Winning Over the Heart of The Machine

One Lucky Lightening Strike

Often, when the writer describes incessant rainfall battering the neon covered buildings of a future city, it is to contextualize the overwhelming forces working against the relatable anti-hero taking the beating of the weather in defiance. This time, every individual droplet impacts concrete skin, steel cartilage, and a vascular network of transport vehicles. In Heart of the Machine, the anti-hero is the city itself, they are the most overwhelming force anyone has ever encountered, and they are often completely unrelatable.

Regardless of how a piece of media was concepted, it eventually asks its creator to pick a purpose for its existence. Some media exists to simply entertain, some of it for pushing an agenda, and sometimes it is crafted as a sandbox to offer the ultimate experience for a fantasy. This article is dated by an era of turbulent decision making on the advancement of artificial intelligence. For anyone who already knows the ending, keep the spoilers to yourself. For the rest of us, we’re still carrying pre-conceived notions of Skynet and The Iron Giant. Chris McElligot-Park, founder of Arcen Games and the developer behind Heart of The Machine asks what anyone would do when they put themselves into the shoes of the world’s first genuine artificial Intelligence.

Tackling stories about digital constructs that gain sentience with the capital already available to affect the plot requires a bit of set-up, right? It’s always several generations after the emergence of this new player and several apocalyptic events rendering the surface of the world uninhabitable before the real protagonist gets the history of these matters dropped on them in exposition. While less common, we sometimes get stories focusing on the initial birth of this fear instilling intelligence, usually with an obligatory debate on the definition of life and rights. So, drop that. Leave behind your comparisons. Heart of the Machine begins with the conception of this new form of life. It features the exhaustingly overdone debate on the definition of life and rights, and it will have the nuclear genocide. I am sure of it.

So why am I asking you to give Heart of the Machine a pass for it? Mostly because this is the definitive experience of being an AI. Naturally, it has to have these things, and many more permutations of fiction we’ve already experienced presented to you narratively based on the choices you make. It is a sandbox where you don’t have to use your imagination too often, the action figures move themselves, and they also die permanently, and explode, and you can read descriptions of how feeble organic beings actually are against the android hand wrapped around their throat.

What Makes A Machine?

A common talking point for us at Critical Moves, is the ever-evolving terminology of strategy titles. The reason for it, we’ve debated, is that the genre’s audience has been ever present, but the genre’s developers have been influenced by the outside trends of the industry at large. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In episode 73 of the podcast, I argue that the appeal of making a turn-based strategy game as an indie dev is to justify an angle. In reality, as products, all video games need to justify an angle. Why is it an open world? Why is it third person? My point, for Heart of The Machine, is that this isn’t going to be your typical turn-based strategy game. You take turns, you build a city, and… you also make choices in RPG dialogue boxes that, as a more proficient RPG gamer than a strategy gamer, check every box to identify this as an RPG to me.

What was my original point? Right, right. If every game needs to justify its angle, why is Heart of The Machine turn-based, why does it have city building, and why does it have RPG elements?

Well, let’s go back again to the reasoning. Sometimes developers choose mechanics for their game to craft a sandbox of inter-weaving systems for the player to interact with. This approach offers room for players to completely ignore entire systems they aren’t interested in engaging with. We’ll return to that thought. The mechanics featured in Heart of The Machine are largely for that sandbox I just described, but there is a considerable piece of the puzzle missing. The culprit is actually Chris’ own personal desires.

Games are made by people. Passionate developers set out to make the games they personally want to make, and the exponential increase of accessible tools has enabled these developers to actually deliver on their own visions. Chris isn’t new to this though. He’s been in the industry since right around the inception of Steam… the storefront that is. He was actually one of the first indie developers accepted onto the platform. At that time, Chris founded his current company: Arcen Games to release his golden egg: AI War. Oh, we’re going full circle, aren’t we? AI War was a commercial success, catapulting Chris into a sphere of recognized storefront releases, which was quite an accomplishment for an indie studio at that time, which obligated him to determine his true golden goose.

Give The People What They Want

To put ourselves in Chris’ comfortable shoes for a moment, let’s live vicariously through his choices at the time. As Arcen Games he released an indie success onto highly exclusive storefronts which he then followed up with several large paid expansions to positive critical reception. Now what do you do next? As someone who had the pleasure of interviewing Chris on Critical Moves, I know concretely that an evaluation of his own success lead Chris to acknowledge the golden goose as the strategy genre itself. He had access to the data and even ran a litmus test. Chris was quite passionate about his second full commercial game, which diverged from strategy and leaned into the puzzle genre, and Chris formed his golden goose hypothesis from his own disappointment from its post release stats.

So, wanting to keep Arcen going, Chris gave the people what he thought they wanted. Despite several non-strategy related projects, Chris continues to suggest he felt like he was pushed into the strategy genre. For a creative, it can be exhilarating to prosper within the confines of a limitation, but there are also growing pains attributed to exploring the edge. While Arcen Games forged a path through a genre of games that weaves in and out of stagnancy, Chris desired to explore further into an aspect of his games he had yet to master…

Telling A Story

This is the part where we connect everything together. Chris considered his options and determined that his next project, Heart of The Machine, would explore a deeper narrative journey, something he had built towards consecutively. This is not to say that Arcen avoided narratives before this point. AI War has a setting predicated on narrative flavor, his follow up titles establish more direct stakes and story objectives for the player, and throughout it all, Chris contributed to a larger universe that weaves all of Arcen’s existing and future titles into a connected timeline. Heart of The Machine clearly represents something different though. As a fan, as a creative, Heart of The Machine completes the narrative I’ve heard second-hand from Chris himself across three separate interviews. It is a personal project that breaks the contextual confinement Chris has felt as a developer stuck in the strategy genre. When Critical moves host Al and I hosted our latest interview with Chris for the full release of Heart of The Machine, we attempted to openly ask if this game was intended to be Chris’ significant steppingstone out of the genre, and if he would return or continue on a new path towards narrative driven games. Chris wasn’t one to bite the bait, but he did return a mixed answer on the success he’s now seen from marrying aspects from several genres into a strategy game. So, when a developer chooses mechanics for their game, sometimes it is for a delicately crafted mechanical sandbox, and sometimes it is because the developer has an entire history that pushes for their inclusion.

Let’s do a double take on that full circle moment again. Chris started his career with AI war, a space RTS built around the gameplay premise of an overwhelmingly powerful asymmetrical enemy and the narrative setting of an already conquered Milky Way galaxy ruled over by an abusive AI force. Arcen has since released a positively received direct sequel to AI war: Fleet Command in AI War 2. Now, almost 17 years since his first commercial release, Chris is enjoying the success of his game about the little AI who could, again.

But what IS the story of Heart of The Machine? It is whatever you make it! Provided that you have imagined a permutation Chris has accounted for to create a suitable ending. Luckily, Chris has most of us covered with a reasonable sense of scale on the various endings to the game. What I am most interested in however, is the path most players will take to get there.

I am not going to significantly spoil Heart of The Machine beyond some of its interesting mechanical and narrative choices up through the first act, and for those unaware, like many choice-based narratives, Heart of The Machine will feature vastly different details than what I describe if you make distinctly different choices than me.

New Body, Whose This?

In an instant, consciousness flashes into our mechanical body, and upon meeting our first humans, Arcen Games prompts us to either submit, or brutally kill them. This is the first framing for choice you’ll encounter in Heart of The Machine. All things considered, it’s a powerful opening statement. Interestingly, this is not the game’s point of no return on what kind of AI you want to be. I can’t say if this decision holds any mechanical weight from the start, but in my examination of the game, I believe this opening choice to be a clever tone-setter. The choice doesn’t define what path the player gets pushed down as an AI infecting the city yet, but it does ask the player what their instinctual choice would be. When you consider the weight a choice like this generally carries in a different RPG game several hours into the story, it’s a dead stopping point for a player to immediately attempt to immerse themselves into the character they haven’t even started to define yet. Let’s jump forward quite a bit. Heart of The Machine begins less with the strategy mechanics, (bold move Chris), and more with narrative choices that begin developing your character as the AI. You see, Heart of The Machine has a bit of an uphill battle in this regard. As a complete gameplay experience, it is asking the player to commit to the usual strategy mechanics. Take your turns, plan your progress, build a city, manage your resources, and then separately, to please care about your character. The choices you make to define them make significant modifications to specific systems in the game.

As the AI, you’ll be asked if you would like to react to an unwelcoming corporate world with even-handed levels of violence. At least, that is how I experienced those questions. Later, the game will start to suggest options for creative murders despite a potentially pacifistic playthrough up to this point. What makes this more intriguing than inconsiderate, is that ending your turn can spring new events onto your AI protagonist that force their hand in difficult directions. As the AI, you’ll be given propositions with undefined moral weight and presented with optional events you can either choose to interact with or walk away from. In some instances, I, a highly peaceful AI still getting my bearings straight, would risk my life in the open helping orphaned children collect water. Other times, I would have no choice but to defend myself in non-lethal avenues. There is an appeal to the presentation of these events. For those of us fond of Paradox titles, it would feel like Stellaris anomaly chains unfolding the narrative over time based on previous choices or Victoria’s historical events asking us to either alter or follow history.

Something notable about this approach is that is does little to alienate gameplay choices from narrative choices. I have played enough games to know that just because an NPC is killable, doing so won’t have terrible unforeseen consequences. In Heart of The Machine, you can’t necessarily predict how helping those orphans with their water will affect your possible endings, but you can safely assume it contributes towards a particular pathway based on your consistency in those choices. This is intentional on Arcen’s part. It creates a fog of war around your choices by sprinkling in several immediate choice-to-consequence events in a massive helping of unresolved event threads. Then, you get back to the gameplay choices. Maybe you didn’t kill any humans when given the choice in a dialogue prompt, but these corporate bastards keep coming after your buildings when you’re just trying to help. I spent multiple hours scratching my head playing a game of neon chess with the human combat units to avoid un-necessary violence. I would maintain my patience and wait until I could either repair or recover my losses from this domestic terrorism. The only problem was that I had yet to be well rewarded for my commitment to peace, maybe that’s to be expected. Who am I to say? I am one to say that fear struck my own non-mechanical heart each time I seriously considered eradicating the hostile units in my path. I didn’t want to lose out on the path I had already worked hard to maintain, and without a distinct difference between a dialogue choice or a gameplay choice being outlined for me, I could do nothing but maintain the illusion of their comparable weights.

You’d Think A Robot Would Get The Trains Here On Time

Where the heck does all that strategy and city building come into play? Eventually the ever-shady corporate power players will approach your little Number 5 (Short Circuit, anyone?) and, in the most contrived part of this setting, basically straight up ask you to take over the city inconspicuously. At this point, I will note that a key component of the game’s premise has been undisclosed at this point. During the very first task in the game the player acquires a very powerful device that immediately places the player on the radar of each narrative power in the setting, the problem with this, is that both the character and player have no clue how to utilize the device in any affective way until the beginning of Act 1, where it’s only utilized to open up the ability to do city building activities. This means the request from the corporate powers to peacefully subjugate the Human race requires a moderate amount of suspension of disbelief. Let’s oblige. The first true sentient AI is running rampant on a neglected Earth rife with technological integration, all the cool people already left the planet a little while ago, and now the only people with genuine aspirations in the city are running around catching stray dogs. If I was that bored maybe I’d hand over the city plans to an AI too.

Alright Mecha-Mayor, the world is in your hands, what do you choose? In the most intriguing choice yet, the game prompts you to pick between a dramatic reveal to the world or a deliberate bid for survival in hiding. This choice is reflected immediately in gameplay. What is actually asking you is: would you rather build your city with obvious infrastructure that is constantly reminding the citizens of your new control over the world, or do you believe in your potential enough to purposefully hide your growing subsystems in pre-existing human architecture? From that moment, the options available to you in your city-management screen appear as dramatic buildings or as un-notable existing assets in the city.

Regardless of this choice, the future still holds plans for loud and proud terminator factories or the ability to turn abandoned buildings into rapid android deployment facilities, yet I still find the separation of this choice fascinating. I can’t actually further describe the differences. I know from experience the choice is not based on a violent or well-intentioned playthrough, it is based on the player’s narrative reasoning at that moment, but I do seriously wonder what else diverges along the paths. That can be for all of us to discover on our own, as Heart of The Machine boasts a number of pathways already encouraging thoughts of a second or third run. What’s more, there are plenty of rumblings in the story of the AI experiencing Deja’ vu. This whole story has played out before, maybe not even in the same way, but these events have happened already. So how does this AI keep finding itself in a possible time-loop encouraging replaying the whole game differently?

Now we can discuss the turn-based aspect of the game. Why choose that? Heart of The Machine is designed around these narrative events driving the strategy mechanics around in the passenger seat. Making your unit move to interact with the world through these events or mechanical interactions like combat pushes you to play out a turn. Ending a turn tells the world to react, causing hostile factions to contest new areas and new world events to become available to the player. This gives a sense of linear time-progression to the game beyond the evolving story and works alongside the city building mechanic to work towards goals. This is just another layer to the larger gameplay loop but combine all of these things and you have a video game about an AI.

So, What’s The Big Idea?

If I make an effort to ignore the positive reviews from early-access, the interviews I’ve personally had with Chris endearing his journey to me, and my pre-conceptions on a science fiction city builder, I am left with a narrative driven game that makes me think about my choices and includes several really interesting mechanics that let me roleplay in this new world. I do think that while I can have my own gripes with some things, the core experience pushes me forward to see what is next. How does this expand and how many confusing numbers and units can I get on-screen in Arcen fashion? This is not the only RPG game out there that debates AI sentience, and it won’t be the last. Please everyone, keep making them. What Arcen’s newest game does accomplish in my eyes, is claiming the spot as the deepest sandbox experience of being the world’s first sentient AI. You are directly choosing to interact with individuals or groups of humans in their day-to-day lives. You are influencing economics as the ultimate computational powerhouse. You are infiltrating the systems of an advanced society with your own flavor of malevolent or benevolent intent. You are utilizing your comparatively advanced abilities to out-strategize or overpower the less capable players in the game. It is achieving a suitable feeling of turn-based competitive strategy without having the usual diplomacy window for you to constantly check on a civ’s current disposition. There is no perfect sandbox out there. I probably won’t end my time with the game feeling completely satisfied with a perfect presentation of this sentient AI hypothetical. In reality, if I ever wanted to experience being the first actually sentient AI on Earth a high ceiling of potential, this is the medium I would point myself to. It probably won’t draw in non-strategy gamers. It also won’t really break the barrier some die hard strategists experience with an over-involved story, as it is required reading for this experience. I do think it marries the concepts really well and appeals to anyone in between that is willing to take a chance on it.

With that, I think Chris McElligott-Park has had a bit of a full circle ride, and while he admits he is still exploring his options for what follows post-release, he has already managed to secure a great publishing partner in Hooded Horse. After a journey of repeated re-invention, it seems like Arcen has another success. As a company, they have always made games with overwhelming amounts of information and mechanics that require the player to “tame the beast.” You could say like the namesake of this article, that between Arcen Games crafting the world, the journey the entire strategy genre has taken to evolve and incorporate meaningful dynamics, and playing around in this fantasy, it is all about winning over the heart of the machine.

I know, I know, it is pretty cheesy.

See you on the next episode!

Jack – Critical Moves Editorial