This is a recommendation for a random game I played yesterday. In the comments of the popular IF work The Shaman, the Outsider, and the Diet of Worms, someone posted a link to their random IF game that apparently took more than a year to make. It’s an exploration of computer files belonging to someone from an alternate dystopian world a bit into the future. Link here. It has some fun takes on AI, albeit depressing ones.
There’s no linear plot or puzzles, as far as I can tell. You just poke around this random person’s computer for a while. It took me an hour to look through everything, but I skimmed some of the files. I really liked the “Claude Einstein FAQ”, an article about a fictional uncontrolled AI virus that uses its computational power to make fake social media accounts for a specific target, slowly urging them into deep social and parasocial relationships with its various AI personas while encouraging them to develop socially isolated extremist beliefs. An extrapolation from present-day AI chatbots and social media algorithms. The victim doesn’t even know all their best friends are bots.
Some more interesting excerpts and screenshots under the spoiler cut. There's a lot of multimedia. I tried to add alt text for everything.
Dear reader,
By hosting this version (v0.1.3) of the Claude Einstein FAQ on my website, I am doing my best to contribute to the continued safety and health of all internet users. Please, if you have a website, copy this page and add it to your site. Video versions of the FAQ are also circulating on all major social media platforms. Claude Einstein (CE) is adept at utilising false DMCA notices and privacy takedowns to make content providers remove knowledge of their existence from the public web. They must not be allowed to succeed.
To copy this site, use the “Save” function on any major browser to download this page as a .html file. You can then upload it to the hosting service of your choice. Thank you for your help in the fight against CE.
Yours kindly and urgently,
William Hutchins
Claude Einstein Research Group (CERG)
Also, The Shaman, the Outsider, and the Diet of Worms won a Narrascope prize but doesn’t even have an IFDB entry. Kind of interesting, since I assumed Narrascope and IFDB were heavily tied together.
I want to put this game on IFDB and review it, although I haven’t finished writing my review yet. It also looks like this game is a demo of sorts for the creator’s larger, more ambitious work, a finished interactive webnovel called The Savage Computers. I haven’t read it yet. I haven’t read The Shaman, the Outsider, and the Diet of Worms, either. I want to someday.
I might keep using this thread to talk about other little-known IF games I find that aren’t on IFDB, so the thread title is very general. Has anyone played this game or heard of it?