I played Desktop Explorer this weekend.
Actually, I wanted to work this weekend, but I just couldn't get myself to do it, so I kept putting it off. Maybe I need some way to force myself to start working. Maybe even working for just a little while would be good enough. At least it's better than doing nothing.
Anyway, I'm getting away from my main point. Back to the game.
I have some thoughts about it. I don't know when the game was published, but it really made me think about AI.
[spoiler]The game mainly tells the story of a father who made an app called *Desktop Explorer*. The app collects information from your computer and uses it to create new games or apps designed to comfort you or help with your psychological problems. The father uses the app to spy on his daughter. However, he is too confident in the app and doesn't realize that it has misunderstood his daughter. In the end, the app encourages his daughter to kill herself, drives the father crazy, and even hurts another person who later owns the computer—the player's uncle. The player has to solve puzzles to uncover the truth and finally uninstall the app.[/spoiler]
I just think this app sounds a lot like AI today. If we trust AI and allow it to access all the information on our computers, it could potentially become something like this app.
But the information on a computer isn't everything about a person. Real life contains many other things that define us, and AI will never be able to fully understand all of them. Actually, even if AI could observe us in real life in the future, there would still be things that we never talk about with other people, but only think about in our own minds. Those things might still be impossible for AI to understand. So, a person can never be fully defined by a set of information.
But what about uploading the human mind? I think that's another topic we could discuss another time.
All in all, it's quite a great game. I found Part 1 very impressive and creative, but Parts 2 and 3 were a little boring. I think it would have been better if the game had explored more OS-based puzzles rather than ordinary puzzles, because the OS puzzles were what attracted me to buy the game in the first place.
Anyway, it's still worth trying if you like puzzle-solving games with a little bit of horror.
Nice weekend!
