User blog:Ultra64Detective2401/The Process of Personalization

Sequence:The Basics of Anomalies

Previous:Why Every Copy of Super Mario 64 is Personalized

Next:Intermission:Personalization and AI Safety

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Last post, we discovered that in fact, every copy of Super Mario 64 is personalized. But we left off wondering what exactly this “personalization” is, and how it happens.

In this post, we’ll be attempting to solve those mysteries.

Now, as you recall, some copies had their textures edited such to give the appearance of a cracked wall texture, to make the 1-up hint more obvious. We know this is personalization, but what exactly is personalization? How, exactly, is every copy personalized?

We know in order for a game to be personalized, there must be some process that does the personalizing. But how can we learn about this process? We don’t have access to the full, uncensored Oman Archives, what little we have has no evidence of such a process. The ROM itself, dumped and decompliated, also shows no evidence of such a process. Even the Gigaleak wasn’t able to find it. (Nor any of the beta builds, for that matter.)

But we don’t need the full source code of a process to learn how it works. We don’t have the source code of the universe, yet we know tons about how it works! We just need to find more instances of personalization, and perhaps we can learn more about its workings.

First off, we KNOW every copy is different in some way, post-personalization. We KNOW this was intended, at some point, to be a feature of the game. (The process had to be coded in by someone after all)

The personalization process can’t be just pure RNG. Sure, RNG makes the game slightly different, like determining what direction coins travel after defeating an enemy, but again, this was already the case in other games, like Super Mario World. The game changes as players play, not just over time.

The personalization specifically reacts to the player. And this was a feature programmed into either the game, or the Nintendo 64. This means personalization is an input-output program-It takes something from us as input, does some kind of processing with that input, and alters the game as output.

That still leaves several unanswered questions, though. What’s the “something” that’s input? What’s the process it does with the input? Well, again, we need to keep in mind:Personalization was a feature. It can’t be something random, it needs to be doing something to achieve some specific goal. The output must be clearly linked to the input in some way. And we KNOW what the output looks like:A modification of the game-Like changing a texture to make a secret spottable.

We also have a good idea what the input is. It’s how players play the game. That fits the quote, and is also the only real thing that would make sense-The controller is the N64’s only possible input anyways (besides the game itself, of course.)

With that, we can attempt to reverse-engineer the program.

Say you’re a game designer. You want to make a game that reacts to how the players play. How could you do this? You could attempt to fund a massive study, and figure out a way to link controller inputs and game states to playstyles (good luck, we can’t even do that well TODAY), and create a massive lookup table.. (which would likely take terabytes of storage) or you could program an AI to try to find those links FOR you.

The second option is far more likely, and it could catch things missed previously. Later on, we’ll find even more evidence that this is what happened.. but so far, the likelihood is already overwhelmingly in the second options favor. There’s an AI. And the AI’s goal would be to personalize the game in such a way to match your playstyle and desires.

Now, the AI, looking to figure out your playstyle, could sometimes decide to experiment and study you in subtle ways, to gather more information based on how you react with the game controller. This would involve appealing to you subconsciously, as this could cause very subtle affects in control stick input. This would help it personalize your game even more effectively. The AI was likely itself experimental, being developed alongside Super Mario 64. (Nintendo does experiment with huge releases after all. That’s how Super Mario Odyssey happened.)

So, to sum up what we learned so far:Every copy of Super Mario 64 is personalized. There exists an AI that adapts and subtly changes the game in response to your playstyle, thus tailoring it specifically for you, appealing to you subconsciously in ways you don’t even notice, as well as attempting to mess with you and study how you react to it.

This also means it’s quite certain that other anomalies should exist besides the one we discovered in the first post. And in fact, there are. Next post, we’ll be diving deeper into these anomalies. Trying to find other cases of the AI altering the game, and attempting to learn more about the AI’s potential capabilities.

After that, perhaps we’ll attempt to use this info to form an understanding of why Nintendo has been hiding this, and removing traces of the AI from all of their rereleases, and denying that such an AI has ever existed.

But wait a minute! Isn’t this reason enough? An AI not properly programmed to take safety into account, this resulting in it experimenting on you, often causing harm through said experiments? Isn’t that reason enough for Nintendo to do what they did?

It looks like we’ll have to go through an intermission where we look into this potential solution to the mystery. So next post, we’ll be looking into the idea that Nintendo simply failed to properly make the AI a safe one.