The Turing Test [video game] [review]
Dec. 8th, 2021 07:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsThe video game The Turing Test has been out for a few years, but it was on sale during the pandemic so I bought it and played it. It’s a blatant Portal clone of seven chapters with ten room puzzles in each chapter. You play Ava, a “backup engineer” on a mission to Europa, the largest moon of Jupiter, who is awakened from cryogenic suspension by the mission AI, whose name is TOM, when the ground crew fails to report in. Your job is to leave the orbiting ship, descend to the surface, and find out what happened.
The crew, it turns out, have used robots and automated equipment to redesign the entire ground base into a series of puzzles that, as the AI informs you, “seem to be Turing Tests, in that they can only be solved by a human being.” When Ava asks TOM what he means, he explains, “In the very first room, you threw the battery through a window. I would never have thought of that. I am, after all, programmed to preserve company property.”
But there is something ominous and wrong about what you’re doing, and this feeling of creepiness grows as the mission goes on and you start to discover notes from the crew about what really happened and why they’re so eager to keep TOM out of the base. It does seem a little odd that Ava doesn’t question why TOM is so eager to get in, but there’s really no choice to the mission; either Ava continues, or she’s stuck on Europa for the rest of her life anyway.
The puzzles are pretty good. They’re very much like Portal; you have a single tool for manipulating different power sources, and can sometimes control small utility robots, to throw switches, raise levers, activate or deactivate window shutters, and so forth. I had fun with them, and learned that I’m still a lightweight when it comes to alcohol; a single glass of wine made some of the later puzzles unsolvable until the next day.
The story is short and interesting, and like all stories, has questions to be answered. There are two different questions at the heart of The Turing Test. One is a moral question, and the other is a philosophical question. “Does TOM think, or is it just programming?” is the philosophical question. I probably would have found it much more interesting if I hadn’t been deeply steeped in, and deeply familiar with, the arguments Daniel Dennett and John Searle have been having for the past twenty years or more. TOM falls into the Dennett camp, and the even older the Julian Jaymes camp, that TOM walks like a duck and talks like a duck, so is clearly a duck.
The other is an issue of Kantianism vs Utilitarianism, although the latter question is muddled and poorly argued. TOM is arguing the Utilitarian point of view, but it’s clear that he’s leaning heavily on Objectivist arguments as well since he’s programmed by The Corporation to protect their interests. Ava is arguing the Kantian position, but her argument is muddled by both a phenomenological weakness and deonotological descent: she feels duty bound but she’s not entirely clear as to why.
The ending is disappointing. The ending does settle the Turing Test question, but it doesn’t solve the moral quandary that supposedly is the conflict. This is the big problem with a lot of writing, not just in games but in general: the main character’s biggest problem is not the one the writers want to face in the final conflict of the story.
But it’s a good puzzle game, and a good SFnal setting that’s more serious and straightforward, than Portal. If you enjoyed Portal for the puzzles, then put The Turing Test on your Steam wishlist and wait for it to go on sale.
The crew, it turns out, have used robots and automated equipment to redesign the entire ground base into a series of puzzles that, as the AI informs you, “seem to be Turing Tests, in that they can only be solved by a human being.” When Ava asks TOM what he means, he explains, “In the very first room, you threw the battery through a window. I would never have thought of that. I am, after all, programmed to preserve company property.”
But there is something ominous and wrong about what you’re doing, and this feeling of creepiness grows as the mission goes on and you start to discover notes from the crew about what really happened and why they’re so eager to keep TOM out of the base. It does seem a little odd that Ava doesn’t question why TOM is so eager to get in, but there’s really no choice to the mission; either Ava continues, or she’s stuck on Europa for the rest of her life anyway.
The puzzles are pretty good. They’re very much like Portal; you have a single tool for manipulating different power sources, and can sometimes control small utility robots, to throw switches, raise levers, activate or deactivate window shutters, and so forth. I had fun with them, and learned that I’m still a lightweight when it comes to alcohol; a single glass of wine made some of the later puzzles unsolvable until the next day.
The story is short and interesting, and like all stories, has questions to be answered. There are two different questions at the heart of The Turing Test. One is a moral question, and the other is a philosophical question. “Does TOM think, or is it just programming?” is the philosophical question. I probably would have found it much more interesting if I hadn’t been deeply steeped in, and deeply familiar with, the arguments Daniel Dennett and John Searle have been having for the past twenty years or more. TOM falls into the Dennett camp, and the even older the Julian Jaymes camp, that TOM walks like a duck and talks like a duck, so is clearly a duck.
The other is an issue of Kantianism vs Utilitarianism, although the latter question is muddled and poorly argued. TOM is arguing the Utilitarian point of view, but it’s clear that he’s leaning heavily on Objectivist arguments as well since he’s programmed by The Corporation to protect their interests. Ava is arguing the Kantian position, but her argument is muddled by both a phenomenological weakness and deonotological descent: she feels duty bound but she’s not entirely clear as to why.
The ending is disappointing. The ending does settle the Turing Test question, but it doesn’t solve the moral quandary that supposedly is the conflict. This is the big problem with a lot of writing, not just in games but in general: the main character’s biggest problem is not the one the writers want to face in the final conflict of the story.
But it’s a good puzzle game, and a good SFnal setting that’s more serious and straightforward, than Portal. If you enjoyed Portal for the puzzles, then put The Turing Test on your Steam wishlist and wait for it to go on sale.
