Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter

What’s the point of being alive? I’m not being flippant, genuinely, it’s hard to squint through a coffeesip at Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter, and not in your grimace wonder. Because, you see, the game opens with an insult: “# ERPS Dial-Driven Narrative Engine (Player-Facing Version)”. Not only the hubris to call 700 words of low effort garble a narrative engine, not only the sneer at calling the only text that exists in the context of play the player facing version, but most vexingly the realization that we’re not even meant to read what little has been offered to us, since one of the sections of this player facing version is a list of twists to shock us towards conclusions.

That the prompt immediately spoils the game it hopes ChatGPT will magically make is one of the many ways in which Penny Nichols is damned by GIGO. The rest of the prompt consists of nonsensical infinitesimalhearted gestures at RPG mechanics which are more likely to trip up the LLM than produce even the faintest verisimilitude of simulation. Even then, the few details meant to supply our adventure are ridiculous on their face: the color associated with the cost for “sneaky” magic is cyan, the color of a clear sky. I’d be willing to be gaslit into perceiving this irony as a constitutive opposition were any coherent commentary to emerge from the mechanics, not even within the magic colors themselves, I just mean like in general, at all, if there was even the slightest sense of a reflective consciousness.

Similarly confused is the setting, which the prompt insists is “retro-futurist, occult-nuclear” despite initiating play as an insurance agent, muddling us through a magic system with divination and conjuration, culminating the story in smaughoard dragons, and whose narrative style is described as “Scooby-Doo”. None of these vagueries will do anything to ground the hallucinatory expanse of a player cajoling the LLM to generate more interesting elsewheres.

Penny Nichols, as a narrative experience that an LLM could enable, breaks upon contact. Copypasting this prompt into Claude will generate a worse experience than simply typing “Let’s roleplay. I am an insurance agent investigating a claim on Mars.” Everything Penny Nichols adds, the clunkiest skeleton of mechanics, a series of twists it telegraphs, and an inconsistent setting, detracts from the basic back and forth you could have with Claude, whose training set has already stolen everything Penny Nichols hopes to take credit for, including Penny Nichols, a punning name already made in Phoenix Wright.

We’re worried about low effort AI slop avalanching over everything we adore, but actually here is a worse abyss screaming beneath us, the annihilation of the spiritual. Mockery of creative communication has been mechanized. This game was not really written nor really meant to be read nor really capable of being played. IFComp has been, for over three decades, a celebration of a computerized interface between writer and reader animating newly possible interpersonal interplay, but now some bugeyed demon ridicules this tiny community festival by weaponizing hundreds of billions of dollars of hyperscaling dishumanification to erase both sides of the interface. Other entrants have poured their hearts into years of hope in anguish, and someone thought so little of that filigree desire to exist they lampooned it here to disrupt the beautiful electricity as we congregate to care about how we care.

At least in troll entries there’s some interpersonal experience whose bathos puddlesplashes as you nod blankly at Uninteractive Fiction 2, and even in low effort AI slop at least there’s a desire for something to have been made that’s been outsourced though precisely is it the resin of human contact which makes the thing alive, but in this nullity is there nothing, nothing comes from nothing and keeps on coming til the nothingness reigns. Why be anyone? It’s an extremely humiliating process, and, in the end, whatever you you make will be dissimulated into the machine.

Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter

This game consists of instructions to an AI on how to run a game for a human player.

I was excited to see this, because I've often thought when playing an AI-generated game: "I bet the prompt the author used would be so much more interesting than the output I have to read." And here I had the prompt itself!

So I tried playing it twice. In the first, I made myself both player and DM. Instead of AI, I used it as a writing prompt as I explored what might happen with these characters and this setting. I had a lot of fun; I usually struggle to write more than 300 words at a time and 1000 in a day, but I got up to 2270 words in less than an hour. I relied heavily on cliches and tropes but I liked the setting and concept.

I then plugged it into Copilot. Copilot made it look fancier and was much, much faster. Parts of it were interesting and fun to read. It was much more fast paced than my own transcript, and I had been trying to go fast myself. Amusingly, we used a lot of the same cliches and tropes. Where I was most disappointed is that, where I had tried hard to spool out the mysteries and fill in the backstories and characters, the AI just gave away half of the secrets in the first few paragraphs and mostly ignored my companion characters and almost all of the backstory. I felt like it wasn't really making use of the extensive mechanics sheet and was more just giving a series of climactic scenes without real buildup or denouement. It makes me feel like I couldn't personally rely on an LLM to follow my instructions if I were to make such a game myself.

Interesting concept, very glad I just got the prompt instead of having to suffer through pre-generated pages and pages of boring prose and instead got to write my own pages of boring prose.