The other weakness is that of course – of course – this is all clearly a minefield set up to trick you into creating a killer AI that’s going to wipe out humanity. If the protagonist were strongly characterized in a way that made sense of these restricted choices, that would be one thing, but here I think the player is encouraged to weigh in with what they really think, which is a hard thing to manage! There’s a gesture in this direction – if you think Asimov’s Second Law should apply to the new AI, you’re given an opportunity to say why you’ve made that choice, but the only two options on offer fail to hit many of the reasons why one might think this is a good decision. This section works well enough, but it suffers from a common weakness of philosophical-dilemma games, which is that it’s hard to articulate the reasons behind your choices. Asimov’s Three Laws feature heavily as a starting point, albeit you can depart from them if you like. It opens with the protagonist as the one being grilled for a change – rather than having your identity put to the question in a meta twist, though, you’re setting ethical parameters for a new AI your lab is developing via a Socratic conversation. The TURING Test (handy of the author to do the all-caps thing to make distinguishing game from test easy!) falls into this trap, but it does so affably and enthusiastically enough. Instead of the test Turing devised, the player’s actually stuck in a version of the iocane powder scene from the Princess Bride, trying to second-guess whether a particular bit of clunky writing is meant to be a tell. The trouble is, unless an author rolls their own AI – perhaps a high bar for a free text-game competition – the player isn’t actually administering the Turing test, just trying to determine which bit of human-authored text is meant to denote personhood and which is meant to come from a machine intelligence. In a genre where text comes first, what better challenge than to closely read the responses of a mysterious interlocutor and separate out man from machine? And of course to have an AI sufficiently advanced for the test to be plausibly attempted almost requires a science-fictional setting of the type that tends to provide good fodder for a game, not to mention a likely-rogue robot or something to provide a readymade antagonist. It’s easy to see how the Turing test could be a good fit for IF. My son Henry was born right before the Comp, meaning I was fairly sleep-deprived and loopy while I played and reviewed many of the games, so in addition to a highlight and lowlight, the review includes an explanation of how new fatherhood has led me to betray the hard work the author put into their piece) (This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp.
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