I went to GDC to meet clients, learn from peers, and slap the butt of a giant cat.
One of my favorite things to do at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco is play the games in the alt.ctrl.GDC booths. These are experimental games made with alternate controllers. Some of my favorites in past years include a game where you launch fish out of a toaster and a game where you swirl wine in a glass to shoot energy blasts out your window blinds. (I won several games in a row of that one.) The buzziest game this year’s alt.ctrl.GDC was How To Pet Your Cat by Da Chu Interactive, where two players slap a giant furry cat butt as fast as they can to the delight of on-screen felines. There is even a wagging tail. 😻
These experimental games are rarely the most fun games I play all year. The gameplay on alt.ctrl games is designed for short play at a crowded industry trade show, so what you generally get is a quick hit of arcade novelty and innovation. It’s incredible what developers can build with a PC, an Arduino board, and well-disguised touch sensors. As someone who has experimented with and taken classes to learn Arduino basics, every year I am beyond impressed, and the quality bar keeps rising.
The most ambitious game I’ve ever played at alt.ctrl.GDC went beyond arcade action and a neat controller gimmick. This year, there was a game called Breaking News. It was designed by Kathy Wang and a talented dev team. Breaking News was an IGF Audience Award Finalist, as well as a GDC pick. I think the experience lasted around 10-15 minutes, rather than the usual 5 minutes or less alt.ctrl game, and there was a wait to try it out. Rather than a single setup of monitor-plus-wacky-controller, Breaking News is like an open floor plan escape room, where the player goes to multiple game stations within a booth to engage with a story from beginning to end.
In the first station, the player is shown a video setting up the story and mechanics. You play as a disgraced reporter for a news website covering the mysterious and scandalous death of a college student. The audio was loud in the convention hall, so I didn’t hear all the audio, but I got the basic idea. My mission was to investigate the story, gather evidence, and write a story that goes viral. The experience host gave me a “reporter’s badge,” which I swiped at every station so the game could keep track of my progress from station to station.
This was the last day of GDC, so my throat was sore and I was carrying around my backpack full of clothes and toiletries, but something about this game intrigued me. I put on my reporter/detective hat – a figurative fedora with a “press” card wedged in the brim – and got to work solving this mystery. In the second station, I was given a camera-shaped wireless controller and was presented with a variety of evidence on screen, from a tampered bottle of pills to a statue with blood on it. A crooked-seeming cop who I instantly hated appeared on-screen. He allowed me to photograph only five pieces of evidence. (There was no bribe mechanic.) I looked for a pattern within the evidence. Which of the five pieces fit together to convict a murderer? I picked out evidence related to the victim being poisoned.
In the next station, we listened to audio testimony from people who knew the three main suspects: the victim’s envious teacher mentor, her reckless drinking boyfriend, and her angry roommate. This section was intended to help guide the player toward potential motives and weaknesses in each suspects’ alibi. There is a light puzzle mechanic where the player has to “decode” the audio tape in order to hear it properly, which was the weakest part of the experience for me. I’ll explain why later. After seeing and hearing evidence, I gravitated towards the theory of the roommate poisoning the victim after a blowout argument, based on who I thought had the best opportunity to commit the crime.
In the third station, the player uses a phone to “talk” to each suspect and ask questions. These are AI generated characters powered by an LLM to roleplay and answer questions live. The response lines felt wooden and predictable in a “ChatGPT writes a screenplay” kind of way. However, I was impressed with the natural voice quality. The characters sounded different from each other and were able to emote in basic ways. The roommate got angry with my line of questioning and their rage caught me off-guard! I thought it was neat how the AI characters could be interrupted mid-sentence. They acted offended when I cut them off. No matter what questions I asked the roommate, she had a logical response for everything. I thought maybe she used an open bottle of laundry detergent to poison her roommate, but the roommate refuted my theory really well. There were no tell-tale signs of lying in her delivery. I only had five minutes to question three suspects. I did not live out my Phoenix Wright fantasy of hearing a liar break down into goofy hysterics.
In the penultimate station, the player is given five minutes to fill out a form on a laptop about the murder. Who did it? How did it happen? What is the evidence? Classic murder mystery stuff. But I did not feel like I had the goods at all. My hunches were unconfirmed. Nothing was adding up. I looked at the iPhone timer the host set next to me. I was running out of time, so I just guessed. I ignored major factual contradictions and just blurted out a tattered story, filling out the form as fast as possible. I was technically over time when I got to the final question. It was something like, “Why did the suspect commit this murder?” and I wrote, “She’s mean!” At which point, the host told me to submit the form and let other players finish. I was genuinely anxious, because I enjoy murder mysteries. If given more time, I thought I could’ve cracked it.
Finally, I went back to the starting position, where I was given a news article written by AI, printed on a newsprint-looking paper. It was an unexpected “artifact of play,” as the experimental gamers would say. The article very much reads like ChatGPT doing an impersonation of a journalist, with clunky prose like, “This shocking crime serves as a stark reminder of the darker side of human nature that can lurk even in the most unsuspecting places.” Very profound, robot. News articles about local crimes often end with a discourse on the nature of humanity itself.
I felt like I lost the game. I didn’t solve the mystery. There I was, holding proof of my mediocre detective work. But then, the host shocked me. She said my “article” was in the game’s top 10 most popular rankings for GDC, out of hundreds of articles. The game takes into account various unknown factors, then determines how viral the article would go. According to their algorithm, my poorly thought through murder accusation would do quite well online.
After playing, I watched the Breaking News trailer online with my headphones, so I could hear it properly. The game’s premise is that the player was an excellent journalist who exposed corporate corruption… and got blacklisted from the industry for their efforts. So the player character sold out, launching a news website to “twist the truth, ignite outrage, and let the AI do the rest.” Through their experience, the player learned “the system doesn’t want facts. It wants chaos [and] clicks.” The word “LIES” is upside down in the game’s logo, something that never fully sunk in.
Suddenly, I understood what the hell I just played. Breaking News is explicitly not a mystery game, where the player uses logical deduction to uncover a definitive solution. It’s a satirical game where the player is encouraged to create the most attention grabbing story they can. The facts do not matter. The truth does not matter. The goal is to take the information given and churn out a story that seems right, and most importantly, is intriguing. This is the first game I’ve played that turns AI slop generation into an active game mechanic. Though the game uses AI tools, the player is the key slop generator. I was not meant to deeply understand or even care about what I was doing. Instead, I was meant to acknowledge the information presented and regurgitate it in a stylish way.
While I was playing the audio puzzle element, I did not find it particularly clever or satisfying. But after my revelation, I could see how out-of-place it was. That section of the game was about logically discovering a definitive answer. The rest of the game, which I now deeply appreciate, is about how humans amble their way through corrupt systems. If you play by the rules, the worst thing that can happen to your character is not going viral. We never get an addendum saying the player helped put the correct – or more like, incorrect – person behind bars. Or that their reporting helped the students get closure. None of that matters. The player mines a human tragedy for clicks, like swarm of locusts on a wheat field. Not unlike the way people use LLMs, despite the well-reported impact on the environment and exploitation of labor.
Many game studios want to use AI to replace workers. In Breaking News, the player takes the role of an AI – a callous, exploitative, unthinking generator of content. The satire perfectly demonstrates the limits of this technology, and why many humans don’t care. I came to alt.ctrl for the cat butts, but I left with a deep feeling of dread I could not explain. What a blast!
🎲 Your Turn: Have you ever experienced a piece of media with a surprising message? Something that really shocked or intrigued you? Do you have an AI hot take? Reply to the email or tell the whole world by commenting. Just click the orange button below.
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