On Sunday, I got around to watching Free Guy. The movie tells the tale of an NPC character named Guy (played by Ryan Reynolds) inside a MMORPG world similar to GTA (aka “Free City”) that gains consciousness and becomes a sentient life form. I enjoyed the silly action comedy, but as a software engineer, I couldn’t help but notice how certain aspects of the film are unrealistic.
Let’s start with the reuse code lawsuit, which is a big part of the plot. Millie (played by Jodie Comer) spends lots of time playing the Free City in order to try to find evidence that it has reused her AI code. First of all, code is not going to be visible to players inside the game. Secondly, code reuse across the industry is common and pretty much accepted.
The evidence that Millie eventually finds is a video clip showing a tropical island from her own game. That also strikes me as weird. Even if her AI code was reused, there would be no need to include the stolen UI as well.
Another unrealistic part is how servers are handled. If the MMORPG was really that popular, it would be hosted in the cloud; the server farm would probably not be right next to the developer’s office. Destroying parts of the server farm with an axe should not result in the destruction of individual buildings in the MMORPG; server farms generally run in parallel so losing a few servers would just make the game a little laggier. Restarting the server should not cause all the NPC data to be lost. (That would require wiping the database.)
The way the release of Free City 2 is handled also seems wrong. Most MMORPGs don’t have sequels; they are slowly updated over time. (Just look at Runescape, World of WarCraft or EVE Online; all have been chugging along since the early 2000’s.) Even if there was a radically different sequel (aka Guild Wars 2), the original would not be taken down right away because doing so would mean the loss of many valuable customers.
Last and most importantly, there is the underlying question of whether computer software can be really sentient or not. For biological life, killing it means destroying the body. There is one place where the brain is housed and getting rid of it means death. For AI, it’s more hazy. When something is duplicated so many times in the cloud, what does it really mean to kill it?
