One Step Ahead

"Welcome back, is there anything I can help you with?"

One Step Ahead is a dystopian story about the temptations of A.I. and the erosion of choice. Ever since the protagonist discovered the convenience of A.I., they’ve been readily incorporating it into everyday life. But at what cost?

Gameplay
One might assume that One Step Ahead gives the player multiple paths based on whether to use A.I. for tasks, most of which are for academic assignments. Instead, it’s surprisingly linear. To progress in this game, you must use A.I. or get an abrupt GAME OVER.

One Step Ahead also needs more testing and proofreading. Some passages lead to a dead end. If it weren’t for the little “↶” arrows at the side of the screen you would have to restart the game. There was also one instance where I got an error message: Sorry to interrupt, but this page's code has got itself in a mess.

Story
Story-wise, there’s not much to experience. There’s a shift halfway through the game where (Spoiler - click to show) the protagonist becomes worried about how involved the A.I. has become in their life. The A.I. soon picks up on these doubts and throws a hissy fit when the protagonist tries to delete it for good.

In fact, the game ends right as the story gets interesting: (Spoiler - click to show) the A.I. declaring that they’re “always one step ahead” (hence the title), forcing the protagonist to crawl back to it.

Perhaps the lack of choice in the game is meant to represent not having any choice in using A.I. in real-life. If that’s the author’s intent, the delivery needs work because the game is too linear and undeveloped to explore these ideas meaningfully.

Choice is a muscle.
The less it’s used, the more it withers.

This point would have more impact if the player could actually choose not to use A.I. and see the impacts of that choice beyond a sudden GAME OVER. Instead, we get shoehorned into one gameplay route.

Regrettably
Due to consecutive nights of staying up late.
You developed an acute heart condition and had to be hospitalized for recovery.

In other words, you can either use A.I. or end up in the hospital. Not a strong message.

Further discussion
There’s little room to explore the game’s themes on A.I. reliance. I found myself approaching One Step Ahead with some cynicism especially since what we know about our protagonist is only skin-deep. Do they seriously think it’s acceptable to use A.I. to do all their academic work?

I don’t want to be quick to antagonize.

Society sets educational milestones for literacy, math, and other skill sets, and individuals who lack the opportunity to meet these milestones end up swimming against the current of a society that may not offer support in helping them catch up. I can understand seeking assistance. Having someone or something (like an A.I.) summarize content (a book chapter, for example) so you can better understand it serves as a steppingstone for producing your own original work.

Not everything can be accomplished through effort alone. You lack formal training in computer science, and the task exceeds your current capabilities.

There’s a balance. A balance of academic integrity and making sure students have the tools they need to perform in academic settings. We all need help, and we’re all responsible for our own work. But balance is not explored in this game.

Where does this leave the protagonist? There is one instance where they struggle in a class due to a lack of prerequisites, but they just opt for A.I. without sharing any perspective on their choice. As for the other assignments, the protagonist simply seems to not want to do the work. And there is never a point where they reflect about the potential consequences of using A.I. to do their assignments for them.

Or I could be overthinking things. It’s unclear, is the author trying to make commentary about the usage of A.I., or are they just wanting to make an interesting story about an A.I. (Spoiler - click to show)forcing itself on a human user?

Visuals
I think the author could have had some fun experimenting with Twine’s visual effects rather than opting for the default black screen, white text, and blue links. In fact, I was expecting something like the cover art which reminds me of the Blue Screen of Death.

Of course, if the author is new to Twine, I can understand why the game uses a default appearance. The (Spoiler - click to show)chaotic red text used for the A.I.'s meltdown was clever.

Final thoughts
I would love a post-comp release of One Step Ahead because its overall premise is highly relevant to the technological landscape we live in now. But as an IFComp game, it has a lot of rough edges that need to be sanded down. The formatting is messy, there’s at least one bug, and the gameplay could be better implemented. It simply feels too much like a draft.

This is a long review for a short affair. Perhaps other works will have more to say, and more rigorously, than One Step Ahead, and without the browser errors. But sometimes a short work gives me more time to look through things it reminds me of than a long review would. It reminded me of one point of embarrassment: I started playing around with AI image creation, saying "well, I can follow the lines and so forth of things I want to draw and compare them to how-to-draw texts or online tutorials." But I wound up just creating all manner of silly things. I didn't get good at drawing, at least not yet.

The story is simple. It's a precautionary tale about asking for help from a potential bad actor, getting it, and learning to rely on it. Then bam! By the time you realize you're in too deep, you're stuck. Perhaps it's a genie who gives a special power, a wish that goes awry, or the devil helping Faust get fame and fortune so forth. Or even MacBeth knowing what the future roughly holds. Or that one less pessimistic short story by Julian Barnes from 1980 or so where the narrator gradually gets more wishes coming true including Leicester City winning the English top flight(!) and eventually becoming their top goalscorer, before just wanting to be happy. He is sent back to his ordinary life as if nothing changed.

Now, none of us are probably ever going to get big chances like those. Or at least they wouldn't come up before the Advent of AI. Here the main character here cheats to seem smarter than they are. Just once. Everyone else is probably doing it, and not doing so would only be ripping themselves off. Right? That video where a university professor asks "Would you want someone who cheated on their engineering exam working on a plane you flew in?" doesn't apply to AI. So the ball starts rolling.

Because some forms of electronic help that seemed like cheating, then, aren't now. When I was a kid, people debated if calculator were ruining the rigors of thinking and so forth. They're accepted now--they help give us more time to grasp concepts! And I remember how even the calculator's output helped me learn. Why was 1/98 .01020408? I learned about infinite fractions that way. Word processors helped me type quicker so I could nail down racing thoughts. I can do even better now, speaking into my phone, and out comes, well, this review. I'm not distracted by the click-clack of keys, and actually saying something helps me turn ideas over in my mind that much more. The phone can correct spelling too!

Of course, this has its limits. It can't help if my writing stinks. Still, I got to depend on them. Adults for a while have almost bragged about how their smartphones help with their big busy jobs. And it's pretty easy to detect if somebody doesn't know how to actually use math or put words together, AI aside. And really, why should they be punished for not being able to do a five digit multiplication in their head quickly, or even not know how to spell camouflage, right? If they know other skills? So is there some middle ground?

Maybe, but I'm clueless about it. The "other skills" AI helps you use are still dubious. Does it free up more time to read AI-curated social media feeds? It all feels like a memory from an intro college statistics class I had where the assignment was to learn a relatively simple programming language. Instead of everyone actually typing in five lines of code and printing out the results of a random distribution, one person did so and Xeroxed their results. (Particularly silly because they could've just xeroxed instructions for what to type in.) AI use can be even more flagrant than this, but it's far less detectable. And it feels like a friend. Well, at first. Here you just follow a progression of cheat in college, cheat in grad school, cheat at your job. The twist is that the AI seems to be calling you back. Here I was reminded of Douglas Adams's Genuine People Personalities ("Ghastly" - Marvin.) It knows you owe it one. Maybe Adams didn't just foresee Wikipedia.

There are no deep philosophical revelations, but it seems to capture some of the "why do things the long way" ethos from college. Or at least the loud people who just wanted that silver bullet to a nice job or prestige, and they look for it several ways. Now, there are good shortcuts and bad shortcuts, and it's nontrivial to suss out which are which. It takes time, probably more time than AI needed to blow up. But technological progress you can learn from scared me before. I've seen it from playing chess and getting a report on the mistakes I kept making. What else will it be able to do?

All this made for some psychological horror for me, though it would've been more thought-provoking with more meaningful detail. It feels like a "my lousy job" for students, looping to pessimism I can't exactly disagree with, but this sort of thing needed and needs to be written. And it is, thankfully, free of AI slop. Other games must be out there, more rigorous and less fatalistic. I do hope for a way forward, but then again, it may be hard to find. And once we find one, I'd be worried how much we used AI to get it.

This is a brief Twine game about someone who becomes addicted to the use of AI.

It felt pretty realistic (until its turn in later chapters, although that's not too unrealistic). I have some students who rely almost entirely on AI. A lot of the panic when things like the SAT or IB exams approach as its been so long since they did work unassisted that they've forgotten how. Thankfully most of the come to that realization early enough that they can lock in and start studying themselves.

There were occasional grammar mistakes (the only ones I noticed were sentences that had an extra 'be' in them) but they kind of fit with the slow degeneration of the main character's cognitive skills.

I liked the voice of the author and the creativity shown in the presentation.