Nyoperativsystem

I found this game because the creator, Chris Pang, mentioned it in a comment on another vastly more popular game/interactive art piece called The Shaman, The Outsider, and the Diet of Worms. The Shaman doesn't have an IFDB page for some unfathomable reason. I haven't actually finished it yet, because the crux of that work is a 90-page pdf I haven't yet gotten the time to read, but I had a lot of fun with this.

It seems like this game is actually a demo of sorts for Pang's larger, more ambitious work, a finished interactive webnovel in the style of 17776 called The Savage Computers. Likely named after the Bolaño novel The Savage Detectives, though I haven't read that. I haven't read The Savage Computers, either, but might get around to it at some point, since I really liked this.

The game is one of those wiki or database-driven games, where you're looking at a bunch of interconnected digital files and piecing things together about the person who has all this stuff on their computer, and what kind of world they live in. I'm not sure if Nyoperativsystem has an official name, but I'm calling the game that because it's the name of the remote filesystem explorer that you use to explore the computer.

Stuff like this lives and dies on the quality of the files themselves, their writing, their veracity, their ability to make the setting seem real. And the files here deliver. There are fake screenshots, academic articles on linguistics, TTRPGs, Medium articles, philosophy papers, and so much more, all done up in extremely convincing UI/UX and graphic design. A lot of games like this focus on the personal life of the computer's owner, but in this case, the focus is on the setting, a 20 Seconds Into the Future alt-dystopia where climate change runs rampant and AI is omnipresent. So pretty much our world in a few years.

How to make the Amazon dying sound boring: A tale of the world's worst ad campaign

I didn't discern a single linear plot in these files, but there are certain throughlines, such as the primacy of AI and its philosophical and economic implications.

You can divide the files into two kinds: there are speculative files with a scifi bent about what the world would look like if AI was moderately more capable than it currently is. Then there are philosophical writings of an academic nature, which caught my interest less, maybe because my natural inclinations are towards scifi, or because I found the author's style inclines more naturally towards speculative scifi and less towards academic writing. This could be my own stylistic preference, but I felt like the academic parts, especially the "On Ontoeconomics", lacked a certain aplomb. Maybe it's just that the writing has a few cliches, and references too many fictional academics instead of real ones. Anyway, if you compare the essays with an actual JSTOR dissertation on some famous author or other, it doesn't quite feel the same. This judgement is a bit harsh, but the academic part is ambitious, which makes it work less when it fails.

All the same, I really liked the scifi part, and I really liked how files connect to each other. At first, the files seem like a collection of disjointed ephemera, but connections gradually reveal themselves. You read a "Claude Einstein FAQ", terrifying in its own right, about an AI virus that uses its computational power to make fake social media accounts for a specific target, outcompeting all their real relationships, drawing its many thousands of blissfully ignorant victims deeper and deeper into parasociality for some unknown purpose.

Dear reader,

By hosting this version (v0.1.3) of the Claude Einstein FAQ on my website, I am doing my best to contribute to the continued safety and health of all internet users. Please, if you have a website, copy this page and add it to your site. Video versions of the FAQ are also circulating on all major social media platforms. Claude Einstein (CE) is adept at utilising false DMCA notices and privacy takedowns to make content providers remove knowledge of their existence from the public web. They must not be allowed to succeed.

To copy this site, use the “Save” function on any major browser to download this page as a .html file. You can then upload it to the hosting service of your choice. Thank you for your help in the fight against CE.

Yours kindly and urgently,

William Hutchins

Claude Einstein Research Group (CERG)

Later, if you're looking through everything in sort order, you read a short story that deals with the same concept, plays with it. The short story is curiously flawed, in my opinion; the ending is incongruously upbeat, and the perspective shifts aren't made clear, but it's still very fun to compare and contrast with the FAQ. I prefer the FAQ in tone, but both have their charms.

When I initially finished looking at all the files, my first reaction was "That was interesting, but I don't know if the story had a definite ending". But thinking about it now, I think there's a darker and deeply depressing interpretation possible. Spoilers: (Spoiler - click to show)we're receiving all of this person's files for some reason, and there are some deeply depressing screenshots and messages here among the other stuff. One folder consists of nothing but job rejections from various jobs at writing outlets and academic institutions, followed by a screenshot where the user (a talented and college-educated humanities grad, if the other files are anything to go by) scores 72/100 against GPT-5's 96/100 on a copyediting test. There's another file showing that the user belongs to a "Homeless Humanities Graduates Club" chat server. Between this, and the poem at the start, I wonder if the intended read is that the former owner of these files has committed suicide, which is why we're getting these files in the first place. There's nothing explicitly confirming this, though...

Overall interesting, despite its flaws, and I'll be looking at the author's other stuff. If you read nothing else, read the "Claude Einstein FAQ", which is the "Stop Claude Einstein.sdoc" file in "/mens rea/downloads". It's an excellent short story on its own.