Kidney Kwest is an educational, parser-based adventure
designed to reinforce lessons for children with kidney failure. It was created
by Eric Zinda and Luka Marceta, with artwork by Kristina Ness.
I enjoyed the writing in Kidney Kwest. It has the
unavoidable “after-school special” tone that you would expect from the subject
matter involved, but there’s a clear challenge with some basic puzzles and
multiple outcomes. I was also entertained by the Kidney Fairy's sense of humor.
I don’t normally quote the bible, but Kidney
Kwest makes me think of the one about trying to serve two masters.
This entry is trying to do a bit more than that when you consider that it’s:
- reinforcing key messages about taking medications and avoiding specific foods,
- giving people something to do during their weekly dialysis treatments,
- engaging an audience that is 8–18 years old,
- showcasing the “Perplexity” Natural Language Prototype that was designed by Eric Zinda, and
- being judged in the 2021 Interactive Fiction Competition.
Clearly, some tradeoffs have been made.
The overall experience reminded me of AI dungeon —
specifically, the part where I endured a noticeable lag between submitting a
command and receiving a report from that command. This added extra stress to my
Kidney Kwest because a substantial part of the gameplay involves finding food
and taking medication before bad things happen.
(I knew that the delay in sending and receiving responses
wouldn’t really affect my character’s
health, but it was rough having to wait through a sequence of
commands before I could take care of immediate needs. And then it was only a
matter of time before hunger became an issue again.)
I’d call this entry a functional proof of concept, but the
real question is how Kidney Kwest is received by its target audience. If it
encourages people to lead healthier lives, then my opinions (and its final score in IFcomp) are irrelevant.
No comments:
Post a Comment