Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter
Sean Woods
So… right. There’s been a lot of talk about AI around this comp, and ‘Penny Nichols’ has been an example at its epicenter. So I’m a bit trepidatious about writing anything about it, as I feel like I will mortally offend someone. But hey, in for a Penny…
First off, I’m not going to talk about the ethics of AI, because they are myriad, and better summarized by people who know more than I. I want instead to talk about exactly two things: effectiveness, and rule-based art.
There’s not a lot of rule-based art out there that I know of where the rule is literally the only thing that the artist contributed to the work, but there is some. I remembered someone talking about a candy dish at an art gallery, with a label next to it saying that people could add or take candy as they wished. This made some people very upset, because the artist wasn’t creating anything, in their view. But the creation was, instead, the rule: we are going to tell observers to add or subtract candy from this dish, and that ebb and flow will say something about each other. When I went to look that up for this review, I couldn’t find it, so either I’m just misremembering, the person I heard it from was misremembering, or it’s just obscure. But I did discover something similar, in "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) - Wikipedia where a pile of candy of approximately the weight of a person was present and people were invited to take pieces of it as they wished. The decay over time, reversed by museum staff at periodic intervals when the pile is restocked, is the art. In a similar way, John Cage’s 4′33″ - Wikipedia (which is four minutes and 33 seconds of performed silence) is not ‘music’, per se, but it is a rule about sound during a performance. If you are present at a performance, you hear little from the stage, but instead hear the sounds from your fellow concert-goers, the hum of machinery or lights, passing airplanes, you yourself, or whatever else might be making noise during those four minutes and thirty-three seconds. John Cage didn’t create the sounds you are hearing, but he created a rule that made you listen.
Works of IF are typically some sort of balance between traditional ‘here is a thing’ works of art and ‘here is a rule to follow’ pieces of art: it requires audience participation to a degree that very few other art forms do, and in a way, this frees reviewers to not try to be as ‘objective’ about something that is, by its very nature, designed to be deeply subjective. But even traditional art (paintings, music) is still designed to evoke: to draw in an audience to have a reaction. It is a ‘good’ piece of art for a particular person if it evokes something in them. And we can talk about balance and harmonics and lighting in an objective way, but at the end of the day, did it make someone feel something? Think about something? IF is participatory in a way that makes that question much more obvious.
And in case you couldn’t see this coming: Penny Nichols is much closer to the ‘rule about a candy dish’ or ‘be quiet for four minutes’ rule-based art than it is to the ‘I made a thing’ art of paintings or music or even traditional IF. It is a chatGPT prompt: a complicated rule-based piece that recruits a stochastic algorithm trained on the internet as one participant, and the player as another. And it seems to me that complaining that this ‘isn’t IF’ is akin to complaining that because John Cage didn’t instruct your seat mate to clear their throat, that what he did ‘isn’t music’. Under some definitions it might be, and under some definitions it might not be, but what it clearly is is art: you are a participant. You are intended to respond. That response will dictate how effective it was for you.
And that gets us to part two: the effectiveness of the Penny Nichols prompt on the experience of a particular observer, vis a vis one Lucian Smith.
[I’m hugely tempted to write ‘I liked it,’ here, and quit. Because that would be hilarious. But I will instead unpack that just a bit.]
I was honestly very impressed by the story that Sean, chatGPT, and I managed to create! The writing, far from being dry and generic, was (I felt) reasonable and perky. The interface, somewhat to my surprise, was choice-based: I was always given three options to choose between. And unlike any other choice-based game I’ve played before, in this one I knew exactly what the stakes were in each choice! ChatGPT always told me what exactly was at stake, and I felt a real sense of ownership of the story, that I was taking Penny Nichols in a particular direction because I wanted to find out what happened when doing option 2; that the story I wanted to create was somewhere behind option 2. It felt more like a TTRPG than any other IF I’ve ever played, which was interesting! A large part of that was that the mechanics were frontlined, and kind of felt like an amalgamation of a ‘Powered by the Apocalypse’ game with FATE, both of which I’ve played a lot of, and enjoy. (For that matter, the front-lined mechanics kind of felt a bit like the story/mechanic juxtaposition in ‘Citizen Sleeper’.) At the end of the story, it even gave Penny a ‘FATE-compatible phrasing’ aspect “The Paperwork of Reality Has My Signature On It,” which is kind of amazing. And, again, maybe you hate that line and maybe you don’t: I was amused and intrigued.
Another thing about the story that made me smile was when Penny discovered that the central ‘Artifact’ of the piece was able to edit reality. Which is, like, the perfect plot device in an LLM-generated story, because the LLM itself is very likely to edit its own reality as it goes, and by making it part of the fiction, you can just say ‘well, that means the Artifact was doing more than you originally thought!’ I thought that was a genuinely clever insert into the prompt/chat/me interaction soup. The whole thing felt like it wouldn’t be out of place in Stross’s ‘The Laundry Files’ series.
So the upshot is that after I read a lot of anti-AI screeds on the forums, I really thought I would hate this. But objectively, for me: I had a good time. I experienced a sense of freedom that I usually only get from TTRPGs, where I know the GM will make up a story regardless of what direction I take my character. I never had to worry about whether I was going to pick the wrong option; I knew there was an equal amount of story-ish stuff behind everything. I knew it was being made up by some amalgamation of The Internet, and that colored my experience in an interesting way, not unlike hearing people shuffle their feet and giggle nervously at a 4’33" performance. It was something different, and I appreciated it.
Finally: I’m not going to complain about reviewers who don’t actually play this game and instead comment on the prompt, or on the ethics of AI, or anything else. In a very real sense, ‘this work of art prompted me to be angry on the internet’ is a perfectly valid response, and yet another way that one could evaluate the effectiveness of this piece. But while I’m sure I could write an interesting review of a piece of I7 source code, it wouldn’t be the same as a review of my interacting with the game that I7 source code produced. I could write a review of someone’s transcript of playing the game, and it wouldn’t be the same as a review of myself playing the game. For that matter, I once heard Laurie Anderson ‘perform silence’ at a concert, and I would not have been able to predict how I felt about my time spent listening during that time, had I not experienced it myself. So I would encourage people to acknowledge that the experience of actually playing the game is going to be different than reading the source, or reading a transcript. Do what you will! I’m not your dad. But you might try it. When I did, I was surprised.
Did the author have anything to say? I kind of feel like what I got out of it was a bit more than the author put in, but, basically, yes: the author was trying something new in rule-based art forms, and it took the shape of a vaguely-SCPish short story.
Did I have anything to do? Yes! Perhaps more strongly than any other pre-programmed game in the competition, this one felt uniquely ‘mine’.