Page - 154 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 3:2

154 | www.limina-graz.eu Frank G. Bosman | The turning of Turing’s tables Some words on methodology. I consider games to be ‘digital (interactive), playable (narrative) texts’ (Bosman 2019, 40–43). As a text, a video game can be an object of interpretation. As a narrative, it can be conceived of as communicating meaning. As a game, it is playable. And as a digital me- dium, it is interactive. Treating the video games as “playable texts” and opting for what is called a “game-immanent approach” (Heidbrink et al. 2015), I will use the close reading of the primary sources of my research, the actual video games themselves, as well as secondary sources, i. e. material provided by critics and scholars discussing the same game. Close reading of the video game series is performed by playing the games themselves (mul- tiple times), including all possible (side) missions (Bosman 2019, 43–46).1 To test a TOM: the game The Turing Test At the opening of The Turing Test, Ava Turing (nomen est omen of course) is awakened on May 13th, 2250, from her cryostasis on-board the spaceship Fortuna, orbiting Jupiter’s moon Europa, by the ship’s Technical Opera- tions Machine (“Prologue”).2 The machine, abbreviated in-game using the acronym “TOM”, is a highly-advanced artificial intelligence, responsible for the support of the crew in the hostile environments on the surface of Europa and aboard the Fortuna. TOM informs Ava, the player’s in-game avatar, that he has lost contact with the ground crew, and sends her ‘down’ to investigate.3 The base as a Turing test After she has landed, TOM tells Ava that the ground crew “has manipu- lated” the base modular structure (“Level A1”) to form one gigantic Turing test (“Level A3”), for which TOM indicates he is in need of a human partner to “complete”. This forms the ludological ground structure of the game: all levels are physical puzzles, arranged in “Sectors”, in which the player/ava- tar has to manipulate the environment to reach the end. Between individual puzzles TOM and Ava have little conversations on practical and theoretical issues, which grow more existential over the course of the game. At the end of every sector, a special “block” can be found, for example, the crew quarters or maintenance. Every sector also contains one secret room, only reachable after some very imaginative or creative thinking. Both kinds 1 To facilitate referencing of the source material for both games – texts, audio fragments, visuals and the like – I have set up two dedicated websites: https://turingtestgame. wordpress.com, and http://talo- sprinciplegame.wordpress.com re- spectively. 2 On Ava’s cryostasis-pod the date of awakening is indicated as “2250, May 13th”, but this seems to be a typo by the developers since all other crew activities on-board the Fortuna and on Europa are dated no earlier than 2443, December 24th. The cor- rect year of Ava’s awakening seems to be 2550, allowing a period of seven years during which the events prior to the game’s start could have taken place. 3 TOM is referred to by the game characters with masculine personal pronouns. See, for example, the discussion between Ava and Sarah Brooks in the Brig (at the end of “Sector D”), or during the “Epi- logue”.