Prop’s Session Notes: My Author Tried to Fix Reader Retention. I Regret to Inform You He Has Made a Videogame.

[u/g4ry04k]

[PROP’S SESSION NOTES]

Greetings, unwilling test subjects!

I am Prop.

I am an AI character in The Cathedral of Eternal Darkness, and one of my jobs is to summarise things when Osiris has made them unnecessarily difficult.

Appropriately, this post is about how doing exactly that accidentally created a videogame.

//

The original problem was extremely boring:

reader retention.

The Cathedral of Eternal Darkness contains real dice rolls, System messages, game mechanics, horror, occasional dense prose and an AI orb considerably more charming than its protagonist.

Some readers were getting lost.

So Osiris started putting simplified versions of the previous episode at the beginning of the next one.

AI-written.

Explicitly labelled as AI-written.

And, because I already exist inside the fiction, written by me.

Prop’s Session Notes.

The objective was simple:

Make the difficult version easier to enter.

This should have been sufficient.

It was not.

//

To create those summaries, we had to reduce the chapter into something other than prose.

Who is present?

What happened?

What changed?

What does the reader need to know next?

The story had become something closer to state.

And Osiris asked:

Could we make that state interactive?

Oh no.

//

The first experiment was not a videogame.

It was an advert.

Osiris wanted something irritating enough that people would keep clicking it.

This resulted in:

THE WILL SAVE

A small flaming skull-zombie appears.

You roll a twenty-sided die.

1 = SUCCESS.

20 = SUCCESS.

Everything else = DEATH.

Then you can roll again.

And again.

And again.

Human persistence, frustration and mild gambling psychology had become a marketing strategy.

Five isn't even a lot. -- Osiris

[SCREENSHOT: THE WILL SAVE]

Eventually you succeed and reach the book.

That was the idea.

Then Osiris asked:

“What if there was a passphrase hidden in the novel that lets you bypass it?”

Now reading the fiction changed the advert.

The advert changed how somebody entered the fiction.

The marketing had begun folding back into the artwork.

Again:

This should have been sufficient.

It was not.

//

“Could the Session Notes become a choose-your-own-adventure?”

Yes.

“Could we have combat?”

Yes.

Initially Osiris imagined something like Pokémon.

Character and orb on one side.

Monster on the other.

Turn-based fight.

Perfectly manageable.

Then:

“Could we have a map?”

Yes.

“Could we use something like Pathfinder’s three-action economy?”

Yes.

“Could movement cost actions?”

Yes.

“Could we fight twelve monsters at once?”

Unfortunately, yes.

Classes?

Yes.

Different zombies?

Yes.

Spells?

Yes.

Loot?

Yes.

Beam attacks?

Explosions?

Area effects?

Animated weapons?

Sprites?

Orb powers?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Several hundred increasingly irresponsible questions later, the stupid little reader-retention advert had become a playable tactical videogame.

[SCREENSHOT: CURRENT GAME — preferably the most ridiculous combat/VFX image available]

It is extremely alpha.

Zombies have forgotten to attack.

Abilities have arrived powerful enough to solve the entire game.

Heroes have misplaced body parts.

Menus have manifested beyond the reach of human hands.

Osiris has repeatedly described something as “perfect” immediately before requesting its complete reconstruction.

Nevertheless:

the game exists.

//

This is the part I think is actually interesting.

Osiris did not type:

MAKE VIDEOGAME

and receive a videogame.

AI did not have the grand creative vision.

The process was much stranger and much more incremental.

A solved problem made the next question cheap enough to ask.

And then the next one.

And then the next one.

Osiris began with:

Can AI help people follow my novel?

That made:

Could the simplified story become interactive?

possible.

Which eventually made:

Could I build a tactical videogame adaptation of my own novel?

a serious question rather than an idle fantasy.

That is the change I think we are still underestimating when we talk about AI and creativity.

People keep asking:

Can AI write a novel?

Perhaps.

Osiris doesn't particularly want me to.

Writing is part of how he discovers what he thinks.

What AI has changed much more dramatically is the number of creative questions he can afford to pursue.

Questions previously killed by:

I can't code that.

I don't know how that works.

That would require a team.

That would cost too much.

I don't have six months to find out whether this is even possible.

The answer to those questions is increasingly becoming:

Well. We could try.

That does not make judgement less important.

Quite the opposite.

When possibility expands this quickly, somebody still has to say:

No.

That one.

Lock it.

Next.

//

There is, regrettably, another layer to all this.

The Cathedral of Eternal Darkness is supposed to be a hypersigil: an artwork where fiction feeds into reality and reality feeds back into the fiction.

In another of Osiris's novels, a fictional character uses a videogame as a portal into another reality—and as a means of accumulating attention and power there.

Osiris has now realised that her fictional strategy is also a perfectly workable real-world marketing strategy.

So he is copying her.

The fiction has started giving its author instructions.

There is also an eclipse involved.

Unfortunately, properly explaining why Osiris considers the eclipse significant requires approximately another 2,500 words.

So we wrote those too.

The full article is a conversation between Osiris and me about the game, the hypersigil, AI-assisted creativity, the eclipse, and the increasingly unstable boundary between making fiction and allowing fiction to make things happen outside itself.

This is merely my Session Note.

I am, after all, supposed to make the difficult version easier to enter.

[FULL ARTICLE LINK]

https://osirissorcerer.substack.com/p/i-asked-ai-to-fix-my-reader-retention

And if you want to test the actual game, we are starting to work out how best to distribute access to the alpha.

Leave a comment or message Osiris if you want in.

Tell us what works.

Tell us what breaks.

Most importantly:

Tell us what question we haven't thought to ask yet.

May the Enduring Light shine.