I’m grateful for this response, Dan, and continue to be leery about responding. The last thing I want to do is antagonize someone who’s given such careful consideration to a work of mine. But since I don’t think I’ll be writing a postmortem, perhaps a few thoughts here will suffice re: artistic intent and the (possible lack of) realization of those intents.
Spoilers abound in the text below!
First, let me say that I agree: the game “gets good” when you discover there’s an ethically-questionable human behind the supposed AI. One of my lessons from this game is that perhaps I buried the lede a little too much. I thought that, once I announced that there were multiple endings to achieve (as the game does at the end of every playthrough), most players would seek out the alternate endings and do what you did: find them and assess them as a gestalt. Based on the comments I’ve received, most players play through once. It’s actually making me question the value of multiple endings in a game like this one, that has a satirical mission.
Here’s a point where you and I disagree: satires don’t need to be “novel.” That isn’t the genre. Satires, in fact, tend to have pretty obvious targets. The ones with the biggest scopes, like The Golden Ass or Tom Jones, have a picaresque structure so that, as the hero wanders from place to place, they can lambaste huge swathes of society in fairly obvious ways. Is Tom Jones less of a satire because it takes time to mock the greedy logic of an innkeeper who is clearly inflating prices as she calculates the bill? Naw. That’s the job. In smaller satires, often the whole point is to say, “This thing that is happening is so bad, everyone. Are we really going to let this stand?” “A Modest Proposal” isn’t less of a satire because, obviously, we shouldn’t be letting people starve. Its mission was to galvanize change. I would argue that a great number of our most memorable satires have nothing we’d call “novel” targets. Quite the opposite: the outrage that fuels them comes in part from the fact that their targets are obviously bad, yet they are allowed to exist in society.
You’d mentioned that automated personality tests have existed for ages. Yes. They were bad then, and they are bad now (don’t get me started on the Myers-Briggs Personality Horoscope Test). One of the reasons these tests continue to exist is that we haven’t satirized them into oblivion, I would argue.
I thought you made an interestingly meta point about the game being neither live or LLM-powered. There’s no way I would have used an LLM for ethical reasons and because it would have contradicted the point of the satire, of course. A live version, however, is of interest. I design RPGs and LARPs and am now thinking about a LARPy version of “Burger Meme.” Could be a hoot!
Continuing in this line, you state that the fictional AI felt irrelevant to you because the personality test wasn’t dystopian because of the use of AI, but rather because the personality tests themselves are dystopian. I would argue that degree matters. A car that gets 9 miles to the gallon is more dystopian than one that gets 16, even though both are awful and should in my opinion be illegal. I’ll also say that, if you look at the specific personality test I am satirizing (available in the “WTF is this?” link in the beginning of the game), you will see that it, too, looks like a Twine game.
As a final thought, I know you think the endings that don’t reveal the human behind the machine aren’t as strong as the ones that do. I agree, but I will also say that I think they are lode-bearing in terms of the satire. One point I was trying to make is that the people with money hate paying workers and love throwing money at the dream of never having to pay workers. Jwala, the person who is sabotaging the AI from the inside, is never fired in any of the game’s endings. Either you get the job (more fool you), or you don’t get the job, and Jwala contacts you, OR you don’t get the job, Jwala never contacts you, and you read later how a “hacker” (obviously Jwala) forces Burger Meme into Chapter 11 by releasing damning documents. In no scenario is Jwala discovered. Why? Because the owners don’t care that the AI personality test is garbage. They are happy to pay an endless string of charlatans who promise a future where they get to keep more of their millions.
That was my thinking. But again, I think I could realize that more in the work itself. I’m remembering now how, in “A Modest Proposal,” Swift includes an entire italicized rant of all the things that should be happening to mitigate the famine: which would not require the eating of babies. I think I needed more “italicized rants,” so to speak.
I feel that I learned a great deal from submitting “Burger Meme” to IFComp, especially from you and other reviewers who read the game so carefully and wrote about it so usefully. Again, I hope this discussion is okay! Thanks so much for all the time and thought you’ve given my game. (And just as a aside, I am friends with both Max Gladstone and Ben Rosenbaum, whom you’ve worked with in Choice of Games, and so am a big fan of the work you do!)
edit: typos suck
