Eliza (2019) - ★★★★★ a game that saw the future and positioned itself for a knockout blow.
a deep ambiguity about working in the tech industry washes over everything here. getting your little achievements for telling every client the same thing in their 15 minutes of therapy, leaving them totally unsatisfied and unable to solve their problems, while the people with power rave about the unstoppable power of AI to create poetry!!! and fix our own personal demons!!!! if we could only get one more sip of personal data, please!!!!, is a stark reminder that the world we live in was always something critics saw coming and warned us about well before anyone knew what a GPT or an LLM was. but the villains aren’t Marvel villains, the protagonists don’t smash the servers into pieces, and all we can do is seek out the connections that let us live with the world we made, some of us on accident and some of us (I mean…. not us, us) on purpose.
its also a nice and accurate portrait of seattle, as a little bonus. maybe a bit on the nose but i’ll take it.