Faceminer Spiel

by Rian

AI was the talk of the town during Christmas dinner, so I thought to give Faceminer a chance. Even before AI was such a hit, we — everyone who has seen the crypto ads on social media — have seen the whole mining rig as a business opportunity to ‘work from home’. It has been always been a brief talking point during light hearted dinners. What if we had bought ourselves a powerful workstation fit for crypto mining or local AI training to switch jobs?

As a simulator game, Faceminer sits at an awkward position. Frankly, I’m not entirely confident in saying this is an intended experience. The protagonist has landed on a job to find a human face from 9 images (i.e. think reCAPTCHA). But soon after, we are offered an opportunity to automate the process; which inevitably leads us to upgrading to better software, hardware, and more of everything for bigger profit. The game unlocks more elements to supposedly manage for growth, but it is a dull, linear experience with no speciality. Had it been a data center simulator, I would have been more interested. Had it been AI programer simulator, it would still be more specific.

I believe any flavor in the gameplay is washed out due to game’s inability to narrow down what it is trying to criticize. The game creates an immersive Windows PC of 1999, but the core gameplay is set on managing a data center, not a personal computer. Owning a data center, no matter how small, is not an easy feat. It depicts the hoarding nature of such businesses, but it also dilutes the attention by having the player be the one to solve reCAPTCHA manually. As much as I would like to give it a credit of being AI modeling sim, the criteria is more akin to having a crypto mining rig. In fact, the central tenet of the main plot relies on the protagonist not understanding what the computing is for, yet being paid handsomely.

The true irony of Faceminer abounds by the mere fact it uses AI generated faces for the game. It is somewhat understandable why it had to be; the game is looking for photorealistic experience, and thus the photos themselves are either needed be bought or generated. However, this is not the only game that speaks of the dangers of surveillance and AI. There are other predecessors that used clever trick to make the players into thinking they are seeing millions of people’s faces. Using AI generated contents to partially criticize AI industry, especially when the game heavily relies on it, defeats the purpose of it.

Conclusions: Buzzword Clicker

By the definition of genre, Faceminer would fall under clicker game or incremental game. In the first few minutes, the player does stay involved in the process of finding human faces from the data sets. But there is hardly any clicking after that, it’s more or less an idle game in the most literal sense. This is not the hardcore business sim, let alone realistic home mining or AI development sim. The impression I’ve received is more reminiscent of chasing IT buzzwords than actually developing one topic in depth. Unless the idler game or clicker game were already of your interest,Faceminer is not the new avenue of gaming I could recommend easily.