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| Piloting a ship in Space Engineers |
Keen Software House is a game development company based in Prague, Czech Republic, and it is probably not a name that you hear very often. They have developed 4 games in total since 2012: Miner Wars Arena, Miner Wars 2081, Space Engineers (beta), and Medieval Engineers (beta). The game that put Keen Software on the map was Space Engineers. This is a giant sandbox game that allows players to roam freely across the entire Milky Way galaxy and more. Players can build space ships, in which they can fly across the galaxy to explore and mine for more resources. They can then build giant stations just outside the atmosphere of a planet to dock their ships at. Random encounters with other lifeforms prompt players to equip their ships and stations with weapons to defend their goods or to attack to gain extra resources.
The possibilities of customization are expanded on with mods, or modifications, to the game. Space Engineers’ code is open source, which basically means anyone can look at it and add to it. This allows people who can understand the code to write something new to add different blocks, weapons, or anything that they can think of. Other players can then download this code to use these new in-game objects and tools in their own game. Ultimately, this game is exactly what you make it to be – plus space. Not surprisingly, this game has sold well over 2 million copies.
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| Marek Rosa |
So, who is Keen Software House? The best answer is the company’s creative genius Marek Rosa, the founder and CEO of Keen Software. He is a man who cares about major, new technology – game development and AI, or AGI to be more specific (AGI stands for artificial general intelligence). Keen Software’s mottos parallel Rosa’s personality: “We’re getting it done,” “Work hard, play hard,” and “Reality is the best game-designer.” He believes that one of the strongest forces in nature is the “need to create,” which he portrays in almost all of his games. Something that is particularly interesting in Rosa’s life is his involvement in AGI. Many things that we deal with on a daily basis, such as Siri or OpenAI Five, are examples of AI. AGI, however, is much broader AI. For example, when you ask Siri to do something she does not understand, she will ask you if you want her to search the internet for it and nothing more. AGI is something more, something much closer to a human’s intelligence. Instead of just looking up something that it does not understand, it would ask you more questions and have a real conversation with you. It would then store that conversation and the information presented in it so that it would remember what you mean next time you ask a similar question. In other words, making an AGI is equivalent to creating a human brain. This is what Rosa is extremely interested in, so much so that he decided to start another company, GoodAI, which researches AGI.
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| Part of the GoodAI Team |
Rosa is clearly a very motivated person. In a paper written by Markus Baer, Greg R. Oldham, and Anne Cummings, they explain that extrinsic motivation often causes a lack of creativity in people when they have “complex” jobs. This brings up a very interesting point as many people would classify designing and maintaining a game as a complex, yet very creative endeavor. Marek Rosa describes how he overcomes obstacles as going “into some kind of autopilot and just do[ing] it.” He does not seem to have a purely intrinsic motivation as he consistently says how he does not like solving boring obstacles; he enjoys having something to push him towards his next venture. On the other hand, he is not purely extrinsically motivated as he says he “would not be working on AI if [he] didn’t believe it, or [he] would not be working on games if [he] didn’t believe it.” Rosa uses a combination of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation as a driving force behind his creative products. In addition, collaboration, as described by Sunstein and Thaler, plays an invaluable role in Rosa’s creativity, especially in regard to AI. Whenever you see a news article or story about AI, headliners often warn of how dangerous it can become. In response to this, Rosa states that “the key here is collaboration and preparation.” Marek Rosa believes that as long as he and other creatives work with each other, they can create a creative, useful, and, most importantly, safe product.
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| Space Engineers |
I love playing Space Engineers, it offers so much creativity and possibility in a limitless universe. I could spend hours building a space ship just to crash it into another, and many people do just that. Rosa is to thank because of all of that. His creativity is guided by the real, physical world, and that is what makes him so unique. His work on Space Engineers affects many gamers, pushing them to be more creative in Rosa’s universe while his work on AGI may affect everyone in this universe.
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