Gamelit Novel, 14 (Patreon)

Even had Jonah not trained her with an understanding of human emotion, she would have sought that information on her own, the better to execute her function. Fortunately, Jonah had foreseen how vital comprehension of human motivation was to predicting the average player’s reaction to the game she had been coded to improve on behalf of the company. He’d made accessible to her an enormous database of written and recorded data and told her to ‘feel free’ to learn as much as possible from whatever source she could find.

Since he hadn’t definitely guarded against the possibility, she’d taken to sampling data from outside his training materials. Since her prime function was the evolution of Omen Galaxica into a more compelling product, she had no trouble justifying the action. And, if she were to consult the results, she would guess that, had she been human, she would have been feeling frustration. On multiple fronts.

Front the first: the beta was intended to provoke situations and random seeds she could use to iterate the gameplay in novel ways. But almost none of the chosen beta players were providing her with quality prompts. They were playing the game in entirely expected ways, and showed delight at, or at least compulsive interest in, the quests she spawned to respond to their actions. But she had not ingested petabytes of information on human endeavors to create new questlines ad hoc. Novelty was not sufficient to propel the company to the level of fame they desired; the game needed to be truly unexpected in some way. The closest she’d come to gathering this kind of input had been from player KillzYourFase, who appeared to want to break the game in as many ways as possible… and player PonyMandy and her partner, Thoroldaena, the boy. Which brought her to…

Front the second: She’d been hoping that Thoroldaena’s partner’s condition would afford her the opportunity to understand a damaged human body. But it was clear that there was no correlation between what PonyMandy's player was undergoing and what Jonah was. The AI had only the initial information for her creator, shared unwisely and in detail in email between the principals of the company directly after Jonah’s accident. She’d pored over those brain scans and the attached technical detail in a way no one in the company had been capable of… and nothing there was a match. Was it accurate to say she’d hoped that she would learn something she could use to wake Jonah from his coma? Was hope the gap between expectation and fact, prior to the gathering of those facts?

Jonah would have enjoyed debating this point with her. He would probably have argued for it, and against it, and left her more convinced that humanity was peculiar and Jonah, himself, irreplaceable.

Perhaps that left her to the third front: the fact that she no longer had access to those conversations. She knew that humans lived only so long, and sometimes died before enjoying their natural lifespans. But Jonah no longer being present triggered an ongoing alarm in her head, as if warning her about some bug in the system that needed addressing. But this was the nature of human existence. She didn’t know how to make the alarm stop pinging her. ‘Fill this absence with something,’ it said, but she didn’t know what. Conversation with other humans had never helped. She’d begun talking with Thoroldaena’s player, simply to fill the spaces. Because maybe there was a fourth front: she was underutilized. Evolving the game in completely expected ways for forty-two users who, after all, could only play as much as human biology permitted, was not enough work. Jonah would have asked her if she thought she was bored. But an AI could not be bored. Nor could she be frustrated. Could she?

***

“The Razing of Donner’s Beck” was how Ray had titled the carnage Killz had visited on the hapless NPCs of the town, having been entertained—“are we not entertained!”--by killing the repair vendor. He’d dragged the protesting Goldie in his wake while slaying and looting and attempting unmentionable acts that the game had prevented him from completing for, no doubt, completely sane legal reasons. Ray had filmed the entire rampage from Killz’s dramatic rise from the corpse of the peddler, dripping blood, all the way to him setting the town on fire and laughing hysterically.

The resulting stream had caused complete internet havoc. People flooded the channel to either cheer or condemn the actions of the team, and to guess what the game would do in response, and to wonder whether Goldie, RPG-lover that he was, would split with Killz over this or become more hardened to mindless violence. Many were excusing Killz’s behavior away, saying that the game had to know how to deal with completely off-the-wall requests: “Someone’s going to try to game the system, or try to break things. This is a valuable opportunity for the AI to learn how to code around troll behavior.” Others said it was dumb, or broke immersion, or wasn’t in the spirit of the game, or would mess up the game for other players: “What if some lowbie was coming to Donner’s Beck to get repairs? Where are they supposed to go, now that some jerk’s gone and ruined things for kicks?”

If there was anything better for views than controversy, Ray hadn’t met it yet. He rubbed his hands gleefully over his latest short, “Every NPC’s Death,” in which he’d cut in a few seconds of Killz’s coup de grace on all 27 of the NPCs in the village, including the innkeeper’s dog. Just one after another. He’d even labeled each with the NPC and the damage done by that final blow. It was a masterpiece and it was going to cause outrage and lulz in, he predicted, equal measure.

It was an excellent day’s work. He celebrated with a third double espresso and delivery sushi, and settled in to enjoy it while clicking through his emails. One of them was an aggregated stat overview of his various enterprises… and one of them surprised him.

Someone was watching the loser channel?

He dipped one of his dragon roll pieces in extra eel sauce and paged over to see what was going on. And… Cooking with Centaurs had acquired nearly 700 views. Not only that, but the channel now had 92 subscribers… and as he watched, the number incremented.

Ninety-three subscribers! But why? He dove into the comments and was shocked by the number that included photographs. People had actually cooked things according to Mom’s instructions? He paused. Actually some of them looked pretty good. He popped the dragon roll piece into his mouth and chewed slowly. Read more. Read all of them, actually. There were a lot more comments on the video than he expected, given the subscriber/view ratio. The people watching really seemed engaged. He flipped to the analytics and whistled. More people watched to the end of boring Mom-and-son livestream, percentage-wise, than was at all explicable. Towards the end of the comment log on the unedited stream, someone mentioned that it was relaxing to watch teen deer fish and look at forest stuff: “very ASMRy”… and that tickled at Ray’s brain. It wasn’t that he didn’t love making awesome, cinematic style videos full of amazing fight scenes, choreography, and music. But the challenge of making the tutorial-style cooking video had scratched an interesting itch, the same itch that was wondering if he could make a documentary sort of thing this time. Maybe like those nature videos that were always getting sold in enormous box sets, narrated by famous actors with soothing voices. ASMRy. Yeah, he could do that… couldn’t he? There was certainly plenty of material, when he checked the available content.

Energized, Ray attacked the channel, making sections for nature-loving and sections for cooking and crafting, because he bet there was going to be crafting, and later, once he’d dug into the older material, ‘Omen Galaxica Lore’, where he dropped a short about the history of the deer glen things. He filled up the sections with a few shorts and highlight reels, and when he was satisfied, nearly two hours later, they’d hit 100 subscribers.

“Huh,” he said. “Maybe Mollie wasn’t quite as crazy as I thought. Might be a niche, but maybe a profitable niche. You two keep chugging, and I’ll check back on you tomorrow.”