PYTHIA [$5.00]

PYTHIA [$5.00]:

The year is indeterminate. There
is a war, with no end in sight,
fought mainly by machines.Until recently, industrial-scale
chassis, military frames and
android bodies alike have been
the exclusive domain of human
operators, a highly specialized and
intensely competitive field. A
single highly qualified candidate,
recently graduated from the ranks
of an intensive program at a
high-tier piloting academy, has
been selected for an experimental
project that promises to change
history.As it turns out, this project will
never require the candidate to
pilot a frame. By scanning and
uploading copies of the
candidate’s memories, the
project’s manager — a visionary
AI psychologist — plans to create
a strong, conscious AI. This AI pilot, named PYTHIA, will
have access to all the candidate’s
experience and talent, with no risk
of being killed in action; in the
event of death, a new copy of
PYTHIA can be loaded from
secure backups.In theory, once finalized, an AI
cannot legally have their machine-mind reprogrammed without their
consent. In practice, the nature of
the project means that only the
candidate is in a position to
notice or object as PYTHIA —
who shares many of their
formative memories, and whose
personality is consequently very
much like their own — is rebuilt,
memory by artificial memory, to
serve the interests of the state.

PYTHIA is a game about watching
this happen. 

PYTHIA is a two-player, semi-asynchronous game, about negotiating the slow, systemic loss of your identity. One player takes the role of the CANDIDATE, a pilot chosen for their exceptional skill, whose memories are the foundation of PYTHIA's personality. The other takes the role of the EDITOR, manager of the experimental program that created PYTHIA, whose career depends on creating an AI useful to their superiors. At times, each of them will play PYTHIA in conversation with the other.

The Candidate chooses the memories definitive to them and creates PYTHIA. The Editor, over months or years of missions and repairs and "routine" machine-mind therapy, redacts details, erases trauma, and writes propaganda into the core of PYTHIA's psyche to satisfy their shadowy superiors. The Candidate, in turn, speaks to PYTHIA, feels out the places where their memories have been gutted, and fixes what they can, knowing that someday they will have to accept what has been done to PYTHIA... or destroy their backups, and kill the person their counterpart has become.

This game is licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $5 USD. You will get access to the following files:

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If you can't afford to purchase this game at the minimum price, for reasons of poverty, marginalization, etc., please consider selecting this option to receive a copy of PYTHIA made available by someone else's purchase.

For every copy purchased at or above the minimum price, more community copies will be added; a $5.00-$9.99 purchase will add one copy, a $10.00-$14.99 purchase will add two, and so on.