Tales of Nivea: GRIP
Tales of Nivea – my mind is racing immediately. Could it be about a guy suffering from slightly irritated dry skin between his fingers, who notices significant relief after applying Nivea™ lotion for a week? Or is it about a woman complaining that the house brand sunscreen she’s been using makes her skin feel a bit oily, and then her friend suggests using the premium brand? I’m joking, but also a little baffled. I think that ‘Nivea’ is never mentioned in the game; if it is supposed to be the name of a fictional country, or something like that, I would respectfully suggest choosing a new name that is not also an international brand of skincare products!
The game itself. We’re living in an proto-fascist Earth kingdom where people who have affinity with other elements, or whose powers are too great, have always been looked on with suspicion. The anonymous and mostly faceless bureaucrats have started a new programme, GRIP, that finds out about these people at an early age and then… sends them to the right place. In practice, it means that your job as an aspiring bureaucrat (you’re in it because you need to earn money somehow, no matter how) is to interview children aged between 6 and 14, read their files, then determine to either give them a symbol of social ostracism, hand them over for military training, or terminate them.
Those who know my games by reputation may be surprised to hear that I almost stopped playing when I realised that part of the game was to sign the death sentences of children. (Those who have actually played my games are perhaps less surprised.) I’m glad to report, though, that termination is never insisted on by the game. In fact, the only episode where it makes sense to choose it, is one where the powers that be do not want you to choose it. I did choose it, and the game handled it with more grace than I counted on. I wonder what happens if you play as a zealous killer.
Overall, the build-up and the atmosphere are good. The writing is pretty good too, although I’ll have something more critical to say about that at the end that I’d like to keep out of the main body of the review. The strict rules of bureaucracy, its faceless nature, are presented in a very convincing way; and then the inevitable injustice, senselessness, and even sheer hypocrisy are exposed through a series of cases that never get boring. What happens is not, I think, surprising – and I think the game may owe more than a little to Papers, Please, although that’s only an informed guess since I never played it – but it is thematically effective. There’s real tension too, helped by the colours and graphics. (I believe there is music too, but I played without sound.)
The games structure is on the opaque side. I got taken from my job, perhaps terminated, because I stayed the same – I kept wondering, rather than committing to the system. That made some sense, but wasn’t easy to map onto the actual decisions I made. I understand from the IFDB review of @mathbrush that you get doubt points when you question the children. But just like him, I had assumed that you were supposed to always question the children – there was no indication that the interviews were optional. While not feeling in charge of my destiny is okay for a game with this theme, I don’t think it wants to descend into Kafkaesque realms where the relation between action and punishment is unfathomable. A clearer connection of the end with my deeds would have been better.
Overall, though, GRIP is a good game that does justice to its ambitious theme. End of main body of the review.
Now that we’re outside of the main body of the review, let me tell you that I’ve been doing some fiction generation with locally run LLMs (that is: models that run on my own computer, no disastrous data centers involved). I’m not creating texts for other people’s consumption, but experimenting with using LLMs as a tool for solo roleplaying – with mixed success, to be honest. But that’s not what I want to talk about.
Contemporary LLMs write narrative prose that is quite fine, sometimes bordering on the good, but the models have distinctive mannerisms. It’s a bit like how certain writers have their own style, and you immediately recognise that style. Five sentences and you know it’s them. What happened to me when I was playing GRIP was that there were passages that felt 100% like they were written by the models I know. They felt so much like it, that it was like recognising the face of someone you know well – it’s hard to put into words exactly what it is that you recognise, except that it is them. Here’s a passage that does that for me:
It’s the phrase ‘squared off with more precision than any job should require’ and not just the construction of the phrase, but also its not quite making sense. (Can you rank jobs along a scale of how much precision they require in squaring off stacks of files?) It’s the fact that we re-use an environment detail that shouldn’t appear here: the white job offer notice, framed, makes no sense as an office decoration. It’s especially the entire last sentence, its grammatical and semantic construction, the words used, the way how it sounds very accomplished but once again subtly fails to make sense (if someone thinks they already accounted for all your needs, they might still offer you what they think you need). I cannot read this paragraph without thinking: I know who wrote this! Or, rather, what wrote this.
But that’s a big claim to make, because it would mean that GRIP breaks the competition rules and would face disqualification. I’m neither willing to nor interested in basing an accusation on my mere subjective feeling. (And perhaps there is counterevidence too: ‘stair’ should be ‘stairs’, and is that a mistake LLMs make? Maybe not.) What’s more, I have the nagging suspicion that as people use more and more LLMs, their very own writing might start to copy the mannerisms of LLMs. That a text sounds like an LLM is, conceivably, no longer a solid sign that it was written by an LLM. It could just be a sign that it was written in an LLM-infused world.
One thing that LLMs have done to all of us is that they’ve made us suspicious and paranoid. If a student sends me something good, a doubt is generated in my mind. If an IF Comp entry phrases things a certain way, a doubt is generated by my mind. I don’t like being suspicious. This state of mind – this justified paranoia – is itself already a form of harm we have suffered. And that’s an insight into the power of systems over individuals that fits GRIP quite neatly.
(Just to be clear: I do not accuse GRIP of breaking competition rules, but I also could not write about its prose style and how it affected me – a crucial component of an IF review – without mentioning these thoughts I had.)