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You can’t have sex with yourself in The Alters, “but it’s not like this topic is totally removed”And nor is the topic of generative AI
And nor is the topic of generative AI
Image credit:11 bit
Image credit:11 bit
Image credit:11 bit
“We had the idea of what are the most important problems or maybe decisions that players can relate to, and built upon that was the decision of how many Alters do we want to have,” lead designer Rafal Wlosek told me. “We want to have enough Alters to talk about all those things, but not too many, so we wouldn’t drown in in writing the shallow stories. So there are more Alters hidden [in the game] then you can find in one playthrough, but just enough for us to get deep into each type of decision and where they came from - what type of person will he become? What will he decide to believe in? How does it work for him in his life, for the people around him?”
“There was a time when we were discussing the idea of an AI being part of the quantum computer - maybe creating a character out of this machine,” he said. “But we wanted to focus on one topic at a time. And we didn’t want to, you know, put the spotlight on too many different aspects of sci-fi.” To be clear, the quantum computer AI would have been a written character, not a piece of text-generating software. “I think it was [conceived] before GPT showed up to the general public,” Wlosek added. “Personally, of course, I’m very interested in how things are going in this area. This is something that probably everyone who knows what’s going on is interested in, and will be watching closely, but it’s not in this game.”
Image credit:11 bit
Among the broader strokes that differentiate one Jan from another is romantic history. Jan Prime has signed up for offworld mining duty partly because he’s broken up with his wife, who plays an active role nonetheless in the plot. One of the other Jans is from a Janiverse where his wife has died, and is naturally frantic to discover that she’s still alive in Jan Prime’s continuity. The topic of lovelives, together with the conspicuously cramped confines of the rolling space base and the emphasis on building a rapport with other Jans, got me wondering just how far Jan’s evident vast self-absorption might go. Is it possible for Jans to romance other Jans? And with a view to getting ahead of the Rule34 crowd - can they bone?
“No they don’t,” Wlosek said, exactly 31 seconds later. “But it’s not like this topic is totally removed. The whole game is about thinking about your decisions, about your life, going back to those decisions, if they were good or wrong, and dwelling on them, and maybe we want to show this from very different angles, to give the player the space to think about it. And in order to do that, we had to take a look at every aspect of life, so I guess that would be my general answer! It’s not like having sex with the other Alters or anything like that, but the romantic relations of a couple of the Alters are very important, and not all of them are with women.”
