Aggregate (2024)

An interpretation of the concepts of desire paths and machine learning in the shape of a third person open world video game.

Video game, 3D print, installation

By Distraction Collective (Jonathan Coryn, Nino Filiu, Victor Meas Pierre Moulin, Vincent Moulinet, Camille Petit, alpha_rats) and friends (Igor Dubreucq, Jules Durand, Théo Le Du Fuentes, Moshe Linke)

Aggregate is an innovative art game that explores the concept of artificial intelligence learning to desire. Set in a vast, desolate landscape filled with electrical pylons, abandonned supermarkets, and post-sovietic superstructures, players take turns controlling a humanoid personnification of an AI as it painfully navigates through this wasteland.

The main game loop consists in the player having to walk long distances across thorn-ridden fields that quickly make them die out, but on respawn the paths traversed in previous lives are now safe to walk without losing health points. Across many iterations, the adversarial landscape slowly morphs into a network of walkable highways.

The more narratively explicit metaphor of the game is the exploration of gay cruising spots, but another metaphor of the unique locomotion mechanic is reinforcement learning, a technique used by machine learning models to learn new concepts through many iterations of trial and errors. The player is thus both a machine finding its way to be human, and a human finding its way to a lover.

The resin 3D printed gamepad displays countless thorns and spikes: designed to be uncomfortable to hold, its use creates a tangible connection between the player and the AI’s struggles.

The project aims to provoke thought about the nature of desire, the role of AI in understanding human experiences, and the concept of “third landscape” - spaces that exist outside of traditional urban planning. It challenges players to reconsider abandoned spaces, the contingency of desire, and the subjectivity of algorithms in our contemporary world.

I took the technical lead of the project around halfway through, when we realised that a completely flat collaboration paradigm wasn’t working well.

Powered by Unity, the game doesn’t use that many pre-made assets and is mostly composed of bespoke 3D models, scripts and music. The game made our team express our talentes in a wide array of technical and artistic areas, namely C#, visual scripting, shaders, cinematics, level design, 3D modelisation, optimization, non-linear game narration, and more.

As a large open world taking more than an hour to fully explore that was built by people from wildly different background, it was both a technical and managerial challenge to pull off, but the game was ready with zero reported blocking bugs for its grand première at Octobre Numérique 2024.

Play it here (contact us for the password)

On display at Octobre Numérique 2024

Mentionned in Usbek & Rika