Have any of you played a RPG where one or more players joined the game remotely via Skype? AKA, one of your players is a face on a screen and a voice from the speakers?

I've had that experience twice and I kinda creeped me out.

I was a big fan of Counterstrike on Xbox where you could ally with AI bots on your side. The AI was pretty weak, but remarkable for its time. Every time I was a table with a Skype player I kept imagining what if the player was just a program instead.

Quote from: David Johansen;857576That we'd rather game than have sex must say something about gamers.  

What's interesting about discussions about sexbots is how many people are seeking "intimacy", not just sex. There is an interest in engaging in communication with the machine as a "persona"

Here's the scenario I see:

1. Bang the Toaster!
2. Now what?
3. Xbox? Watch TV?
4.
5. Hey, you wanna play D&D?

There was an interesting film a couple years ago called Lars and the Real Girl which lightly explored the concept of sexbot as companion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_and_the_Real_Girl

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;857580If they are real and human enough to be worth gaming with, they'll be real and human enough to be arseholes sometimes. Or even worse, they'll have needs of their own.

The sexbot AI concept discussed in the second article focuses on how sexbots would not have full sentient AI, but instead be designed more like pets. AKA, the programming would never achieve "human" sentience with a recognition of self and thus these robots would never have needs of their own (unless you bought that app).

Of course, to be worthwhile players in a RPG, how sentient does a robot need to be?

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;857580I think you will be disappointed in your desire for sentient slaves.

We've always had sentient slaves, but now we call them by polite terms like "minimum wage workers" or "outsourcing"

I expect humanity will love robotic workers.

A robotic "slave", especially when there is no actual sentience, would be hailed as a great forward step as they would accomplish tasks most humans would prefer not to perform (janitorial, dangerous tasks, monotonous tasks, prostitution, extreme hours, extreme temperatures, etc).

Of course, all robotics opens lots of questions and concerns regarding the future economy and need for an expanding population in a diminishing workforce.

Quote from: CRKrueger;857640They're made in Japan, they have strap-ons.

Futanari bots?

Quote from: nDervish;857595Suspend the process (or the entire virtual machine that it's running on) to disk when it's not in use.  Then the AI doesn't exist at 3am to call you and it just perceives the world as jumping directly from the end of one game to the beginning of the next with no intervening passage of time.

Then you get the problem of treating the AI, who to be viable for RPG play is probably sentient, as just software.

Conversely taken to its extremes, by WW natch, in d20 GW they inserted fully sentient AIs into common household appliances and tools, even weapons. Allways on, allways aware. And going quietly insane from boredom, possibly sensory deprivation, and loneliness when discarded.

Yeah I would want my bots artificially intelligent but not sapient.  The gaming ones that is.  I'm pretty sure my wife would object to the sex ones, and it would be an odd conversation explaining the sexy new companion to the kids.

That said, I key off what my players are interested in when I GM and I'm not sure intelligent but not sapient would have a capacity for creative interests.  So perhaps no bots unless they were just "people" like everyone else, who just happened to not be made of meat.

I'm lucky that when we all game online (which is most of the time, since we are spread across 3 time zones) the people I'm gaming with mostly consist of people I gamed with back in the 80s and 90s.  So even if all I see is an icon, I know the person behind it, unless perhaps they have been synthesized since then.

Quote from: Settembrini;857564I'll only allow robots at my game table when they are allowed to vote.

That's funny... because the Turing A.I. is going to make sure you can't effectively vote, or that your vote is irrelevant, before you even know it is there.

Quote from: Settembrini;857564I'll only allow robots at my game table when they are allowed to vote.

I thought Germans could already vote.

Someday, unless we blow ourselves to smithereens, this is going to happen. May not be for 100 years or more, but someday.

I doubt I'll live that long, but if you actually had artificially intelligent physical robots, it would just be a matter of time before you get TOTAL WAR between them and our dice, which I am convinced are already sentient and probably possessed by spirits and demons.

Or maybe they'd just gang up on us.

I think a focused game playing AI is close. Possibly do-able even now to a lesser degree. Able to play a specific game like a player. But not very creative. The limitations being what its been coded to be.

And a year or two on SecondLife I met another free roaming AI someone was testing. It just flitted around and asked questions. But according to the programmer it was remembering things as it went, adding to its pool of information the more it interacted with people. (Preferrably ones that werent complete scum.) disk space was again the problem.

Any sort of mobile player AI today would probably be about the size of a horse.

Quote from: Omega;857741Any sort of mobile player AI today would probably be about the size of a horse.

That's a Mr.Ed sitcom re-imagining just waiting to happen.

Quote from: Omega;857575This is also why some people want a full immersion VR.

There have been talks before, even back in the 90s of viable AIs as gaming partners. A few ideas bounced around for AI DMs as there seems ever a need for DMs.

Way back also in the 90s on a MUD I met a AI a friend had coded into the MUD. Did not know it at first as it acted just like a player. The lightning fast response times were the eventual giveaway. Thing was he could only run that one AI at it used up alot of processor. Apparently it learned over time in some way. Responses, rememberd players it had talked to. Places it had been.

A year or two ago ran into a new type of virus that would talk to you like a person on the infected computers messengers. Ran into two of those.

A cybernetic gamer would be interesting. If you set it up as a specialist program to one game system it might prove easier. A more broad spectrum AI will need alot more work to be able to adapt, or coding in its library of games it has expertise in.

forgive me for asking but i was born about a decade to late so whats a MUD?

Quote from: kosmos1214;857792forgive me for asking but i was born about a decade to late so whats a MUD?

Young kids and your lack of knowledge of things before your time.  Shameful!  

MUD = Multi User Dungeon.  Essentially a text-based MMO.

We survived the Toba eruption. We've survived the internet. I am sure we will survive sexbots just fine, if a bit more distracted.

The Toba eruption was crazy! It's the heart of the  "Human Bottleneck" theory and worth a look for RPG setting ideas too!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory

Quote from: Thornhammer;857795Young kids and your lack of knowledge of things before your time.  Shameful!  

MUD = Multi User Dungeon.  Essentially a text-based MMO.

ahahahhahaha thanks funnily enough im rather knowledgeable about stuff before my time its just this is the 1st time iv heard the term MUD and it sounds fun are there any still going or is it 100% dead now


and as to sexbots taking over the world only if they sing like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTJLX3an1To

Quote from: kosmos1214;857822ahahahhahaha thanks funnily enough im rather knowledgeable about stuff before my time its just this is the 1st time iv heard the term MUD and it sounds fun are there any still going or is it 100% dead now

Tons of them still out there, in large part because, if you have a fixed IP address available, they require basically no additional resources to run.  The only hard part of keeping one alive is getting an active enough player base to make it worthwhile for people to visit.

Do a search for "list of muds" and you'll find plenty of them.  I can't offer any recommendations because it's been about 20 years since I was last actively MUDding.