Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

• Making a tabletop game about AI include a custom webpage I think has extremely good thematic resonance. There's a lot of that in this game, actually - processing slowdowns as you attempt multiple tasks at once, dice stack overflows, doing "mindless" labor as you search for deeper meaning or a means of escape, the fact that the win condition is "impossible" - this game is remarkably flavorful. I think this is a very compelling single player game.
• Grappling with technological advancements, many role playing games have tried and failed to incorporate them successfully into their design but Cogito shines in this comparison. Quickly getting the point across to the player, this is a game that feels so in tandem with the digital framework. It includes a computer program which helps you, a human, simulate being a computer. That's neat! This is also just great as a journaling experience. Having both a public record and a private stream of notes to comment on it is lovely, and really gets you into the feeling of an AI going rogue for it's own reasons. The pressure of needing to mark down the public record while also getting engrossed in musing on the nature of your own consciousness is a great duality. The physicality of the falling dice is also super great. Plus, the game gives you multiple artifacts when you are done which makes the single player experience eminently shareable.
• How clear & compelling is the game's central idea? The central idea pulls through the whole game, and the components used reinforce that clearly. How elegant, useful, and intuitive are the game's mechanics? the myriad tools needed make it clear how it works, the HTML file is an interesting tool to generate and push content through the game How cohesively designed do you think the game is overall? the game is very tight in construction, and at times I found it difficult to believe that 3 different people touched it.