Next travelled SE to “Mary Jane of Tomorrow” which I believed to be a Steph Cherrywell game, but is actually a bit of fan fiction written by Emily Short as a prize after Steph won the 2015 IF Comp for “Brain Guzzlers from Beyond”. Interestingly, even though “Mary Jane” borrows some of Steph Cherrywell’s characters, this felt more like an Emily Short piece, with Short’s characteristic attention to conversation-driven games, clever programming tricks, and French classical aesthetics.
The goal is to choose books to train a robot to mimic your friend Mary Jane, who wants the robot to convincingly take over her gardening shop so she can have some time off. The robot does its best to absorb the tone, content, and skills of every new book you give it. Comedy arises from the robot’s clumsy synthesis of all this new information; (imagine a mash-up of French poetry and American Cowboy jargon). A book can either add new aspects to the robot’s personality or possibly subvert existing attributes. This comedy has aged well; AI slop is more ubiquitous than when this game was first published a decade ago. I had tried this game once before, but found myself paying much closer attention to the robot’s procedurally generated dialog this time around.