Imperfect

switch up co-writers

A beige notebook's process for One on one asynchronous interactive fiction went as such:

Back in, many years ago, I played this role-playing game/gamebook of sorts.

My friend and I were playing Chaosium's Pendragon. He created his character, as usual, and I did the gamemastering. But we didn't have time to play together, so that's what we did:

I wrote a page in a narrative style, telling what had happened and suggesting two or three choices plus a "open choice" for the player to push his own ideas and such.

Then he'll reply with his own paragraph, which I evoluated to come out with the next section of the game, and so forth. Combats we didn't go turn by turn. I mostly run the whole thing myself, keeping close to the players ideas, until such combat arrived to some critical phase. This was necessary to keep the game going without delaying it too much.

It did work quite well, to be honest, so I'm offering you it as an idea, in case you'd want to do something similar. And you could do the whole thing by email, or go as fancy as you want.

Replace the gamemaster above with an AI system. Think about how much that overlaps with processes like that of Sean's Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter:

This adventure has been fine tuned and optimized to permit a player to paste the prompt into either the free version of Claude.Ai or ChatGPT and have a play and entire adventure.

Instead of pre-selected "choices", players tell the GM "Investigate the smoking cabinet" or "Consult the legal department on ...". The GM, within the well known limitations of AI, will improvise a response and move the story along.

To play: past the contents of the attached file into either Claude.ai or ChatGPT. Feel free to try it out on other LLM platforms, but your mileage will vary.

In Slop comes for everything you love, Bruno comments on said game description:

I realize that the IF community has a certain trauma around gatekeeping of what 'counts as IF' but I don't think a prompt you're meant to paste into chatGPT 'counts as IF' in any meaningful sense.

Yet, both processes above count in meaningful senses: player choice, narrative progression, and otherwise. Switching up the co-writer hasn't removed those senses from play.

Extending that realization, lines blur between man and machine all around us. Behold multiple examples of how virtual companions matter, the AI guest post within Lloyd's on the topology of consciousness (commented on in embracing ai optimism), and even Rex's thoughts on More Blogging? Forever?:

And now, with AI, if you load it with all your work, everything you've written your whole life, it can re-create you. To do what? To answer any question like you would, or even write more like you would. Could we have an AI continue to write blog posts for us after we die. I think that might happen.

I might even try it... for fun.

How much do we underestimate machines as men?

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