The Test is Now READY

A series of moral questions, fleshed out as stories and implemented as Interactive Fiction. Some people have balked at the forced choices or the situations, but I suppose I'm just the sort of person who's more than willing to accept the premise of the question and place myself exactly in the position described, and answer the damn question.

Some of these are easy. Obviously I shoot myself in the first scenario, for example. Some are harder: I spent an inordinate amount of time dithering over the choices in the third scenario -- the classic trolley problem.

The various scenarios are, for the most part, existing moral questions dressed up as stories. As a matter of fact, I'd just read a short while before about a lab experiment closely paralleling the final scenario: it was found that lab rats would insist on hitting that pleasure button and forget to eat or drink in their anxiety for the next pleasure high. So we're not looking at attempts at originality here. We are looking at some competent writing, though.

The game is, as the title suggests, not much more than a test. I remember something fairly similar in principle being entered into the competition many years ago: Harry Hardjono's "Human Resource Stories". In both cases, you are essentially simply answering multiple-choice questions to obtain a final test result. The difference, however, is that this one has been properly implemented as bite-sized chunks of interactive fiction, and dressed up with narrative. And that difference is everything.

A three-egg omelette with shreds of roast lamb and the bitterest endives you can find. Fair-trade coffee, black.