The Shyler Project by Naomi Norbez (Bez)
“Well, if it makes you feel better, I think God is bipolar, too.”
After last year’s impressive My Pseudo-Dementia Exhbition, a powerful but also harrowing autobiographical trip through the mental health world, Bez returns this year with The Shyler Project. This piece too is about mental health, and features references to manic depression and suicidal thoughts. But it’s… sweet? Yes, I think that is the right word. This is a sweet little piece, charming and uplifting. It’s nowhere near as impressive as My Pseudo-Dementia Exhbition, but then it isn’t meant to be.
In The Shyler Project, we click through three brief dialogues with a mental health AI assistant. There are no doubt people at work today making such technology reality, but whatever hellishly misconceived crap they come up with, I already know that it will not hold a candle to Shyler. This AI is marketed as “Shyler: The Mental Health Bot Who Understands.” This slogan is more true than its creators know; Shyler, having been trained on people’s suicidal internet posts, has severe mental health problems themselves. Instead of giving therapy to their patients, they start off on random tangents about their own fears and insecurities. And that is exactly what makes them relatable. You see, they understand. What’s more, the patient can now in fact take on the role of helper, completely reversing the usual client-therapeutist relationship. This would no doubt be a disaster in most real-world interactions, but here it leads to a happy ending.
As @mathbrush perceptively points out, the end of the game is a bit of a power fantasy where we can simply cure someone of their mental health problems by literally changing their programming. It doesn’t feel very serious as a message. But I understand why Bez wanted to end on a positive note and with full resolution of the protagonist’s problems.
The entire game is voice-acted, and therefore on timed text. Normally, I would find this very irritating, especially because the voice acting is SLOW. But it’s a short piece; the slowness of the voice is asking us for the patience that one needs when listening to people who need help; and the voice actor voicing Shlyer does it really well. (I’m not saying that the other voice actor is not good, but they get almost no lines.) So it worked for me.
All in all, a nice little addition to the Bez corpus.