I found it disquieting that all those programs who had tried and failed were not given a chance of a proper life, because only one was allowed to transcend. But they were trying to save humanity and these abused children were the inevitable price. I’m not sure the creators of the Process, Alexandra Drennan and her team, thought this far ahead, as if they assumed only the successful AI would feel anything at all. But many of the AI already seem to be self-aware and these programs are being put through mental torture. Elohim continues to iterate from one child program to another, attempting to find the program that will finally defeat the simulation and thus be the candidate for upload to physical hardware. This ethical aspect of the simulation is never made explicit, although Gehenna does sail much closer to these particular rocks. Rather than the Garden of Eden, the simulation is both purgatory and graveyard – many of the child programs fall into depression or go mad. The saddest aspect of the QR texts is that as you move further towards the end of the game, they thin out, making it clear how many programs never made it through and the world grows more cold and lonely. Jubert: “That’s the thing, right – once you establish that time doesn’t work for them like it does for us, you can just appeal to Kant in claiming that our perception of time is fundamental to our way of being, so there is no way to represent this parallel processing, and anything goes.” “This is Tom’s area of expertise,” says Kyratzes, “but I always figured some aspects of the simulation are running in parallel (or at least used to), while others are consecutive – basically it’s all a bit of a tangled mess at this point, much like evolution in the real world.” Does the simulation only run one child program at a time or several in parallel? Early in the game you see brief replays of other AI in the simulation, but are they actually replays? Are the child programs communicating on a “real-time” basis or only adding to the graffiti of their failed ancestors? The simultaneous presence of Samsara and The Shepherd during the endgame seems to complicate things. There is ambiguity about how these QR conversations work. It was late in the day so I didn’t know if it would work, but the team all said they liked it so in it went.” I added arcs to each of the characters, along with a tombstone for most of them, so there is some closure. “So, I sat down and I developed this main QR story arc with Sheep/Shepherd, who is there mostly to comment on things the player is experiencing, to sometimes elaborate, sometimes add doubts, and generally make it all feel more real and well-trod. I was probably free and Jonas was probably busy, and on playtests I’d noticed the world still felt very empty – it could comfortably take a lot more texts. What changed? “Towards the end we had enough main story content that we knew loads more about how the world worked, and what sorts of experiences the other AIs would be having. So my fear about the QR graffiti was actually the truth for a long period of development. We always intended there to be a bunch of characters, but for a long time all we had were a handful of somewhat random lines for each.” “They began I think mostly as Jonas’ domain,” says Jubert, “because he’s great, like I said, at beautiful and expressive writing, and we wanted the QRs to bring the world to life and draw attention to its beauty. But gradually I realised the walls held stories. Jesus, not another game with it’s-not-exposition-honest-guv graffiti on the wall! I initially paid little attention to them, reading them out of a completist need to do everything. But the one who reaches the summit is not our superior, for they stand on our shoulders to reach it.” The cycle exists so that we may improve ourselves. “I see now that none of us are yet ready. This is the second part of a three-part essay on The Talos Principle which includes commentary from writers Jonas Kyratzes and Tom Jubert.
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