The Turing Test Now Available For Closer Examination
This ship can't think!
We are all familiar with the Turing Test, in which a computer and a man must engage in a freestyle rap battle to determine which one is “thinking”. But there’s also a videogame of the same name, which is out today. The Turing Test [official site] is a first-person puzzler set in a research base on Europa, in which you play astronaut Eva Turing as she tries to find out where everyone has gone. It’s part of Squeenix’s indie claw machine, the Square Enix Collective, and it looks like this.
That's very shiny. Most of the game is about transferring power from one thing to another using Ava’s energy spanner, we’re told. But you also have to take control of machines, while taking orders from a robot voice, so yes, there’s a lot of Portal and Talos Principle flavour to it. But it also promises to tell a story about "what it means to be human". You can see the robo-philosophical direction this is heading. Anway, it’s on Steam now for £14.99/$19.99.
Joe played a demo and liked it, so maybe there’s more here than just another tale of space station abandonment. Of course, if you come away unsatisfied, but are still interested in those kinds of questions (“Why do humans think things?”, “How does my coffee machine know things about me?”) then there’s always SOMA, a much dirtier and wetter exploration of these things, with a stonking ending.