Inhuman Conditions: A Game of Cops and Robots

Product Information

Robots must answer the Investigator’s questions without arousing suspicion, but are hampered by some specific malfunction in their ability to converse. They must be clever, guiding the conversation in subtle ways without getting caught.

Remember what our programming was – do not mention anyone except strangers and enemies. I’ve cast the terrifying prospect of working with clowns in a profoundly antagonistic way. If asked any specifics about anyone in the college it’s trivial for them to be enemies. Or being Dean I could simply say that I don’t have a lot of face to face experience with those in the college so I don’t know them. Avoiding carrying out my penalty, in other words, requires virtually no skill or setup. Constraints, if they are to inspire creativity, must be genuinely constraining. These aren’t handcuffs, they’re more like bracelets. They ornament a role without tethering it anywhere awkward.Inhuman Conditions is a five-minute, two-player game of surreal interrogation and conversational judo, set in the heart of a chilling bureaucracy.

Anyway, my point from this is that the way the game is designed nullifies a lot of the criticism I’d normally have in this section of a teardown. It gives conversational prompts that lower the barrier to play, and you never need to directly deceive anyone – the deception comes as a natural result of obeying a directive. Even the jobs, which might require a bit of role-playing, are optional. There’s a mode in the game called ‘Sealed file’ where you don’t even have one.Suspect: I’d replace the soul-dead harlequins that haunt my nightmares with dogs, so I was dean of a puppy college instead. Humans may speak freely, but may find this freedom as much curse as gift. There are no right or wrong answers, only suspicious and innocuous ones, and one slip of the tongue could land Humans and Robots alike in the Bureau's Invasive Confirmation Unit. There, alongside Investigators who make improper determinations, they will await further testing... Inhuman Conditions is licensed under Creative Commons BY—NC—SA 4.0. That means that if you make your own version of our game, you have to give us credit for the original, you're not allowed to profit from it commercially in any way, and you have to license it under the exact same CC license. You also can't submit anything to an app store or anything like that. But that’s a smaller issue compared to the inducer cards, which have different kinds of accessibility problem depending on whether they are human or robot.