We Don’t Often Think About the Lives of Video Game Characters
We don’t care about Cloud Strife’s awkward teen years. We don’t give a damn about what the sims we don’t control get up to. Some games, like Watch Dogs: Legion or The Elder Scrolls, give characters meticulously planned routes, but they’re a long way from sentient at the moment. Even a sophisticated AI by modern standards, such as the terrifying Xenomorphs in Alien: Isolation, is still just executing strings of code. Still, technology will only continue to improve – there’s a good chance that we all live in one such simulation, but I don’t have time to go down that rabbit hole right now – and Free Guy is set to make us think about what the NPC’s get up to without our input.
Free Guy, Ryan Reynold’s new film, follows the titular Guy, an NPC in the open-world GTA-style game Free City, who becomes aware of the world’s true nature, falls in love with a player (Jodie Comer), and has to work with her to stop the developers from shutting down the game.
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As far as premises go it’s a bit out there, but the newest trailer shows that we’re in for an entertaining time. There’s a good balance between heart and black comedy, with Guy’s efforts to overthrow the system by being nice being juxtaposed against him being repeatedly killed. We also see the movie’s sense of humor, with Guy reacting exactly as you’d expect an NPC to react to seeing the HUD or driving a car for the first time, approaching the film’s events with a sense of childlike wonder, while his love interest, Milly, acts suitably disturbed – and confused – by her growing feelings for him even as she tries to save him. If you’ve ever felt a little too attached to a video game character, this might be the game for you.
How would you react in the mathematically likely event that we’re living in a computer simulation? Let us know down in the comments, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook.
Source: YouTube