The Shyler Project

One of the characteristics of early-21st-Century life is that the line between reality and parody has become vanishingly thin. So when, early on in therapy-sim The Shyler Project, the eponymous chatbot designed to counsel patients in the place of human psychologists, admits to being mentally ill themself, at first I wasn’t sure if it was a bit – physician, heal thyself, and all that. But no, this is an earnest game that plays the plot beat straight, and it’s actually depressingly plausible: any AI developed to help people with these kinds of problems would of course need to be trained up on the toughest case studies and examples, as well as the easiest, and just as we in the West can remain comfortably ignorant of the toll that viewing vile content exacts on the often-non-US moderators tasked with removing it from our social networks, so too is it logical that the same dynamics would apply to non-human people performing the same kind of labor.

I should say that while the game doesn’t really go into detail about the mechanics underpinning Shyler’s identity, I think for the game to work as intended the player is meant to understand them as a person, rather than an LLM mechanistically regurgitating tropes while hastening global warming. But it wasn’t too hard for me to make this leap regardless; Shyler’s personality is sufficiently idiosyncratic, with much of their dialogue drawing parallels between the relationship between God and those who pray to Him and the myriad petitioners entreating Shyler to heal their psychological wounds, that I never felt like they were an oatmeal-generating machine built to the ChatGPT plan. They’ve got a solid sense of humor about their situation, too:

"Now that I understand the world better, I think it was fucked up of my creators to feed me peoples’ suicide posts and the like to get me to understand mental health. What, the World Health Organization’s website wasn’t enough for you, dumbasses?"

While I got a good sense of Shyler’s concerns, I can’t say the same for the notional protagonist, Jaiden – while in your first therapy session, it’s made clear that you suffer from manic-depression, actually for most of the game it’s Shyler who does most of the talking and who ultimately faces a series of existential crises. And while you’re given some choices determining how Jaiden responds, ultimately your options are just different ways of being supportive – which is nice enough, and I appreciate the author sticking with a specific vision of how the story is meant to play out, but I think there would have been room to characterize them with a little more specificity, and perhaps establish whether reaching out to help Shyler is challenging, which could make the plot feel more poignant.

My only other complaint is that the game makes extensive use of timed text, with every single line of dialogue prompting a pause. I think this is because the game is fully voice-acted, but I have to confess I wasn’t able to play with the sound on, so this effort was lost on me, and since I couldn’t find a way to skip ahead I often wound up alt-tabbing after making a choice and doing something else while I waited for the full text of the next passage to scroll on-screen.

For all the unneeded friction this added to the experience, though, I still found the Shyler Project engaging. Shyler’s plight eventually gets quite dire, in a way that works on its own terms within the conceit of the fiction but also offers allegorical connections to a host of other situations: parental rejection, a feeling of being ill-suited for the role that’s been thrust on you, or just being depressed and overwhelmed by your responsibilities. If Jaiden’s decision to help doesn’t have explicit motivation behind it, and feels a bit like a deus ex machina, well, in these times we could all use a bit of unmerited grace, couldn’t we?