You Will Thank Me as Fast as You Thank a Werewolf

by B.J. Best profile

Surreal
2020

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Number of Reviews: 9
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Procedurally generated prose created by the author's own works, October 7, 2020
by MathBrush
Related reviews: 15-30 minutes

**You Will Thank Me as Fast as You Thank a Werewolf by BJ Best**

I beta tested this game.

In regards to the scenery and trimmings of this game, it's polished and nice-looking in the Chapbook format or lookalike (I remember I asked about the format while testing but can't find my correspondence anywhere). It has good music and flows naturally.

Writing-wise, this is GPT-2 (a procedural generation/ai tool). I usually really dislike GTP-2 because it just regurgitates whatever's put into it. Most popular uses of GPT-2 involves scraping other people's content without attribution and then spitting it out, with most of the 'best results' being word-for-word copies of the original input.

But in this case, the person using GPT-2 is the person who made the original content, so that makes it more interesting. I guess, then, that this is like a procedurally generated mirror. It lets the author see themself, and it lets us see that vicariously.

There are fun parts in the writing (the line 'You count the days until Christmas. I count the days when we didn’t know each other’s last names.' reminds me of Arcade Fire lyrics). Overall, it's an interesting experiment, and reveals a lot about the author.

+Polish: The game is smooth.
-Descriptiveness: It's made of interesting chunks, but they don't flow together in larger picture.
+Interactivity: It gives the sense of interaction, a weird sense of pseudo-agency. The footnotes help.
+Emotional impact: For me it was curiosity about the author themself.
-Would I play again? No, one run through seems enough for me.

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