Cyborg Play at Narrascope

The Strange Architecture of U of Albany

The University of Albany was built to resemble a decommissioned nuclear power plant, apparently. The central courtyard is surrounded by a sea of tall white columns and glass domes that evoke the science-fiction espionage of Andor more than responsible learning. The central courtyard is embedded beneath the earth, two sets of wide stairs bringing me down to a shallow blue pool and narrow cypress trees. The campus is sweltering in July, and the blue of the pool perfectly mirrors the blue of the sky, creating an eerie illusion that the entire Narrascope conference is suspended in a narrow beige band between two yawning blue expanses.

In the central hall of Narrascope, just past the registration desk, there was a games experience space featuring half a dozen “experiences” — a mixture of site-specific installations, immersive AR simulations, and fascinating analog experiments. Two of them in particular stood out: both games about humanity, trust, and the mechanical other; both presented as computers sitting on desks; and both blurring the boundaries of digital and analog play. While both of them are playable outside of Narrascape (and I would encourage readers to go support their designers), both took on new life and context within the convention. The resulting play experiences were something I would describe as “Cyborg Play” — the moment when the digital and the analog overlap, when the physicality of both bleed together and produce something new.

(Note: This blogpost contains minor spoilers for Qualia by Sydney Clara and ScribeOS by Milo Duclayan. I’ve done my best to avoid revealing explicit events that would undermine the play experience. Still, proceed mindfully if you’re someone who cares about that.)

Qualia

The Qualia setup

A beautiful ancient computer sat in the middle of a constructed office. Sticky notes left reminders all over the desk. A satirical lunch menu was pinned to the side. A pile of printed-out materials, including a user manual and a guestbook, covered the tablespace. The computer was the centerpiece, though. It was chunky and old, with a bright red knob for scrolling, a blue circular trackball with separate buttons for clicking, and a keyboard with no symbols. The screen was a flickering CRT that, unlike modern LED-based screens, functioned through the illusion of a laser moving quickly behind the monitor. In the photos I took it’s impossible to see the whole screen at once: sketchy massive black diagonal lines cut through the image, the gap between my camera’s shutter speed slamming headfirst into the limits of the human eye’s processing.

I played the game on Saturday with my friend Lexi Kohanski. Since actually manipulating the computer would have been melakha, I acted as her shabbos goy and operated the machine while following her lead. We explored the world of Qualia together, which allowed the game to come to life between us in ways we might not have experienced were either of us playing it alone. The game preloaded on the Qualia computer was identical to the game Qualia available on Steam and Itch.io. But the experience I had playing Qualia could only have happened at that old machine. The designer (the lovely and extremely fashionable Sydney Clara) was walking around the convention “in-character,” dressed as a researcher at Intellica and with a diegetic name tag. The props that surrounded the game, while not necessary for play, did invite new dimensions of play.

Qualia is an administered Turing Test. It presents the player with a question that had been previously given to two participants, who each provided their own answer. The player must judge which of the participants is human and which is AI. The game, of course, is more than that. Lexi and I organically realized the twist as we moved through the survey, as Lexi poked through the supplementary materials (available as downloads for printing out from the game page) and we started untangling hidden ciphers and cunning secrets hidden outside the game. You don’t need these supplementary materials to realize the twist — the game grabs you and spells it out for you once you’ve repeated the central survey a couple of times. The fact that it occurred to us organically made the experience of confronting it later on even more satisfying.

Qualia on the old CRT

Qualia is about realizing a test goes even further than you expected. It’s the moment in a con where the con man tricks the mark into thinking they’re part of the confidence hustle, letting them in on the conspiracy and then leaving them holding the bag. It’s worth taking 15–20 minutes and playing it right now so you can see what I’m talking about. It’ll make you appreciate what happened next even more.

Intellica is disappointed in our performance. The game has informed us it’s resetting the experience. Code is flashing in front of us and I’m frantically trying combinations of knobs and levers on the ancient computer. Maybe if I flick or press the right mixture of buttons I can regain control of the machine. I place my hands down on the keyboard and press a combination I remember from childhood — ctrl + alt + delete. I can’t read what the buttons say, but I hope that my muscle memory is good enough. Something happens! A soft blue screen appears. An old windows login page with two accounts. One belonging to Intellica, and the other belonging to Sydney Clara, the designer of the game and self-styled lead programmer at Intellica. Her account is password protected. Lexi and I start speculating wildly on what the password could be. We spend five minutes flipping through the supplementary materials, going back through our memory of the game, checking the notepad full of previous guest information to see if there’s anything that could show us the next step. Finally we decide to ask the scientist in the labcoat what the password to her account is.

“Oh, that’s not part of the game! Here, let me get you back in.” Sydney laughs and clicks on the Intellica account, bringing us back to the ending of Qualia , back to the machine.

We fell out of the video game and thought we were still in it. If we had been playing Qualia on my laptop at home, it would’ve been obvious that pressing ctrl+alt+delete had pulled us away from the mechanical level of the game and brought us into the infrastructure beyond the game. But because of the unique position of the game as embedded in a machine at a desk, and the presence of the designer as a diegetic part of the game-world, we had no idea how far this game could be taking us! Perhaps if we were both used to videogames we would’ve more intuitively thought of the game as the program and the materials around the game as set-dressing, but our experience with larp and TTRPGs (and our computational naivete) led us to expect something miraculous.

It felt miraculous. It felt like walking off a cliff, out into the beautiful blue sky, and to miss the ground and keep flying instead.

ScribeOS

The ScribeOS setup at the start of play.

My experience playing ScribeOS by Milo Duclayan aligned more closely with the designer’s expectations. This isn’t surprising to me — Milo is also an alumnus of the Wayfinder Experience, the Larp summer camp that shaped our childhoods and informed how we both think about games. Milo was one of my campers back when I worked there, but he’s long since become one of my peers. ScribeOS was the only one of the games at Narrascope this year that described itself as a Larp, but from a distance it didn’t seem that different from Qualia’s own setup. Two cheap laptops sat facing one another with shallow corkboards serving as dividers between the two workspaces. Each workspace surrounding the laptop was covered in old photos, rolled-up balls of paper, sticky notes, and pens. Each side had a cheap yellow journal and a chair. Unlike Qualia, it was intended for explicitly two players.

Sharang and I waited almost an hour to play ScribeOS. He tried out the other games while we sat around:Relational Dance Dance by Jackie Liu and the (utterly fascinating) dollhouse escape room by Alanna Okun. I chatted with the team at the Homestuck booth while watching the display like a hawk, waiting for our chance. I knew a bit of what to expect from hanging out with Milo, but I wanted to feel it myself.

Sharang and I sat down at opposite ends of the twin desks and read the rules presented to us on the screen. Green text on a black background explained to me that I needed to work with my other player to funnel inputs and outputs into a hyper-sentient AI. It explained we would need to occasionally use the journal in front of us to take notes on our surroundings. It also warned me that for the duration of the game we shouldn’t talk to each other, and that I couldn’t trust my other player. I looked up at Sharang and he grinned like a shark. I knew he had the same instructions.

ScribeOS takes 20 minutes to play. The AI issues each of prompts based on our game role as either Operator or Administrator. My prompts included such things as “count the number of eyes you can see from your seat” or “slam your hand against the table. Record how the other player reacts.” It is a single Twine game running simultaneously on two computers disconnected from the internet. I knew intellectually that the two instances of ScribeOS were unable to communicate with one another, that my machine had no knowledge of what Sharang was doing, and that any claims otherwise were a carefully-timed fabrication producing an illusion of a hyper-intelligent AI playing the two of us against each other. Emotionally, ScribeOS felt like a cross of War Games with the Prisoner Dilemma, an abject spiral into distrust and destruction at the hands of a brilliant mastermind playing us against each other. Seven minutes in, Sharang lunged across the table and grabbed my journal. I nearly tackled him in an attempt to get it back. Then, two minutes later, a prompt appeared on my screen. It told me to grab the other player’s journal and rip it into as many pieces as I can.

A giddy hunger filled me.

Sharang and myself playing ScribeOS

The woman responsible for watching over the Experience hall almost intervened until she saw we were both smiling and laughing.

The game concluded with both of us violently chanting at one another. “Metronome. Compilation. Astroturf. Halcyon…” I intoned over and over, slamming my open palm against the desk as punctuation between each word. Sharang’s counter-chant was more melodic, a flowing song that filled the rhythm of my incantation. “Wires beget wires into the skin of steel and chrome…”

ScribeOS is a larp. It’s a videogame you can only play while sitting across from someone. It’s violent and spontaneous and ritualistic and explosive. After we were done playing, Milo came by and duct-taped Sharang’s journal back together. It occurred to me that no one had actually ripped it all up before. We discussed it together and speculated that perhaps it was because video game players (the majority of Narrascope’s audience) were cautious about going “too hard.” That they were used to certain kinds of physical respect and cautious about violating social norms around ripping up papers or play-wrestling at the command of a machine.

The ScribeOS setup at the end of Sunday at Narrascope

Cyborg Play

These experiences are not the first time the digital and analog have crossed over. TTRPGs and board games have always been entangled with narrative video games, even as the latter has vastly overtaken the former in popularity and financial support. Everything from ARGs to TTSes serve as interlocutors between the digital and the analog. But as the general public struggle to shake off the hypnopompic fog and failed promises of the digital world, many find themselves reaching for the reassurance of physical objects to ground their play.

Cyborg Anthropology, popularized initially by Donna Haraway in her 1984 “Cyborg Manifesto,” examines the way humans and machines interface together to produce new expressions of self. Cyborgs were everywhere at Narrascope. Meredith Gran, in her keynote, freely merged the experiences of birthing and raising children with making A Perfect Tide. Sam Sorenson talked about how the materiality of Discord in Over/Under produced unique cultures of play. And of course, the developers themselves, both exuberant about and exhausted by the shackles of digital game production. Someone showed me what a Playdate is and had me use the little hand crank to flip between channels on Blippo+ while we sat under the shade of a tree at the edge of the pool. Indiepocalypse was everywhere, the tiny cassettes with USB sticks serving as a physical alternative to the memory-hole that is a Steam library.

In the past, I’ve reflected on the ways digital games are material objects surrounded by a human formality. The cyborg play I experienced at Narrascope took advantage of this and brought the game out of the computer and into the world. Qualia is a beautiful digital game whose presentation and secondary materials enabled it to explode outside its game structure, while ScribeOS is an intentional cyborg that hijacks human instincts of anthropomorphism and pareidolia towards brilliant ends. Both games took advantage of the materiality of their situation to bring the game outside the computer, using additional physical objects as canvas to spread the game out onto our bodies.

Games are stuck between two vast expanses: the harsh materiality of market conditions and financial expectations on one side, and the hallucinatory phantasmagoria of the AI bubble on the other. For a naive TTRPG designer stepping into the world of digital games for the first time, Narrascope 2026 felt like a thin island of stability buffeted by twin blue seas, a place where cyborgs could flourish and where games can transfigure themselves into something new.

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