The Speaker

A prolific alien blogger has been recently disabled and can't write his advice column anymore. You've been hired to be his "speaker" by recording his dictations and publishing them to the web for him.

The game's central dilemma arises from the fact that the speaker disagrees with the alien's advice and wants to secretly edit the column. Are you, as the player, going to record the dictations faithfully, or are you going to tamper with them?

This seems to be a much greater dilemma for the game's author than it was for me, because I was prepared to record the dictations 100% correctly. That's what I was hired to do. I'm serving as a transcriptionist. I don't see an ethical problem.

Perhaps in a higher stakes situation it would have been different. A general gives the command to engage some military target, and you as the messenger who will deliver the command have reason to try to change it. But that wasn't the case here. The alien might have been giving bad advice on his blog (or he might not have been), but it wasn't any worse than you see on many blogs in real life.

It did occur to me that this alien was more influential than a normal blogger, and the sci-fi setting could have been implying that his columns had telepathic sway over the populace, but these were only thoughts that I had about how the game could have gone. I saw nothing in the story to indicate anything like this during my playthrough. Mainly, the protagonist just disagreed with the alien a whole lot (we're told this but not given many examples why), and that's meant to be motivation enough to sabotage the column.

With more development and more at stake, the main concept about tweaking a transcript to serve another purpose could make for a compelling interactive story. There's just not enough conflict in this game right now.