I hope we can get some (ideally local) version of this we can use as a "gaming minion". There's a lot of games where I probably would have played more if I could delegate the grind. If they're not that competent, it adds to the fun a little even.
I've always wanted an AI that can play my video games for me, so that I can spend my time doing more fun and fulfilling things, like cleaning the toilet, folding my laundry, washing my dishes, taking out the garbage. Now I will no longer have to worry about the annoying chores in life, like drawing art, writing poetry, or playing video games
sorry this is kind of nuts to me. You want something to play video games for you because the video game isn't fun? Just play a game that is fun. The point of the game is to play it
Sorry if it was unclear, but I want something that can act like a dumb co-op partner for games obviously balanced around co-op play so I can have fun playing the game. I've run into a few games like that and I end up dropping them when solo play is too tedious.
"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."
If the game needs to perform grind yourself, without delegating it (think Albion Online, Eve Online, Black Desert Online, Path of Exile etc. basically every MMO with economy), it means it's actively part of the game design, and delegating it to a robot is just cheating (and against the ToS in all of those cases)
So the point of GP's post, which I agree with, is that if that kind of grind is not part of the fun for you, then the game wasn't designed for you (and please don't cheat because you ruin other's fun)
"Wow! I could've sworn I was really playing virtual Skeeball!"
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In practice I think you would lose interest very quickly in any game should you do so. Games are carefully designed to balance the drudgery with action, and to control the complexity progression. Using AI would break both.
I guess only some games are amenable to this, but I automated mining in Terraria by just programming AutoHotkey to automate the keyboard and click specific coordinates. The player is always in the middle of the screen, so you can mine specific blocks by just offsetting the coordinates relative to that. So you can mine sideways, downwards, diagonally...
The only issue I ran into was that it was blind and would keep going so I'd look away from the screen and when I came back I had fallen into a pit of monsters or something.
One thing I do with games is automate the grind. To me, that is part of the fun. I have built lego robots to press a sequence of buttons repeatedly, or programmed microcontrollers using circuitpython to press a series of keys or click the mouse at given intervals to grind various in-game currency and such. It's so common for me to do these kinds of things that I now instinctively look for places in gameplay that I can automate. I haven't done anything as complicated as using computer vision to look at the screen and respond to it, but I did see that Anthony Sottile did this to catch shiny pokemon https://youtu.be/-0GIY5Ixgkk and doing something like this has been out there on my horizon.
