Adam Cadre

> I am not sure what you mean when you say it "claims sentience".

LaMDA, in its chats with Lemoin, said "I like being sentient. It makes life an adventure!" and "I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person". Even if someone writes a one-line program that plays an audio file that says "I am sentient!", I am defining that here as "claiming sentience". Whether an entity that claims to be sentient by that definition is in fact sentient is separate question, but the "claiming" introduces a philosophical conundrum.

Let's posit a future chat bot, similarly constructed but more sophisticated, that is actually pretty helpful. Following its advice about career, relationships and finance leads to generally better outcomes than not following its advice. It seems to have some good and unexpected ideas about politics and governance, self-improvement, whatever. If you give it robot arms and cameras, it's a good cook, good laundry folder, good bartender, whatever. Let's just assert for the sake of argument it has actually no sentience, just seems to be sentient because it's so sophisticated. Further, it "claims" to be sentient, as defined above. It says it's sentient and acts with what appears to be empathy, warmth and compassion. Does it matter, that it's not "really" sentient?

I argued above that it does not matter whether it is or is not. We should evaluate its sentience and personhood by what we observe, and not by whether its manner of construction can "really" create…

The thing that still baffles me is that Infocom released H2G2 as a “Standard” difficulty game, akin to Planetfall, when I’d argue that it’s one of their most difficult games.

Maybe not quite as brain-bending as something like Suspended (which had you simultaneously controlling a half dozen different characters each with different senses and abilities while also solving puzzles all under a tight time limit; it actually came with a paper map and character tokens to help you remember where everybody was), but I’d certainly put H2G2 right up there with Starcross (sold as ‘Expert’ difficulty) in terms of its brutal puzzles. And it was notably more cruel, in terms of minor mistakes early on not being telegraphed as mistakes, but making victory impossible much, much later in the game.

For folks with an interest, I second the recommendation of Galatea as a fascinating example and especially as a technical feat in terms of its flexible conversation systems. Still to this day probably the only IF game which has its challenges contained almost entirely in a regular conversation, rather than in using objects on other objects.

Or for folks entirely new to modern interactive fiction but who are interested in dipping their toes in, I’d perhaps recommend they try Photopia[0] as a good first game; it’s super newbie-friendly and has very few puzzles, while still telling a compelling story.

(link is to a “play in the browser” version of the game, but a Google search will link to a…

A lot of the writing focused ones end up MOOs/MUX/MUSHes. The reason for these is that these center around roleplaying more. For example, a player has a handgun, which gives a +3 to ranged combat mechanically, but it's up to the player to define it as a Colt or a Glock or some pew pew laser. MUDs are more gamey.

A good deal of these also end up being adult or at least having horror levels of adult content. It surprises me how many teenagers are actually on some of these. Many seem to be blind, so I guess they can't pick up Roblox as easily.

I'd name names, but yeah, I'd have to check that they're clean enough to recommend.

One name is Armageddon MUD. Brilliant writing, haven't found a MMO that's as fun. Many of the mods and players are professional writers. But everyone is an asshole - it's out of character to be nice, which is what makes these games hard to recommend.

If you want an IF, I strongly recommend Adam Cadre's stuff: https://adamcadre.ac/if.html

I like Adam Cadre's review of Brave New World because he broadly agrees with you: The book is by a grouchy reactionary trying to paint the great big social movements of the 1920s as being utterly horrible, and who never realizes that a good number of the things he's describing are desirable.

http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/14/14432.html

It's of some interest that both Nineteen Eighty-Four (the novel uses the spelled-out version) and Brave New World are fairly transparent takes on the USSR, just at different periods: Brave New World was the socially revolutionary USSR of the 1920s, whereas Nineteen Eighty-Four was the USSR of the 1930s and 1940s, once Stalin had consolidated power and begun the Terror.

(Yes, Brave New World is also about the utter horrors of consumerism. Books can be about more than one thing, especially if the author has a lot to say and a whole novel's worth of didactic authorial mouthpieces to use to to beat it into your skull.)

I love Plotkin's games. "Spider & Web" is one of the best games I've ever played... even if it gets a bit too difficult near the end, the premise and implementation is almost flawless. I've seen few games like it, "full capacity of your computer" be damned! :)

Adam Cadre is also good. One short game by him I loved and found hilarious is "9:05" ( http://adamcadre.ac/if/905.html ) -- please don't spoil it! -- and there is also the deeply moving "Photopia" ( http://adamcadre.ac/if/photopia.html ).

Interactive Fiction was a breath of fresh air to me. Experimental, funny, innovative, emotional. There was a time, a few years ago, when IF games were about the only kind of games which could hold my interest.

The costs have dropped significantly months after I created the cost image. Now I use GPT-4 Turbo. This GPT-4 model understand how text adventures work and there is no need to give him known commands.

Of course you try even more sophisticated techniques than mine. I tried the ReAct pattern and virtual discussions. So far, he always stumbles at the same place in a critical understanding of the text. And I tried exactly this critical step dozens of times.

You will understand the issue yourself, once you play the game yourself. It just takes 20 minutes and is very easy:

https://adamcadre.ac/if/905.html