Bethesda

Recently, on one of the trawls through YouTube I engage in as a substitute for doing something constructive, I ended up watching clips of bad game AI – moments where an event or behaviour in a video game seems incongruent in the context of its simulated world.

In Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V, for instance, a protagonist invites you for a drink and then immediately rams their car into a gas station and explodes. In Bethesda's Oblivion, a sorcerer wishes you a jovial “Farewell”, before a rising floor crushes him in a spike trap. In Square Enix’s Kingdom Hearts, Donald Duck waddles to take cover from a snowstorm. “The snowstorm can’t get us here,” he says – then quack-screams as it promptly blows him away.


These clips, which players either engineer or come across by chance, are bizarre, silly and gleefully illogical. Their main attraction, though, is more than just their explicit humour. It derives from the deeper joke behind their existence: that developers and publishers have spent millions of pounds and thousands of hours to immerse you in a simulated world, only for some virtual elf to strum his lute improperly and confound the whole effort. In the way it upsets the rationality of a designer’s world, bad video game AI is fundamentally surrealist, elevating a simple piece of farce or slapstick to something more wonderful. Each skit feels akin to watching someone knock down a carefully constructed house of cards.

The central hub for these video clips is a subreddit called r/iwanttoapologize. A moderator who goes by the username u/The_balla_koala explains that the group name derives from a clip that first appeared on r/YoutubeHaiku, a subreddit that hosts any “almost poetic video” clocking in at under 14 seconds. In said clip, a civilian in Grand Theft Auto V badmouths the player. When the player brandishes a gun at him, the civilian changes his tone comically fast, going from “You are dead meat!” to “I want to apologise” in less than a second.

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“A user asked if there were a subreddit for videos of funny video game AI,” says The_balla_koala. Another user, u/UltraSpecial, noticed that there wasn’t, and created the subreddit. The_balla_koala and another user agreed to help moderate. r/iwanttoapologise just turned three years old and now has more than 30,000 subscribers, with some videos racking up millions of views.


One of the subreddit’s more prolific contributors is YouTuber Mr.Slaughterfish. He explains to me that his motivation for making the clips has always been the same: to make people laugh. “I always loved laughing at glitches in video games, and just messing around and having fun,” he says. He describes his work as a form of comedy skit. “I do like to think of some of my videos as comedy skits; I just make skits in video games,” he says. He says he enjoys the slapstick and physical farce of The Three Stooges; The_balla_koala prefers the more clearly surreal comedy of Eric Andre.

Mr.Slaughterfish’s creative process relies on a mixture of serendipity and setups. Often, the AI of a game he’s playing starts to behave oddly and he can just press record; on other occasions, he has to reload a save to try and repeat a glitch he’s previously noticed. And sometimes, he plans the moments himself: in his Skyrim video “Ragnar the Red”, for instance, he discovered that if a bard who periodically plays music to a crowded tavern dies mid-song, the crowd will clap regardless. “With this in mind, I poisoned the bard just moments before he began playing”, he says. “As a result, he died mid-song and the people clapped. It seemed like they were applauding his death, but it was just the AI being dumb.”

It’s difficult to establish the origins of these kinds of videos. They are a type of machinima – the manipulation of computer graphics engines to create a cinematic production – but differentiate themselves by relying on chance, or at least the appearance of chance; they hew closer to home videos than scripted films. Though the odd behaviour of The Sims characters seems an obvious cultural touchstone, the rise of sprawling, open-ended worlds in which players are free to test the limits of a developer’s design must surely have accelerated the medium’s rise. “Larger-than-average worlds just play into the odds in terms of the situations happening,” says The_balla_koala. Rockstar franchises, like Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto, are particularly prevalent on r/iwanttoapologize.

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It’s Bethesda, however, that reigns as the undisputed champion of the genre. Both Mr.Slaughterfish and The_balla_koala trace their first encounter with bad video game AI back to 2003’s The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and r/iwanttoapologize is dominated by the verdant green hills, rust-coloured wastelands and bizarre non-sequiturs of the developer’s Fallout and Elder Scrolls series.

Beyond a technical explanation – Bethesda’s games have console commands that let you easily spawn whatever you might need for a planned scenario – the main reason for this is simple: the games are riddled with glitches. Protagonists wish you good day then walk off cliffs. Monks will describe themselves as peaceful then begin attacking everyone in sight. The company is infamous for a kind of Silicon Valley-esque “move fast and break things” approach to their releases – getting the game out fast then dealing with any mess in upcoming patches.

The_balla_koala hits on another key aspect. Bethesda, he argues, strives for realism in its games: they strive to immerse you, making the moments that disrupt this immersion all the more striking. It’s this sudden lurch, from immersion into absurdity, that positions the videos squarely in the genre of surreal comedy, a mainstay of millennial and internet humor. As the academic Peter Stockwell writes in his book The Language of Surrealism, it is “incongruity” that defines surrealist humour – jokes which “draw attention to their own landscapes as absurd landscapes of incongruity...and resist sustained immersion”. Bad AI unsettles us; it reminds us we are only playing a game.

As such, r/iwanttoapologize likely represents the early stages of a growing genre. As photorealistic graphics and sophisticated game AI strive to deepen our immersion, the moments that break it will only grow more peculiar and more affecting. VR, in particular, aims for “presence”, the feeling of physical immersion within a non-physical world; it seems ideal for this type of humour. Bacon_, another prolific contributor to r/iwanttoapologize, has already started creating videos the virtual reality version of Skyrim. A world of VR surrealism awaits.

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