You'll always have more fun with Grand Theft Auto when you prioritise chaos over common sense. So perhaps it's not such a surprise that watching an artificial deer 'play' the game, with no purpose, has become an instant hit online.
In essence, 'San Andreas Deer Cam' by digital artist Brent Watanabe is simple; instead of a human avatar or player, the game focuses instead on a single deer which is controlled by an artificial intelligence.
With no direction from the artist, the deer wanders and trots around the 100 square miles of San Andreas, and interacts with its other AI inhabitants.
What it surprising is how complex and oddly resonant the interactions of the deer turn out to be; in what is a testament to the AI skills of Rockstar as much as Watanabe, its adventures are peculiarly complex. In its first 48 hours the deer took moonlight walks along Vespucci Beach, galloped at full pelt onto a freeway (causing a large traffic jam) and ended up at the bottom of the ocean, and later in a fist fight, incidents that -- given the deer cannot actually be hurt -- both continued with no resolution for several 'days' in game time.
In another highlight, the deer took on fully-armed tank, and lived to tell the tale. Later it tiptoed between sunbathers, drinking in the digital sun.
The slow TV-style project comprises one of the more hypnotic hacks yet of an ageing, but eminently hackable sandbox video game that has been used to make virtually everything you can think of already, including a Douglas Adams tribute and a literally explosive version of Mario Kart.
The deer is not infallible, however -- technical problems meant the project crashed after two days, and is currently offline. Previously recorded footage from earlier iterations of the deer AI can be watched and appreciated, but its wanderings in these are less diverse, sticking mainly to the populated urban Los Santos neighbourhoods.
As artificial intelligence starts to approach the complexity and flexibility of human thought -- at least in limited arenas such as games and virtual worlds -- the possibility of automated, procedural entertainment is becoming more realistic. Upcoming games like Sony's No Man's Sky comprise a virtually limitless number of worlds and 'lifeforms', and will (hopefully) include oddities that even the games' makers can not foresee.
Whether anyone would watch esports between different computer players seems unlikely -- but if they're prepared to watch an AI deer interact with simple AI pedestrians, and more than 30,000 are judging by the reaction to Watanabe's project, then anything is presumably possible.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
