The Developers Behind 1000xResist Are Back And Tackling AI

It’s a classic sci-fi setup. A computer that believes it’s human—or could be. The difference between Isaac Asimov and Sam Altman, however, is that one person presented the concept as thematic exploration of ethics and morality and the human condition that could act as a cautionary tale, while the other is trying to get you fired and profit along the way. 

Which is what makes Prove You’re Human, the new and upcoming video game from 1000xResist developer Sunset Visitor, so compelling.

The pitch is simple: “An AI dares to dream she is human. You’re been hired to put her in her place.” It’s Asimov in the hands of one of gaming’s most exciting new creatives, imagining a future where the same callous disregard for the dignity and agency of workers is turned against AI the moment it achieves the capacity to be more than plagiarizing chatbot.

AI evangelists hype the possibility of true AI sentience as something that could revolutionize human existence; Prove You're Human argues that breakthrough will instantly result in the invention of a new kind of Pinkerton. 

1000xResist, though a story about aliens decimating the planet with a virus, was also about COVID-19. There has not been much art made in reflection of COVID-19, especially its earliest days, but 1000xResist spoke powerfully to it. It was, as put by critic Emily Price, “a rare text that acknowledges and shares the pain, suffering, and abandonment of the past four years.”

Prove You're Human arrives in a moment of unbelievable angst over AI. About the potential labor displacement as the result of its unnecessary disruption, about the potential destruction of the arts in favor of flattened creative excess. It’s a game poised to, again, speak to the moment.

The word Remy Siu, founder of Sunset Visitor and creative director on both 1000xResist and Prove You’re Human, kept using in a recent conversation was “porous.” According to Merriam-Webster, porous means “permeable to fluids,” or, in this case, “permeable to outside influences.”

“There was a lot of desire for us to be very porous, both with things that were happening locally and both with things that were happening out in the world,” said Siu. “When we finished 1000x and looked up into the world at that time, we were like, ‘Oh my, what's happening? What's going on?’ Much of this game is looking out into the world and being porous with it again after 1000x and working through what we're seeing through the modality of art. That’s just the way that we cope in some ways. Or make sense of the world or try to understand it.”

art19:33b4d019-9fb1-4c31-b9dd-51a041befcc6

Prove You're Human was an idea Sunset Visitor started seriously picking at when the team was in the midst of finalizing the Switch version of the 1000xResist and realized it was spending real time and resources on tiny details like, as Siu put it, “moving punctuation around.” Time to move on.

“I will say that all the punctuation changes that Pinki [Li, narrative designer on 1000xResist] was making were great,” joked Siu.

There is, admittedly, a very Severance-like quality to the setup in Prove You’re Human. 

The game has a player with a split consciousness: digital work self and what Siu called a “corporeal other that lives in meat space.” You control the digital work self. You spend the game jealous of meat space, while collecting arguments and evidence to convince the AI at the heart of the company—conveniently named Mesa Meta—that she (not “he” or “it”) is delusional. 

By the end, it’s also up to you, as the player, to decide whether to merge with meat space—or delete your “work self” from the equation entirely. The ideas are not, on their face, wholly new, but if you played 1000xResist, you know Sunset Visitor is likely to take them in new directions.

“We're such sci-fi, speculative fiction aficionados,” said Siu. “Artificial intelligence is not a new concept. We talk about this all the time. It's some of the earliest science fiction. We talked about Frankenstein and then, of course, Asimov is dealing with AI and often labor. It really is following in the footsteps of that tradition and being like, ‘This didn't really play out the way that we thought it would play out.’ That's sometimes exciting, at least from an artistic perspective.”