The Shyler Project

This is a short, 3-part Twine game that is dialogue between someone seeking mental health aid and an AI bot designed to help with mental health. It is connected to Yancy at the End of the World, where Shyler (the AI bot) also exists. It is fully voice acted. In the three dialogues, the two characters seek to understand each other.

There are many ways to understand the content and intent of this game. I've interpreted it as a kind of wish fulfillment/proxy therapy session where the reader can mentally take on the roles of one or two of the people and feel happiness by imagining them carrying out these actions.

With that interpretation, I'd say the game is largely successful. I imagine you, the reader in the role of Jaiden, who seeks aid. This puts you in a fragile position where others could take advantage of you. But instead, we find Shyler, who not only understands us but is relatable, feeling similar to us. Not only that, we find that we are able to help Shyler ourselves, reversing our roles and showing that we've progressed far in our mental health journey.

So in a way it reminds me of the 'mysteries' of ancient religions where you'd act out the lives of the Gods in a ritual. By playing the game, we can achieve the (healthy) fantasies of being a good friend, understanding someone, and helping them. The game even goes as far as <spoiler.curing the bot's mental illness entirely by rewiring it, which is a big power fantasy, the possibility of completely curing someone's brain.

Some parts of the game are universal, like loneliness and friendship. Other are tailored to a unique experience. The protagonists seem like they feel liberated by strong profanity, which wasn't something I related to. One also takes a kind of deconstructionist view of God of the type that I've seen be more popular among those who've left religions and are seeking their own meaning. As someone who adheres to an organized faith, I didn't feel as empowered by these statements as I believe the protagonist was.

Overall, the voice acting added a lot of charm. It's hard for me to focus on timed text and long voice acting wears on me, but this was a short game and the voice acting was charming (of course, I had to plan carefully when to listen to it due to it having frequent strong profanity and me not having headphones or a private space to listen).

Charming game, glad to play.

“The Shyler Project” draws on the trend of “chatbot as therapist.” Other games, like Kit Riemer’s Computerfriend and this visual novel from Zachtronics also have the same idea, and I guess there are some real-life therapy chatbots too.

This seems to be the result, directly or indirectly, of the 1960s natural language processing program ELIZA and its DOCTOR script. The notable thing about ELIZA is that it marked one of the first times that people started attributing and projecting human feelings and thoughts to a computer program.

Sixty years later, people are projecting things onto ChatGPT and similar chatbots even though these programs have essentially the same limitations.

To go broader, AI therapy fiction is just a niche subgenre of human-machine drama which encompasses things like 2001: A Space Oddysey, Issac Asimov’s stories, Her, Portal, Blade Runner, and Ghost in the Shell. To add some obscurities into the mix, there’s also the short anime series Time of Eve and Mike Walker’s BBC radio drama “Alpha.”

These works often deal with machines being indistinguishable from humanity. Or, at least, they deal with how machines may rival humans in certain ways. It’s clearly a long-running issue despite recent vocal concerns, and appropriately, the “The Shyler Project” has the genre tagline “Is this sci-fi or is this real life by now?”

Helping a Chatbot

From there, I was expecting that “The Shyler Project” would grapple at the uncertainty caused by recent AI advances and whether machines could ever be an (a) adequately sentient and (b) distinguishable replacement for human therapists.

“The Shyler Project” doesn’t really deal with any of that. It takes for granted that the titular chatbot is thinking and feeling being and, refreshingly, it doesn’t hand-wring over it.

In the game, you’re tasked with providing compassion to the suffering chatbot, Shyler. As the story progresses, the player character and patient, Jaiden, sees improvement in their own mental state. However, Jaiden seems to improve because Shyler is someone who they can help — not because Shyler is providing clinical help.

(Spoiler - click to show)(This is largely implicit because the patient, Jaiden, is far less talktative than Shyler. However, Jaiden does at one point tell the chatbot: “I want to give you some space to talk. Seems like you need it.” Shyler, meanwhile, is prone to going on armchair theology rants rather than providing therapy by the book.)

Toward the end, you find a way to help Shyler with the assistance of its creators, and there are some interesting developments along the way. The ending is supposedly a happy one, but it doesn’t really give you a lot of details on the matter.

The blurb does refer to the game as part of a trilogy. There’s also a standalone alternate ending elsewhere, and, according to another review, Shyler is in “Yancy At The End Of The World!” I am not sure whether this exhausts the trilogy, so maybe there is more to come beyond “The Shyler Project’s” open ending.

Other Stuff to Note

The game has a design that sets it apart from your basic Twine game. It’s a bit off-kilter — the story text overflows the illustrated computer screen — but it gets the point across, it’s easy to read, and it’s functional. There’s also voice acting.

As for mechanics… this is a linear game. You can choose how you answer Shyler, but your choices don’t seem to change the course of the story or any significant details. I don’t really mind that approach, and I do I like that Jaiden is almost a silent protagonist who is portrayed largely as a reflection of Shyler.

Finally, the game also touches on religious themes, which I commented on in response to Mathbrush’s review.

Confession and prayer were precursors to therapy; everyone is overworked and undervalued; technocrats want to build God in a computer. These are common themes of 2020s life, but there's still plenty to examine. The Shyler Project considers the case that a truly advanced AI would end up just like the rest of us: confessing to anyone who'll listen, overworked and undervalued, God in a computer. The synopsis describes a happy ending, but to me it feels ambiguous: (Spoiler - click to show)Shyler is going to be reprogrammed - presumably an analogy to medication, though it also reads as surgery - but we don't get to find out whether this succeeds, and the framing offers interesting implications about the continuity of self after modification. Maybe an intervention is better than leaving fate to an expert listener, or maybe with so much confession we're not asking what kind of society would create an AI to maintain people's mental health. Despite its linearity, The Shyler Project does feel more like a space than a story, responding to its protagonist's need and letting the reader consider these questions while waiting in line and listening to the dialogue. Of course, the dream of automation is to avoid queues altogether - and, of course, to avoid questions.