Electric Sheep and Graded Variation

 

Electric Sheep created by a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over

"The electric things have their life too. Paltry as those lives are." - Rick Deckard 

Christopher Alexander is an architect who wrote extensively on architecture, design and life. He identified patterns in our living environments and the quarters we spend our time in. He looked at the patterns that have emerged over the ages and as such taken on a descriptive approach to architecture. In doing so, Alexander has made a blue print for other disciplines to pick up and apply to whatever they feel like, but it's not a simple copy and paste I am afraid.

Let's look at one of the patterns to make it more tangible. Presented here below are fifteen, of many, patterns that Alexander describes in his seminal book A Pattern Language. We'll look at Graded Variation in particular, because it neatly ties in with the Electric Sheep above.

A selection of Patterns from A Pattern Language

You may wonder at this point: 'how is such an Electric Sheep created?' I might come up with an explanation myself, but why not just steal it from electricsheep.org:

"Electric Sheep is a collaborative abstract artwork founded by Scott Draves. It's run by thousands of people all over the world, and can be installed on almost anything. When these computers "sleep", the Electric Sheep comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep".

Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience."

The Electric Sheep are not only the creation of a lifeless algorithm, but its insurrection is also infused by the decisions made by humans. It may therefore not come as a surprise that these Electric Sheep show several of the patterns above, Graded Variation being one of them. But why does this happen? Why is it that the humans that were voting for animations, favored those that ended up making a neat pattern? I simply do not have the answer.

What I do know is that the decision makers preferred the animations that resembled, or would resemble, a neat pattern. And Christopher Alexander devoted many years of his life showing that humans like patterns in building. There is no reason why this wouldn't be the case for narrative nor for video games or the combination of the two.

So what does graded variation in a video game look like? It can be as simple as checking out several boss fights. In Horizon Zero Dawn (HZD) the first boss fight is against a so-called Sawtooth. Anything bigger than you have encountered before and therefore quite intimidating (but that might also be because of my skittish nature). 

"It's... huge. How do you defeat it?"

―Aloy, encountering a Sawtooth for the first time

A Sawtooth encountered later in the game

The sawtooth, or better said sawtooths, can be encountered later in the game again. This time a little less intimidating because your character has gotten stronger and you know some of the weaknesses of the sawtooth. So where does HZD go from there? Exactly, BIGGER!

In later boss fights you are again fighting a robot you haven't encountered before, but now it is bigger and has a couple of different tricks up its sleeve than the one before. Every time this happens, you are presented with a variation of some sort of an archetype bad-ass robot. The robots that are derived from this archetype are graded in the sense that they get bigger and badder.

A Corruptor minding its own business until you came along

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD! So how does this tie in with the story? After the prologue and when you, as a player, get the sense that you are playing with a skilled warrior you encounter challenges that are similar in nature, but are graded and become bigger. These challenges are often directly bound to the robots you have to fight, which are equally becoming bigger. 

For instance, when you encounter a sawtooth for the first time, the stage is set in a particular way. Rost, you surrogate father, tells you that he fears "there's a lesson I failed to teach you." He means that you, Aloy the main character, should sometimes fight for the good of the tribe and not just look out for your own interests. This sets the tone for the rest of the game as well. You often fight to find out things about yourself and your past but at the same time you are fighting for the good of the tribe, the good of a larger tribe and eventually even life on earth. The scale increases perpetually and the goal, even though you are protecting others, changes slightly as well. 

There are more patterns at play here, but this was the one that stood out most to me. I will highlight another pattern in the next post. The take-aways from this post are:

• (good) patterns are emergent
• boss fights in HZD follow the pattern of graded variation
• the general story outline of HZD follows the pattern of graded variation as well
• don't mess with corruptors when they are minding their own business