 3
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War
Team Fortress 2
Waning/Nostalgic Period: 20 – 30 years old
Giants: Citizen Kabuto
Duke Nukem 3D
Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines (again)
System Shock 2
Fallout 3
Fallout: New Vegas
Treadmarks (again)
Fallout 1
Primordia
Dungeon Keeper 2
Among the earliest computer games I remember playing are games for which I was able to find the names of, and games whose names I simply have no idea about. I may have started with point-and-click games geared towards children, but I distinctly remember playing more adult-oriented games with my father as well. At any rate, here are some to start:
Arthur’s Birthday Party (1994), Little Critter: Grandma and Me (1992), Harry and the Haunted House (1994)
Arthur’s Birthday Party, Little Critter: Just Grandma and Me, Harry and the Haunted House were all from the Living Books series. These point-and-click games involved a page-by-page story where you could click on different parts of the page to play small animations before continuing. For example, the brass (?) American bald eagle on the top of a flagstaff would spread its wings and do a little dance to the beginning of the American anthem when you clicked on it, an apple would fall from the tree and/or produce a worm when you clicked on it, a horn would sound, and so on. They were pretty creative with the animations and you would often find something new to click on on a replay.
Just Grandma and Me was a particularly poignant game for me, since I saw even at an early age the storyline from sun-up to sundown as a parable for life and death. Basically, Little Critter and his grandma go to the beach. But where was the rest of the family: Grandpa, parents, siblings? I know that would undermine the storyline of the whole game, but it was concerning. Everyone looked way too happy.
All I remember from Harry and the Haunted House was that the kids hit a baseball into this creaky old house and somehow think that trespassing there to find the ball is a good idea. They eventually find the owner to be a pleasant person, but along the way there was one page with a painting of an old sailor, who starts singing the chorus to the song “Drunken Sailor” when you clicked on it. That made an impression on me.
Paintbox Pals: Peter Pan (1993) and Around the World in 80 days (1994).
Next up is Paintbox Pals: Peter Pan and Around the World in 80 Days. You would also follow the storylines of those classic tales that changed depending on your choices in the game, and in these games you have to solve puzzles and challenges using one of your anthropomorphic paintbox pals, a pencil, a paintbrush, an eraser, and something else. For example, Peter Pan might have to cross a river or stream, so you would use the pencil to link together a bridge, or there might be fire in the woods that you would put out with the eraser. The eraser was easiest since you would just click on something and it goes away; you didn’t have to actually draw anything. There were usually more than a couple solutions to each puzzle and outcomes to the story by picking a different Paintbox Pal each time.
The most memorable parts of Around the World in 80 Days were the Egyptian mummy and Hollywood Alien puzzles, which were both kind of frightening to me. Apparently there was also a Jungle Book version of Paintbox Pals which I never played.
Zoo Keeper (1994)
Beyond an encyclopedia of animals with collectible “fun facts” pages that I really enjoyed reading growing up, and visiting zoos in general, Zoo Keeper was probably the other game that stimulated my interest in wildlife and nature. In the game, some animals have had their habitats ruined and you have to fix that and put the culprits behind bars (ironically). Lots of animal facts and animations.
Various others
There were a number of games that I simply don’t remember the names for and only remember bits and pieces of. There was a game where you had to solve a puzzle (might have been early math) to gradually open doors featuring cubist paintings, one of which was Picasso’s Three Musicians. There was a game where you could place “stickers” of medieval or pirate characters onto backgrounds to create your own scenes. There was a game where you could grow fantastical vegetables and flowers in gardens and sell them in a market; I particularly remember trimming hedgerows into whimsical shapes and growing sunflowers with babies’ faces in them. And there was a game that I remember you could also create your own scenes with floating shapes set to music, of which one of their samples was of floating, rotating dancers from Matisse’s Dance set to exotic vocalizations.
Equally honorable mentions include Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and Swampgas, a game where you flew around the US to different states and cities in alien spacecraft. Both expanded my geographical knowledge of the US and the world.
Oh, and Ski Free, a classic.
These early games were geared towards children, but in the next MML post, I will describe my early exposure to games that were decidedly not made for children, and how that impacted me. At any rate, any game that allowed for autonomy of choice in storylines and creating scenes and arranging shapes or stickers on a palette to create new worlds was highly instrumental to my development.
Myst (1993)
Myst is one of the most famous computer games of the 1990s, and of all time. It was the best-selling computer game ever until The Sims took that title away in 2003. Through the powers of a magical book, the player is transported to an island with a lot of interesting architecture and other contraptions but no people, and has to solve puzzles to find out more about the world and find a way out. The puzzles are involved and require a lot of experimentation and poking around to solve, such as raising a sunken ship or mapping certain patterns of constellations in a planetarium/observatory. Upon completion of the puzzles on the island, the player is transported to subsequent worlds (with more puzzles) and uncovers the story of a rivalry between siblings that takes place via magical book writing.
The game is very immersive with its imagery and sound effects, and definitely pushed the boundaries of what a puzzle game could be at the time. When you immerse yourself in these virtual worlds, you/your brain can truly believe that you are in a different dimension. Your perception of time is altered as your brain creates a representation of a virtual world within your own mind. It’s also a testament to the idea that a book can truly transport you to another world.
Years later and without warning I had a vision of the Myst island as a microcosm for human civilization: The observatory represented the scientific endeavor, the library represented all accumulated human knowledge, the clocktower simply the passage of time for civilization, the gears industry and the redwood forest/furnace represented natural resources, and so on. Of note was the ship that allowed for exploration of the “sea,” or the boundaries of existence as known to humanity.
But most importantly to me at the time was the rocket/spaceship at the edge of the island that eventually transported players/travelers to other worlds, not by flying, but by some of futuristic transportation. Teleportation, transmutation, whatever it was called, either the player’s atoms are rearranged and transported to another world, or they are simply injected into another virtual world-within-a-world, which is exactly what Myst is all about in the first place.
To me, the spaceship represents what the human mind can imagine about other worlds, both external and internal, that have yet to become reality.
Out of this World/Another World (1991)
Speaking of other worlds, I remember watching the intro of this game and playing the first few minutes with my father multiple times, since we couldn’t get past the early part of the game where the player is eaten by an alien lion after escaping some alien snakes. This lion bit is actually considered one of the most frustrating sequences in computer game history, so it’s not that embarrassing, but the intro was truly something special.
A sports car-driving scientist (?) goes into a secure facility to run some tests on what appears to be a particle accelerator. A storm starts to form and lightning hits the machine just at the right time to transport the scientist into another dimension and/or another planet. Eventually the scientist survives to find an entire alien civilization and escapes home, but I never got that far.
Again, these games were made using pretty primitive graphics, but were designed in a way that immersed the player in a new world. Just the opening sequence itself is worthy of a science-fiction film of its own, let alone the entire story and game.
Darkseed (1992)
Ah, this is where my dad may have not demonstrated the best judgment in playing this game with me.
The player is a successful ad exec and writer who recently purchased an old mansion. The first night he sleeps there, he has a dream that some aliens have injected something into his brain and wakes up with a massive headache. He later explores the mansion to find that A) there is a parallel “Dark World” that can enter the human world through the mansion, B) it’s populated by malicious aliens, and C) if he doesn’t destroy the “Darkseed” in his brain (which is real), it will hatch and destroy all humanity – and kill him, obviously.
Ok, we never played that much of this game, either, since it’s also considered one of the most difficult and frightening ones of its era. And, after seeing a baby delivered by the mailman turn into a grotesque alien, I think I had enough of it too. But the cool part about this game is that it was designed by H. R. Giger, who is the same Swiss painter who designed the aliens and sets in the movie Alien. Can you see the resemblance of the artwork? So, I was exposed to some pretty high-level sci-fi stuff even back then.
So there you have it, the games I played when I was in preschool and kindergarten have left a lasting impression on me and made me believe in the power of entering deeper (virtual) worlds. Next time on My Machine Life: Into the Myst, it’s going to be all about combat flight and war simulators from the 1990’s, as the Early Period continues!
My Machine Life – Into the Myst – IV
Here we go again – To round out the Early Period of my computer gaming, here is a closer look at four titles that I remember quite distinctly, along with casual mentions of a few others.
Hellcats Over the Pacific (1991)
I began to learn a little bit about World War II and World War I when I played the combat/flight simulators based off of these conflicts. I think I really got into the WWII stuff after I read an account of the Battle of Midway from the point of view of the American torpedo bombers (note: this is getting turned into a questionable movie about Midway featuring Nick Jonas which I’m probably going to go watch anyway). Basically the story I read is they happened upon the defenseless Japanese ships by accident, which were refueling and reloading so the Japanese had all their fighter-bombers on deck when the Americans attacked. Fun fact: The Hellcat was not invented until after the Battle of Midway, so it did not partake.
But in terms of this game I mainly just played the demos and shot down Japanese fighters time after time. The demo was randomly generated which made it replayable. This title was particularly memorable because the graphics were quite good for the time and the Japanese fighters were bright yellow, which made them quite easy to track, along with the guns of the Hellcat which conveniently shot out black dots as bullets. There was also an instant replay and bombing function built-in to the simulator.
Honorable Mention: An F-16 simulator that I don’t remember the name of, but allowed me to learn about the different missile types used by that fighter jet (Sparrow, AIM-120 etc.)
U-Boat – and Battle of Britain (1994)
This game was from the perspective of German U-Boat sailors operating in and near the Atlantic. You would go on missions to find merchant vessels, or destroy military ships, which got progressively difficult (some of the merchant ships would surprise you with weapons or were actually destroyers). I remember trying to sink a battleship, that did not go well. If you didn’t destroy the enemy at a first sneak attack you likely had to run away or dive deep, and hope that the enemy didn’t sink you. It was very suspenseful waiting for the depth charges to go off and dealing with “battle damage” while underwater – the sound was very atmospheric. Of course all the Germans on the U-boat are speaking English with a German accent. This was another fun game to play with my dad.
The Battle of Britain came with U-Boat and was an interesting simulator around the titular air battle. You would be in charge of directing British fighter planes (Spitfires, mostly) towards incoming German bombers and fighters as shown on a radar screen. It was pretty difficult to anticipate the movements of the Luftwaffe, usually the Germans won when I played the simulation – meant to show how difficult the battle was for Britain, I suppose.
Comanche (1992)
In this game the 3D graphics are getting noticeably better, so it’s getting harder to run it on our old Mac. But Comanche was a great game that pit you as an American assault helicopter pilot against Russians, warlords and drug runners, etc. The variety of enemies was interesting and the missions were fairly engrossing but not overly difficult. This is where I learned about the stinger and Hellfire missiles at an early age.
This was one of the games where the user manual was super detailed and interesting, starting a trend where I enjoyed reading user manuals and strategy guides as much as the games themselves. In the guide, it introduces the player-character as a US pilot who used to fly fixed-wing aircraft and was now being trained for what was then a prototype Comanche. If you think about it, most of the coverage of American military helicopters are Black Hawks (like in the movie) or Apaches, not this helicopter.
SimCity 2000 (1993)
This one is a classic. Maxxis would later make the best-selling computer game at the time, The Sims, but started out with this city-building simulator. It was recommended for urban planners, which is how my father started playing it. At first it was too difficult for me so I ended up using a lot of cheat codes and turning natural disasters “off.” The classic natural disaster was the alien robot that would cause havoc on the city from high above in the sky.
In the game, you can build residential, commercial or industrial zones and had to provide for everything like hospitals and police stations, schools, waterworks, power lines and power plants, and parks and so on. I think one of the most interesting parts about this game was the high-tech power plants that were available later in the game, like a dish to convert energy beamed from the sun’s rays or a fusion power plant. In addition, there were Arcos, which are massive self-contained structures that would increase your population substantially. These had a heavy influence on my thinking and sci-fi writing.
That’s it for now. Next time we will begin the Landmark Period of my computer gaming, from when I was 7 to 11 years old, where my gaming…habit?…really took shape.