A strange piece of software has recently landed on the PC gaming store Steam. And “software” feels like the cleanest way to describe it. Existing somewhere between a full-blown life sim, a science project and a kind of haunted fish tank, Anlife: Motion-learning Life Evolution probably would have disappeared without making much impact if it wasn’t for one unusual factor. Several years ago some of its creators were absolutely roasted on camera by one of the genuine legends of Japanese animation.
Back in 2016, Hayao Miyazaki, the director of movies such as Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, was shown new technology that used AI in order to animate models. Faced with a zombie that utilised its head to move by knocking its skull against the ground and wriggling its body like a fish, Miyazaki declared what he had seen was “an insult to life itself”. It’s hard not to watch the clip without feeling slightly seared – but now, a decade later, the ashen-faced developers from that room have sufficiently recovered to make their work widely available.
Judging by the chatter surrounding the launch, at least some of the people downloading Anlife are doing so in the hope that it might provide some kind of indication of the current state video games’ relationship with AI. Putting aside the often broad use of that term, this is certainly a thing that’s worth trying to understand, whether it’s because of the job losses caused by AI or blamed on AI, or the sheer number of games made with the assistance of AI models now landing on storefronts such as Steam.
There’s a problem here, though. And it’s that Anlife itself is such a cheerfully inconsequential thing that it’s hard to read too much of anything into it.
Anlife promises players an evolution simulator where “AI-driven block creatures move in unexpected ways.” What this comes down to for the most part involves placing a range of different creatures into a small environment and then watching as they learn to get around.
Visually Anlife is pure Frutiger Aero, offering landscapes of green valleys and sparkling water that could be the kind of soothing images MRI technicians sometimes encourage you to look at during a lengthy scan. Sonically it’s equally inoffensive: with a range of bloops, bleeps and popping sounds, we’re pitched right into the soundtrack of a million 00s day spas.
This desire to soothe permeates to the level of mechanics, too. Over the course of an idle morning with Anlife you can place a range of simple creatures in the environment and then give them food that will encourage them to breed or mutate. You can expand your territory and then lure creatures towards water or up into the air in order to create more variations. There are plenty of things to unlock (including a shadow tech tree that has you covered if you want to annihilate your digital sea monkeys rather than watching…
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