You are SpamZapper 3.1

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The most experience ever, June 18, 2022

Made an account just to leave this here:
I liked it a bit! I opened this offhandedly while scrolling through the AI protagonist tag and before I knew it 3 hours of my life were gone and I had gone very attached to a Spam Blocker Plug-in, haha, crazy! This game is going to stick to the back of my head for a long while, thank you to all the people who made this game! It was a fun experience!

I admit, I preferred the shallower parts. Which weren't really shallow., December 10, 2021

There's a study showing that judges give harsher sentences when they're hungry. Or that's the claim. Causality hasn't been established, and I was interested to read alternate perspectives that poked holes in the "hungry judge" theory. But I remember the punchline and recalled it here on playing SZ31 late at night. It took a very cool premise and wavered at the end. That felt like my own mental fatigue, and then on replay, I wound up focusing on how I felt instead of looking through things again. Perhaps it tried to reach for a message that wasn't there. But either way, it still Had Quality Moments.

The title, if not the play time, suggests that you'll just be zapping spams until you mess up, and then everyone has a good laugh about how futile it all is and then goes home. That would be more than adequate for a decent IFComp entry, but there's a bit more. You do, in fact, play a spam-zapper plugin who ("that" is the inappropriate pronoun, I think, for reasons you'll see shortly) detects spam emails incoming to the account of your owner, Spoony. You get to choose a real name, but that's their email address and what they use on forums.

The tasks start out trivial. They may leave you nostalgic for some Greatest Hits of spam you've received. They did for me. Back in 2000, we had all long since gotten sick of feeling clever we could delete spam immediately, and when my webmail got a spam filter installed, I remember peeking inside just to say, hey, wow, it works, and there were relatively few false positives. It was interesting to see how spam filters got subverted by professional-looking messages, and if I was feeling dumb, being able to finger a particularly bad spam email that snuck through made me feel a bit smarter, as long as they weren't dumped on me. This brought back a lot of that, but there's also a ubiquitous needy loner or two who needs confirmation. Someone forgets their password. Someone at Spoony's workplace sends a mistaken reply-all, followed by reply-alls that are, well, mistaken in their own way. You, as the spam-zapper, have comments on that. You've seen it before. But you also get intents of spam and non-spam emails wrong. Artificial intelligence, amirite?

And that's where the actual story kicks in. One of Spoony's correspondents, Laurie Boggins, has a very, very restrictive father. Not only that, but she seems to have struck up a legitimate friendship with her Wizard email plugin. As her computer is confiscated, she sends one last email to Spoony saying, keep Wizard alive! And that's when the spam zapper "meets" other plugins. They try to band together and rescue this friend. In fact, they create their own virus to track down information. They understand morals in the small picture but maybe not the big one. Helping their owners is all that matters.

So they discuss what it means to exist, and this is where I slacked a bit. One thing about my slacking, though. If you've ever watched Amadeus, you may remember that one scene where the Emperor yawned during The Marriage of Figaro. If I yawn, and think of it? Well, whatever I am paying attention to is not Figaro, but I know it's probably part me. Perhaps I was disappointed the helper apps didn't just stay in their place and entertain me. I mean, it's probably more in-character for them to discuss concepts like nous or whatever that might make people say "get back to the jokes, already." It's tough for AI to make jokes. But it's earnest and does go on a bit, and while I enjoy a good "what and why are we, and what are we doing here?" I felt a small bait-and-switch.

Still, the spam dumping does go on a bit. By the time you've finished deleting the reply-alls, a QuickBasic worm pops up. Then one of Spoony's friends begins composing spam-looking emails that you, SpamZapper, consider to be mind-control spam. Yes, you're wrong, but it's internally plausible. Then you have to search through forty or so emails to find information to the odd plan you've hatched with Wizard and the New Mail Chimes to get Laurie's computer back, to "save" her. They don't seem to understand humans can survive without computers, and yet, at the same time, they're technically–Laurie's father taking her computer away is most unjust. While some emails could obviously be rejected, I just got dragged down by the tedium and took a break and then came back to a few more "search Spoony's emails" puzzles. It was tiring, but I can't see any other way to do it.

My tired mind did find the whole plot a bit too farcical, and all the talk of nous seemed a bit mystical to me, and I zoned out, but I was still able to appreciate the loneliness of Spoony's friends and what sort of person Spoony must be. Still, I can't help but feel I mostly enjoyed the low-hanging fruit. The switch between the general narrative and the mailbox work well, as does the glimpse into a post-apocalyptic (well, climate change) future. It's hard not to be amused at SpamZapper forcing decisions or having something it HAS to say about Spoony's dad's email. You'll know which one. And the time-distortion where you're not sure how much time was between emails, but it helps remind you the spam zapper can't understand certain emotional concepts natural to humans. Yet it tries. And I felt, as I was playing, I was missing something, but I hope I was trying.

So my advice is to be awake for this game. You'll need the energy, but I guarantee it will pay you back, even if you drift a bit. There are lots of funny examples of how AI gets things wrong, and I think this was the strongest part, where you can see clearly that the well-meaning plugins are about to release something potentially catastrophic. It's quite a good laugh and very touching, but looking at the work again, my eyes glossed over the philosophical discussion. Still, once you solve the game, there's an amusing way to unlock design discussions for each character, and I appreciated them very much. Though I needed a break after all that philosophizing. It's tough. I've written games where I wanted to be smart, and smart people told me "keep it simple, stupid," but really, I thought the parts they disliked were the best part. SZ31 turns the table on me, as I found I wanted to give it the same advice. So I feel like a bit of a hypocrite, but given a choice between the funny story plus philosophizing and nothing at all, give me the first.

Too much of a good thing, December 7, 2021

(This is a lightly-edited version of a review posted to the IntFict forums during the 2021 IFComp. 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)

With a new Matrix sequel coming out I think reasonably soon (“linear time” is a concept that feels like it only applies to other people ever since Henry came) I’ve been reminded of why I found the previous set so utterly disappointing. Like basically every then-teenaged boy I was very excited by the first one, and I thought it ended on a really exciting note: the humans were poised to go on offense, and clearly the way they were going to do that was via mass-Satori, awakening all the people trapped in the Matrix from their illusions - and crashing the machines’ power systems in the process. But then the sequels arrived and were, uh, not that – instead of a Buddhist parable of human liberation, we were suddenly supposed to be invested in all these new AI characters and their muddy Gnostic maundering about destiny for two long movies.

This may be running a little afield when assessing You are SpamZapper 3.1 – though the turn-of-the-millennium setting means it’s tapping into at least some of the same zeitgeist – but I had a similar reaction to the game, as what initially seemed like a winsome workplace comedy turned into an overlong melodrama about immortal intelligences and their codependent relationships with their users. There’s a lot to enjoy here, and I think it’ll find an audience that enjoys the heightened emotion and big-idea twists it has to offer, but it didn’t land for me as well as it probably deserves.

Now that I’ve spoiled a bit of where the story goes, I should lay out where it starts, which is with your anthropomorphized spam-blocking software meeting a new coworker (an email plugin that dings when an arriving message hits the inbox) and logging in for a busy day’s shift zapping spam. This segment of the game makes elegant use of the sometimes-constrained nature of a choice-based game, since the only agency you have is to block or approve incoming messages one by one. As the flood of email rises, you start to get a sense of who the human user’s friends are, and also a retrospectively-idyllic look at vintage-2000 email ads.

I enjoyed this bit, but it definitely goes on for a while (I think 50-odd emails) before the main plot stats to emerge. Because this is not just a regular workday: a friend of the user’s (Laurie) is having issues with her Christian-conservative father, who’s considering taking her computer away. The stakes for this are higher than just being e-grounded, though, since Laurie has, uh, fallen in love with another program, the letter-writing wizard in her word-processor. To avert the separation of these two lovers, you need to work together with the other programs to change the father’s mind about the temptations posed by technology. Along the way, you also learn to deal with your crippling self-esteem and anxiety issues (you’re perpetually worried that if you make too many spam-blocking mistakes your user will uninstall you), plus there’s a recurring subplot going into way too much detail on the mechanics of why the programs are sentient – it’s not just a comedy bit we’re supposed to go with, in fact these email plug-ins are incarnations of immortal noosphere intelligences who exist simultaneously at all points in time (there’s yet another plot strand set in a post-climate-apocalypse world).

It is a whole lot, in other words, and reader, I can’t say I followed all the way along the journey. The writing is solid enough – the different programs have a good amount of characterization, and there are some really good jokes involving the different chimes the new-mail signal program can make (I remember that duck quack!) and all the different obnoxious spam running around the early-00’s internet. But there’s also a lot of text here, most of it delivered in linear click-to-advance fashion that started to feel exhausting by the second hour, and some things are definitely over-explained. Similarly, Zappy’s various crises of confidence began to feel fairly belabored by the end. I also really had a hard time investing in the love story between a girl and her Word template: I get that we’re supposed to see the programs as metaphors for people, but their obsessive, near-slavish devotion to their user stands as a creepy barrier to taking the metaphor seriously.

There are some puzzles and choices to break up the progression of the story, and a few of these I thought were quite clever: your merry band of AIs only has a few things they’re allowed to do, so figuring out how to leverage those abilities, which includes leveraging opportunities in the giant mountain of spam, is generally pretty fun (though there is one pick-the-right-spam-message-to-exploit puzzle that felt like it required reading the author’s mind, as the characters even comment on what an off-the-wall idea it is). The balance between puzzles and reading seemed off to me, though – I wanted less text in between the interactive bits.

In fact that – less – is just what I wanted for You are SpamZapper as a whole: less word-count, sure, but I also think I would have enjoyed the game more if a few of the plot’s twists and turns had been excised in favor of a leaner and more compelling progression, and if some of the crazier ideas had been weeded out where they get in the way of the emotional core of the story.

Highlight: I really liked all the mail-ping jokes – something about that bit of circa-2000 Internet nostalgia works for me.

Lowlight: I ran into a bug around the bit where you (Spoiler - click to show)open a new credit card – a development-tools window popped up at the bottom of the screen that made it hard to click the links, though eventually this went away (I played in a Safari browser on an iPhone).

How I failed the author: I was really tired when I played the first part of the game, so the business where two characters were sharing an email account left me permanently confused about who was who.

Life on the internet, November 24, 2021

This game is incredible. It almost invokes the same kind of energy that playing SPY INTRIGUE for the first time did. It doesn’t quite reach those heights for me, but it’s still an amazing experience. It’s also a more straightforward, less player-hostile experience.

The author is the creator of the Harlowe format for Twine, and this game makes very good use of twine as a medium. It uses various styles and visual effects extensively, and overall the interface looks beautiful. There are lots of click to advance segments, but that was okay; the story was well written and I enjoyed it. I played it on mobile and was engrossed for all two hours of playtime.

The premise is a little reminiscent of (Spoiler - click to show)Starbreakers from this comp which might be a spoiler for both games. The use of philosophy in this game reminded me of Universal Hologram (not necessarily any specific bits of worldbuilding, just the way philosophical concepts are deployed).

The plot and writing are great. I love how the world is gradually built up and characters and concepts are introduced. The emails are excellent as a vehicle for characterization; I just like epistolary stories I guess. The spam emails are funny and better written than they have any right to be, and I like the little details and nods to real internet culture (that REPLY ALL thread. people clicking on links that are obviously viruses. spoofing sender fields in emails). The game mechanic of zap or approve is nice; I like returning to the mundane after the deep philosophical segments about the nature of consciousness.

If I have any complaint, it’s that parts of it stretched on for too long. There were just so many words, and the midgame (after Laurie’s problem has been revealed) had too much drudgery. I enjoyed discovering new concepts more than I did trying to recall some piece of spam I read an hour ago. After some time, I didn’t find the long conversations between the programs very interesting, so I clicked quickly and skimmed through. Some of their quirks started to grate on me after hours of playing.

But I’m just looking for things to criticize at this point. This game is one of my favorites of IFComp 2021.

There are quite a number of games in IFComp 2021 that have stories within stories and broadly deal with online “fandom” topics: SpamZapper, A Paradox Between Worlds (my own game), extraordinary_fandoms.exe, The Dead Account, maybe even And Then You Come to a House Not Unlike the Previous One. 2021 is truly the year of the Online in IFComp.

Amazing Game, November 9, 2021

Man, this game was fun. I was completely drawn in, left me a bit dazed as I found myself in the real world once again when the game came to an end. This game made me feel for plugins, made me wonder, and stuck in my head after. There was a fair bit that went over my head, but it didn’t take me out of the game at all. Also, I loved the ending. It all came together wonderfully. I also enjoyed the beginning, really liked going through the emails.

Absolutely, 100%, recommend this game.

Quirky e-mail game with an aggressive bot, November 7, 2021

I enjoyed what I played of this Twine game. Other reviewers have noted that there were false endings; I think I quit after the first one not knowing there was more, but I played enough to write a review.

The spam zapper's voice is well-done and entertaining to read. Its personality reminds me of the drones in Iain M. Banks "Culture" series, with a quirky but aggressive personality.

While other reviews have noted that the game is quite long, especially given that the tone of the game is very light, the bite-sized email format works well. Each email is rarely more than a few heights of the screen and is easily digestible.

The game has custom CSS styles that are fairly simple. The majority of the game is on a simple white page set against a grey background. I assume this is meant to resemble the Microsoft Office workspaces of the late 90s, which works thematically even though email clients didn't follow that look.

There is also a very busy black theme with jumbled text in the background a few times in the game; thankfully that is not used for every screen in the game but it is fine the few times it shows up.

I hesitate to rate the game for two reasons. First, like a lot of Twine games there is not a lot of gameplay; the writing quality carries most of the game.

Second, it's squarely in the "weird topic sim" genre of games, like "You Are Jeff Bezos" and (outside of IF) "Goat Simulator." Those games (even if they are decent and had work put into them) sort of feign being low brow through their weird choice of topic. They get by on being viral and become love-it-or-hate it games.

"Spamzapper" seems more heartfelt and genuine than many of those games; on the other hand the fact that those comparisons come to mind mean that it has less of a bar to clear to stand out as a legitimate work.

So it is a good game worth checking out but not one that is easy to rate.

Funny game about email, November 5, 2021

This game had a very strong start with lots of funny spam e-mails. Some of them are even relevant to the story later on. You play as a spam plugin and there is drama between you and the other plugins. The drama seemed overblown and it dragged on quite a while. I wonder if deciding to zap or approve any emails affected the story (I suspect that they don't affect it a ton). This game could have been improved by removing Zap's commentary and letting the player do the role-playing and making connections between e-mails. (Spoiler - click to show)I think reducing the other plugins to just two other characters would have been good too, as well as deleting the far-future memories, the partial construction of Laura. The ideas were interesting, but not fully developed. The idea of copying one's self while being conscious of the other selves' suffering and distributing onesself as a virus was strong enough to give the plot a strong feeling of resolution.

16 hour shift as a plugin, October 31, 2021

In the beginning of this game, you read emails and decide if they are spam or not. It is mildly amusing at first, as the emails are well written parodies of the usual junk we all see everyday. This section goes on quite a while longer than I felt it needed to, as the player is required to continually choose "zap" or "approve" long after the novelty has worn off and the point has been made. The game eventually evolves. However, even once things open up to include new characters and shifting dilemmas, every section of the game repeats the same transgression: it just keeps going and going. There must have been six or seven false endings, each more tedious than the last. All the characters are overly melodramatic, wringing their hands over every detail of every decision. A large percentage of the game is just scrolling and clicking to get to the next section of the text, with no real choices. The puzzles that do arrive in the later half of the game require you to either reread numerous lengthy passages in search of deeply buried keywords, or go through a giant list of email contacts, hoping one of them has the hint you are looking for. I would estimate it took me upwards of three and a half hours. I think if it were between 30 and 45 minutes, it could have been a lot of fun and still have been full of surprises.

Save humans from spam while meeting a cast of characters, October 17, 2021

In this game, you are a sentient program in a computer circa 2000. Your goal is to deal with an influx of emails, ZAPping or APPROVing them as you determine.

It cites DIGITAL: A LOVE STORY as an influence, but I've never played that game. It has a feel kind of like Wreck-it-Ralph/Emoji movie/Digimon in the sense that applications 'behind the scenes' are thinking, feeling creatures.

It turns out that one of your human's email friends is in despair because their father is taking away their computer. You have to work together with a crew of other applications to save her.

Here's my breakdown:
+Polish: The game is certainly very polished, with use of changing background images, pop-up boxes, text input, an inbox-managing system, text animations, etc. Could easily be nominated for an XYZZY award of some type for this alone.
+Descriptiveness: The game was very vivid in its writing, and the different email voices were very enjoyable.
+Interactivity: I'll admit, some of the spam emails were kind of long and boring. The simulation of an unpleasant event is still an unpleasant event. But I never felt like things were 'on rails', while simultaneously rarely feeling 'lost'.
+Emotional impact: I found the game funny and the story interesting. Like I said, some parts were boring, but many were not.
+Would I play again? I could see myself revisiting it.

The private lives of plugins, October 9, 2021

I went into this game not expecting to get out of it as much as I did - its blurb doesn't do it justice. But I found it completely absorbing. It starts off as a cute little story about the secret lives of software plugins - you’re a spam filter, tasked with reading an endless procession of emails and deciding whether or not they’re worthy to pass into the inbox of the human whose computer you inhabit - and then develops into a fascinating journey through time, space, memory and the entangled relationships of sentient beings (both human and artificial).

At its heart, it’s a love story, and a very well-written and frequently very funny one at that; if that wasn’t so then I could imagine the earlier section of the game, in which you read your way through a steady stream of faux emails and simply have to decide whether to ‘zap’ or approve them, would become rapidly quite wearing - but I found that the writing was skilful and entertaining enough to avoid that. After the preliminaries, the game opens out and the story and characters come to the fore, the non-human protagonist and their friends being, for the most part, a far more likeable and interesting bunch than the humans they serve; its their attempts to influence events in the outside world that drives the narrative along but their interactions with one another that provide the lion’s share of the entertainment. It’s a hard task to elicit empathy with a spam filter and the equivalent of Clippy, but somehow this game manages to do it, while offering up a thoroughly entertaining story and a few (very easy) puzzles along the way.

This is an author who knows how to spin a rattling good yarn and keep readers along for the duration; I took me around three hours to get through the game and I felt it was time well spent. Linearity seems quite high and the sense of player agency quite low - that might bother the sorts of players who are inclined to replay choice-based games to explore different branches, but I tend to play games like I play life, largely blind to the paths not taken, so it didn't worry me. The implementation in Twine is carefully done with a few different backgrounds and sparing use of text effects - simple and very effective.

Altogether I found it completely enjoyable. I’d certainly recommend this to anyone looking first and foremost for a good story.

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