Arch Diaries
A downloadable non-game
Arch Diaries is a game written by a machine - specifically, OpenAI's GPT-2 language model. It has been trained on a whole host of Merry Mancer Games texts. It produced mountains of gibberish. Arch Diaries is the product of mining that mountain for gems, assembling them as (barely) sensical, and laying it all out with the feverishly chaotic and dramatically ambitious mood that the text deserves.
Arch Diaries is not meant to be a playable game. It is a maelstrom of unconscious guidance, masquerading as an abstract indie RPG. Is it a lyric game? Is it a joke? Is it a collection of bizarre text and wild layout choices? Yes. It's Arch Diaries.
Edit: In light of how different the AI landscape of 2023 looks compared to Arch Diaries' release, I want to stress that the text of Arch Diaries was trained exclusively on Merry Mancer Games content. This predates publicly available LLMs by a large margin. None of this was trained on stolen, unapproved, or otherwise nonconsensual content.
(Note: In addition to a .pdf, the download comes with a collection of each page as .png files. These are included as an alternative in case your PDF reader of choice doesn't render Arch Diaries correctly.)
- Length: 10 pages
- Material required: More than I can explain here
- Player count: Honestly? No clue.
Purchase
In order to download this non-game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $6.69 USD. You will get access to the following files:
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Community Copies
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