making REALLY, IF / REALLY, ALWAYS

Hi! For anyone who’s interested, here’s a bit of background about how I made REALLY, IF / REALLY, ALWAYS. (It is literally made with spreadsheets and scotch tape.)

In a nutshell, the premise of the game is this: REALLY, IF / REALLY, ALWAYS is a conversation with the 1960s “A.I.” chatterbot psychotherapist ELIZA. In this conversation, the “patient’s” (the player’s) dialogue is composed only of words that appear in the “doctor’s” (the bot’s) scripted responses.

To my mind, this game is principally about language and intimacy, that is, the words and syntax we use to talk about deeply personal subjects such as memory, dreams, sex–and how that manifests and distorts itself within the context of a program, ELIZA, that is designed to continually reflect input back to the user.

In addition to these thematic concerns, however, I felt that some suggestion of character and narrative were necessary in order to motivate the player to keep exploring the game, and also to give the game’s linguistic dimension more emotional resonance.

The materials I used to create the story were

-a finite set of words (the sentences from the doctor script) that I had to completely use up
-a set of words that I gave myself permission to use any number of times (the keywords, as defined by the program),
-the ELIZA/doctor program itself, which would create the dialogue for the NPC in response to the “input” I was composing

I began by creating some quick-and-dirty word clouds out of all the words from the doctor script. Different word cloud generators omitted certain important parts of speech, like pronouns and articles, but overall, the words that occurred most frequently suggested themes of knowing and not knowing, certainty and uncertainty.

I then put words in a spreadsheet, in columns arranged generally according to part of speech. I drafted sentences, and tested the responses with ELIZA. (I initially tried to “reverse engineer” the input based on the program’s decomposition and reassembly rules, but, with the exception of section 5, it was usually easier and faster to just type potential sentences into the program and tweak them based on the doctor’s responses.)

The “personality” of the player character emerged mostly out of necessity–out of the need to use up, for example, 67 DOs, 14 PERHAPSes, 17 REALLYs, and 18 WOULDs. I don’t think that a cohesive personality is very evident in the finished game, but as I was writing, I imagined the character to be a bit pompous but also naive; formal, but in a somewhat strained and self-conscious way.

In terms of an actual storyline, it was challenging to create conventional plot points using a limited set of evocative yet vague words which, if they were classified according to Roget’s Thesaurus, would have more to do with “intellectual faculties” than “matter.” There were hardly any definite articles, and 5 times as many verbs as nouns. I created an ambiguous framework alluding to a relationship and past traumatic event(s) that the PC seems to be having trouble processing/remembering accurately. The rest I left to the player’s imagination. What is the relationship between the PC and the NPC? Is the NPC really a therapist? Is the NPC a ghost? Are they both ghosts? Which one is the NPC again? I don’t know.

Structurally, I think the game most resembles a gauntlet. There’s branching within each section, but the overall path is fairly constrained. In order to ensure that on each playthrough the player would be presented with every single line of dialogue, albeit in a different order, I scotch taped each line to an index card and, as I created the passages, I moved the cards to a “done” stack.

The look of the game was inspired by the music I was listening to, which was almost exclusively Pure Moods (actually, Pure Moods I through III) and spaghetti Western soundtracks. What drew me to this music (besides X-Files nostalgia) was its quality of synthetic vastness, which I tried to convey through the images and music.

I was surprised by how intense and upsetting beta testers found the experience of “speaking” with the NPC. I had initially been really worried that I would be setting up a dynamic whereby people felt they could abuse the (female) NPC, so I tried to craft dialogue that would create the illusion of the NPC’s having more agency. I questioned whether the very premise of the game was essentially forcing the ELIZA program to “eat itself,” so I relaxed the initial constraint to allow for unlimited use of keywords.

But in practice, it was the NPC who turned out to feel really aggressive, especially when coupled with the limited choices available to the player. I created some ambient music at the last minute with the intention of relaxing people, but it ended up making the game a hundred times more menacing–sort of like how one of the few places you might see a photographic mural of a peaceful forest scene is in the office of an oral surgeon.

I felt most gratified when testers reported feeling at times that their computers had somehow been hacked and were actually talking to them.

I don’t think the character or the narrative came through very much in the finished game, but I suppose I’m not sure how necessary that is. If I were to do this again, I would have tried harder to make the dialogue more linguistically playful and surprising, and to be more systematic and deliberate about breaking apart and drawing attention to the deconstruction and reassembly rules that the ELIZA program operates on. Or I might have tried to procedurally generate all the player dialogue.

Many thanks to everyone who played and reviewed the game, and thanks to Aaron and all of the other Spring Thing participants :smiley: !

I enjoyed this, thanks!

Thank you—I enjoyed the piece a lot and the backstory only added to it.