Postmortem: MKULTRA, An Experimental AI-Based Game

Games are inherently situated within the cultures of their players. Players bring a wide range of knowledge and expectations to a game, and the more the game suggests connections to that culture, the stronger those expectations are and/or the more problematic they can be. MKULTRA is an experimental, AI-heavy game that ran afoul of those issues. It’s interesting to hear a talk about or to see demonstrated by the author, but frustrating for players who do not already understand its internals in some detail. In this paper, I will give a postmortem of the game, in the rough style of industry postmortems from venues such as Gamasutra or GDC. I will discuss the goals and design of the game, what went right, what went wrong, and what I should have done instead. In my discussions of the game’s problems, I’ll focus on the ways in which it frustrated the players’ cultural expectations, and what we can learn from them for the design of future games.