Player Comments on Machine Contact

The style of this game was rather odd; the narrative voice was really stiff, and you don't so much play a character as dicate the historical events that take place. You stand almost at arms' length from the world-changing events you are told about, which is a shame, because the events are really quite interesting.

There's no character you are playing; instead things are much more abstract--in fact, the game abstracts the choices so much that things like "Global cooperation" are *items* you pick up rather than narratively communicated. It's a very tell-rather-than-show game.

In fact, it's almost as if...an AI wrote this game and were trying to imagine what a human perspective on AI/human contact might be! (If that was the intent, brilliant! But I suspect it wasn't.)

Anyway, the choices are interesting--there aren't a lot of them, but they do branch, and they do make an effort to consider consquences and ramifications, although in the absence of any emotion or characters, it's hard to get any reader interest. It comes off as a *very good* sketch for a game, but not the game itself. If this game were fleshed out, it has the potential to be an excellent narrative, because it has the bones of a cool story. But in its current state of just bones, it's not that effective in being as cool as its premise suggests.

This wasn't bad for a first story. In fact, I'd say it's a good start to the author for writing CYOA's.

The writing itself is decent. The author had a clear intent for this story game and followed through on it. There are 3 different endings based on how the player reacts to the events of the game.

I would like to see this author continue making story games. Adding characters and their emotions to the story would be an improvement for next time. While this story was decent, the lack of a main character made it impossible to fully immerse myself in the story. So my main suggestion to the author for their future endeavors is to bring in main characters to play as and others for them to interact with throughout the story. Explore their emotions and thoughts toward events and give readers that extra layer of storytelling.

Altogether I give this story a 4/8. It's short but has a clear intent, choices that matter, and multiple endings. On the negative side, it has no real characters and some minor grammar errors.

This author has promise. I'd like to see them write more stories and improve in the future.

This is a short game about a machine intelligence making contact with the Earth, and how Earth responds.

Overall, it is written well. Some choices lead to plausible consequences, but others seem to require a leap of faith. There seem to be three endings (good, bad, and perfect.) It's a little cliche in parts, but hits the sci-fi political genre well.

The downside of this storygame is that it isn't really character based. There is no emotional connection to what happens. It's essential just summarized telling of first contact, and the player chooses the course of history. It's sort of like playing a textbook.

There are so many characters that could have made this a more meaningful story. E.g. a new diplomat who somehow was saddled with the task of managing first contact peacefully. A SETI enthusiast who the world thinks is crazy, but finally comes across the first message. A skilled lab technician put in charge of translation. Etc. It needed something more personal to make me care about whether or not Earth survives or we gain the ability to communicate with the machine.

This game was better than most of the other games this length, so that was nice. It wasn't super linear and it didn't have a ton of grammar mistakes that I could see. The variety of choices was really good and I liked how they actually mattered. It wasn't super random either. It was pretty down to earth for an alien story.
There were a few things this story struggled with though. The whole story is just telling us the things that are happening like it's listing facts. It makes up an okay story, but you want to show and not tell. You also have no sense of character. You just play as some random person who is making all these decisions. When you play through it it almost feels like you are being told what is happening in the world with the creativity of a military report and then being told to make one of two decisions. You then get another report and keep going until the end of the game.
All that being said, it was still enjoyable to play and it really wasn't a bad game. You had your strengths and your weaknesses, and overall I would choose to play this if I knew what the level of quality it was.

got the good ending lol, cool

Nice very good made my day

Short, but well made. Good work.

It is well written but it has not really anything that makes me feel attached to the story and not really plot I have 4 endings and all were really easy to guess three choices before the end. It follows absolutely all cliches about military bad scientific pacifism good. It really needs a more defined personality at least in The voyager.

> CHARACTERS
Playing as a character in a great position of power is a refreshing change of pace, and your actions truly do affect the outcome of the story.
There is not much in the way of character development, but that is to be expected—the story does take place over a period of 30 hours, after all. Regarding realism, I'd say the characters were believable, but not very much like one would expect of humans. I believe it was a hit and a miss here. Overall, however, I was impressed.

> PLOT
The entire story takes place over slightly more than 30 hours. Within that compact timeframe, you have the option to do several important actions, but you don't have enough time for every action—that, combined with the short story length, allows for a replayable game.

> Setting
The story is a near-future sci-fi reality. There is no setting since the story revolves around the interactions between the two main parties. There is truly not much to say, but I feel like the lack of a setting only negatively impacts the story.

> Overall
All in all, This story was a refreshing take on the scenario, and for a story of this size, I'd say this ended up very well. I truly recommend adding more background details in your future works. Oh—and realism! That always helps! I look forward to seeing your next story.