The TURING Test: IFcomp 2021

The TURING Test is a choice-based work by Justin Fanzo that was submitted to IFcomp 2021.

The conflict at the heart of this entry is riveting: You are the only person on board the International Space Station, and you must determine which of the two newest arrivals is human. Will you make the correct decision and save the human race, or will you be tricked by robotic agents of destruction?

It’s a delightfully tense sequence, but the problem is that you have to wade through a few thousand words of apocalypse fan fiction — my least favorite variety of fan fiction — before you get there.

I would have preferred to see fewer passages concluding with a single link. This author is clearly capable of creating meaningful story branches, but most of the time they didn't.

In Twine, the story diagram looks like an enormous vertical column:

Many of the scenes in The TURING Test should be familiar for people who enjoyed With Folded Hands, Colossus: The Forbin Project, The Terminator franchise, and even The Mitchells vs. The Machines. If there was a larger message about intelligence, morality, or the ethics of interacting with sentient beings, I missed it.

Ultimately, your choice to determine who can access the space station will decide whether the story is disaster fiction or apocalypse fiction. It turns out that they’re separate genres.