sigh… I’m guilty of commenting without clicking through the link, it’s true. My thoughts still stand though, and in some ways as this project is the diametrically opposite of an aimbot, I’m even more interested in your thoughts on the impact and creep of aimbots as they make trained aim ever less relevant in open online FPS play.

What is the psychological impact of winning a purely recreational social competition by cheating, of knowing that the machine is winning when you are incapable of doing so by skill? What is the brain being trained for by poisoning the dopamine hit of winning with the knowledge of deception that can never reflect to the self? Does the angst of being one among many taking the poison pill and distorting the field of play away from skill and towards the selection of the better mechanism of cheating undermine the identification of the player with the real conditions of struggle for survival in the world? At what point does the act of cheating bleed over into the fundamental world view of the cheater, and of their self identification with the will to strive in the social world? Is the aimbot a symbol of schitzoid disidentification with the self as agent of value in the capitalist system, an attempt to break out of the demand for labor extraction and automate the pleasure of success? Where is the line at which the participation of the player ceases to function in the emotional loop of play? If the bot not only aims but also moves and selects and eliminates all need for player input, what is the effect on their reward centers, on their sense of agency, on their conception of what it is to play with other humans? Would the player enjoy a game where they act as a passive rider inhabiting the perspective of a finely tuned automated killing machine if that was explicitly the game being played, or is the transgression against the rules, the act of inflicting an unfair advantage against those who play the game by skill under the original framework of the social compact of the games design fundamental to the sense of self reward that the player seeks when installing the aim bot?

What if the game masquerades as a normal FPS but then poses as fellow players and messages the user links to scripts that slowly but surely fully automate the game loop until the user becomes a software technician, tweaking a thousand fine tuning parameters to try and eek out an advantage over all those other bot riders grinding to a never quite reached ceiling of possible dominance via automation of the kill sequence, playing out a seemingly endless series of rock-paper-scissors priority adjustments in real time between move, jump, crouch, slide, aim, shoot, equipment?

Are all FPS slowly converging on the endpoint of drone warfare, currently ascendant in the real killing fields of Ukrain? Is the true social function of the aimbot to finally undermine the fetishization of a rapidly outdated field of infantry combat in favor of competition in the field of automated battle at a distance, of the hunter-seeker, the fiber drone, and the mobile sentry?

When will this bot land it’s first kill IRL, and has the integration with a 6 axis gimbal already been vibe coded?

When do you feel you will have accomplished your hopes by contributing to this project?