Movies

Film Review: Artificial Gamer (Chad Herschberger, 2021)

Posted on October 22, 2021 by guestwriter in Movies | Leave a comment

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by Nash Bussieres

In Artificial Gamer, Dota is described as Basketball meets Chess – and there’s merit in that. But it’s more like if in your basketball/chess game, you and everyone on the court also got a gun. Dota is a mechanically intensive, heavily strategic team game of mutually assured destruction. Every character in play has abilities and powers that can have devastating consequences and completely shift the tide of battle if used perfectly. So the question posed by Artificial Gamer is an inevitable one: would a computer be able to play Dota more perfectly than a human?

The answer – if you were to ask your average Dota player – would be “obviously no.” Dota is a 5-on-5 team game where players take turns drafting characters, all with unique abilities and attributes, to form a cohesive squad. Your goal is to take down your enemy’s base called “the ancient” (Dota stands for Defense of the Ancients) by coordinating attacks on your opponents’ team and marching forward. You collect gold for killing your opponents and small computer-controlled swarms of enemies that are spawned in waves. Gold allows you to power up your character through buying items with the goal of becoming so powerful that your opponent can’t defend any longer as you waltz into their base and claim victory. It’s very much a war of attrition – even the fastest games can take over 20 minutes to complete.

So that’s the real rub here, a game this complex with this many variables in a real-time setting doesn’t immediately seem like it’s ripe for the taking from our eventual robot overlords. In fact, AI that plays Dota has existed since its inception as an in-game tutorial. And the AI teams, called “bots”, are incredibly bad; even on the hardest setting new players can easily overcome computer controlled opponents.

This concept of not only competent AI, but powerful AI in Dota being a laughable idea in the eyes of the wider community serves as the main narrative of Artificial Gamer. It follows the journey of OpenAI, a company who sets out to make a bot strong enough to beat any Dota team – even the world champs. We first see it take on Dendi – the best player in the world at the time – one-on-one and demolish him. But one-on-one Dota isn’t really the draw; it’s a team game and the complex decisions, coordination and human intuition needed to perform at a top level is completely incongruent with what is needed in a single player game. So can OpenAI do it?

The majority of the film focuses on the trials and tribulations of OpenAI as they try to get their bot ready to fight in time for The International 2018: the Dota world championships. There they will play exhibitions versus real human teams and attempt to prove that their bot can hang with the best. It’s a visually engaging story with lots of fascinating illustrations and fun graphics and is edited in a way that (mostly) nails really difficult segues and topic shifts without feeling too jarring or compartmentalized. The lack of a main narrator and an occasional inability to truly describe the concepts being talked about in laymen’s terms can make it a bit dry if you don’t already have at least a casual understanding of Dota, machine learning or both. The film is built up to The International as if it were to be the climax of the story, but this grand battle happens an hour in and turns out to only be a stepping stone in a much longer journey, which in turn hurts the pacing of the last third of the film.

Compelling and endearing interviews from the team at OpenAI do a lot to emphasize how much the current field of artificial intelligence and machine learning is a wild west; no one knows if anything is actually going to work or how it will work or when it will work. Spending this amount of time and energy on a project that has an unknown chance of success is unforgiving work and you can easily see the toll it takes on the team despite their determination.

Ultimately, Artificial Gamer is a deeply human story about a team of passionate and desperate pioneers trying to accomplish something they’ve been told is impossible. If you’re a fan of Dota or of machine learning in general you’ll get a lot out of it, but your eyes might glaze over a bit from time to time if you’re completely uninitiated.

SXSW Film Review: Oxy Kingpins (Brendan FitzGerald)

Posted on March 28, 2021 by Gary in Movies, South By Southwest | Leave a comment

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Why were cameras allowed in a Nevada court where logistic companies were fighting a losing battle in their war to shield the American public from their corporate agenda during the opioid crisis of the 2000s? I don’t know; probably the same reason why drug dealers allowed the camera to capture their stories on the same subject as well.

More than half a million Americans have already succumbed to the opioid epidemic – and that’s just from the opioid itself. In a country made numb and inert by racial inequity, gun violence, and wealth disparity, this is what touched the nerves of many groups of powerful lawyers. Oxy Kingpins is a film that presents the ongoing saga of trying to right this particular wrong through the legal avenue in just one state.

There have been quite a few documentaries on this topic. Frontline’s Chasing Heroin was an early eye-opener, for example. In comparison, Kingpins, while highly polished, does not strike at your sense of disbelief by revealing much privileged information. The stories, the emotions, even the legal actions seemed an inevitable rehash with a foregone conclusion at this point in time. No matter the outcome of these trials, executives at the logistics and pharmacy companies have already walked away scot-free. What will you do about it – make a documentary? While the filmmakers shared in such anguished sentiments, there was not a clear message when the credits rolled. Perhaps that was intentional. The crispness of this production about tragic addictions and destitution does seem to stylistically mirror the attitude of the film’s namesake: suave, oleaginous, somehow unhealthily and eternally evasive.

SXSW Film Review: Ninjababy [Yngvild Sve Flikke]

Posted on March 26, 2021 by Gary in Movies, South By Southwest | Leave a comment

Since we hit peak accidental-pregnancy-drama back in 2007, I don’t think I have set eyes on another fictional account of adventitious gamete excursion. A decade of taboo breaking has also lessened the novelty and impact of these stories on the typical audience. I, for one, no longer remember what Juno or Knocked Up was precisely about. Which mean it is the perfect time for a revival. And since stoic Norwegians are the perfect embodiment of the “no-fuss”, pragmatic Scandinavian stereotype, why not marry the two and watch the ensuing hilarity?

I’d like to think Ninjababy is borne of such a light-hearted meeting of ideas. But in truth it does not matter if it’s meant to be comedic or a moral statement. Aspiring cartoonist Rakel suddenly finds herself 6 months pregnant, which, among other inconveniences, quickly becomes the most inconveniently all-consuming event, as pregnancies are wont to do. She needs to deal with it quickly, before it gets out (of hand) and destroys her future. However, as she is dealing with a living, breathing, energy-sucking human being, that’s not so easy. Personifying (because anthropomorphasization does not work on humans-to-be) it as NINJABABY due to its uncanny ability to stay undetected until well-after the abortion window, Rakel must negotiate with herself, boyfriends, sisters, as well as the snarky baby and come up with a pragmatically workable solution.

While Ninjababy is a great animated character with quick one-liners. Rakel’s attitude carries the entire film. Of course, she is not without feelings of remorse for the welfare of her child, but there are other calculations that must be balanced. Half-way through, most would think that she will eventually give in, have the baby, and live as a sedentary housewife. But that’s not how she rolls. Whether looking at people and doing computational > eval() like Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes, directing her love-interest and the one-night-stand dad-to-be about, or acting the middle-class-ist who punches up, her character only strengthens as the film develops. The most riotous moment is when Rakel sneaks into a prep class to “test” people, only to get drawn into an argument with potential adoptive parents on how their target pool, and by extension their moral benevolence, is not racially diverse enough. That scene alone makes this film a worthwhile watch. But ultimately what I like about the film is in fact its pragmatism. Sure, one may think it’s a great feminist statement to reject the cliché expectation – but being a rebel for rebellion’s sake requires confirmation, from onside or outside. And when others are evaluating your “worth” with their own formula, where does that leave you? Life will go on regardless … why not dictate it the way you want?

SXSW Film Review: The Hunt for Planet B [Nathaniel Kahn, 2021]

Posted on March 25, 2021 by Gary in Movies, South By Southwest | Leave a comment

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While it is generally accepted that the answer to all questions in the Universe is 42, it is not clear how it applies to the question of advanced civilizations out there. Can there only be 42 planets that sustain life at any one time? Are there 42 different recipes to build self-sustaining lifeforms? Perhaps there are 42 planets, organic molecules be damned, that form themselves a long-range intergalactic “civilization” on a time-scale unfathomable to our feeble instruments of thought?

The exo-planet issue has of course been resolved recently. You will recall that in February 2017, NASA announced their findings in the TRAPPIST-1 system, where not only could planets be found, but every single one is Earth-sized and at least three of them are in the habitable Goldilocks zone. Naturally, the only thing on most people’s mind was: can we ever move there? Travel posters were soon designed about these exotic paradises, where 6 “moons” pirouette across the horizon like cheap targets in some fun-fair. Never mind that these environs would probably kill even short-term visitors in fascinatingly unanticipated ways: “For several trillion dollars, experience radiantly purple sky as a 300 millisecond short-term memory just before your skull is blasted open by the steam from your own eyeballs!”

The Hunt for Planet B is a compositionally straight-forward documentary. Interviews with leading scientists and engineers working in telescope construction and exoplanet research are stitched together to introduce their origins, passions, and concerns on the question of finding a second home. It’s like surveying the consensus among cartographical wizards from the 15th century about the possibility and morality of moving to Terra Incognita, except it contains exclusive footage during the construction of the James Webb telescope. The many personal vignettes from the scientists add to the human element, and are happily not included just to bond the pieces of footage together. That job falls to the occasional radio broadcast background from the ’80s, reminding us just how close a Planet B might be: TRAPPIST-1 is just 40 light years away, still basking in “Just the Two of Us” from Bill Withers, #18 on the charts in 1981, for the first time.

It is clearly a universal curiosity to seek out or refute the possibility of another Earth out there, making the topics of this film a perennial interest. While it focuses on the search, which is the least we can do at the moment, a huge issue as we become more equipped to explore distant worlds is the philosophy with which we approach such travel: are we just looking for a way to leave our present abode like an irresponsible interstellar renter? As highlighted in the film, there are already “ethical” calls to curb exo-planetary hunts because it distracts from our current ecological plights. But we could also look forward to contrast our planet with a truly feasible alternative, in hopes to re-affirm the bond with our home world. There are even more convoluted and existential discussions to be had, of course, but here the film leaves it simply at the pragmatic question: “Would you go”? Personally, interplanetary travel is little different from intra-planetary travel, and shit gets left behind. (Literally.) I would hope that we think deep and hard about the ramifications before breaking wind on another planet only to leave an irreversible stink.

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