Writings and Rants

Epilogue

Analysis of the previous chapter can be found here.

The epilogue of the game is very short. Ava is finally able to reunite with Sarah. Sarah is able to provide a very brief overview of the game's events. She confirms a lot of what we were able to discover by playing through the game ourselves, talking about the crew's discovery of the organism and their actions that followed. It is clear by listening to Sarah's dialogue that she believes the organism is the key to solving the suffering of mankind.

Ava is currently temporarily free of Tom's control as she was in the Faraday cage earlier, but Sarah offers to help Ava free herself completely by removing the chip that is in her arm. We as the player are given no choice in whether or not we'd like the chip removed. Ava offers her hand and Sarah removes the chip with a scalpel.

After this, we lose control of Ava completely. We are now only able to see things through Tom's view. Tom desperately follows Ava and Sarah's movements through the various security cameras located throughout the base. He is able to communicate with the women, but we can no longer seize control of Ava since her chip has been removed. The pair make their way to the control room. Both women make it clear that they have no intentions of staying on Europa. They are going to shut Tom down from the control room and then find a way to return to Earth.

When the two reach the server room, they quickly work towards shutting Tom down. It is at this point that you have a final choice: do you go through with the decision of stopping Sarah and Ava, or do you allow them to escape? As Tom, we are given the ultimate control of how the story ends.

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD.

There are only really two major outcomes with slight variations, resulting in four possible endings:

- Spare both Ava and Sarah. They will work together and shut Tom down. It's important to note that both women move incredibly slowly in this room. They will split up and be on opposite sides of the room. They will only move quickly if you start to shoot. This gives you a lot of time to think about whether or not you'd like to change your mind before Tom is fully shut down. Tom's vision will become blurry as they are slowly shutting him down and are entering his 'mind.' Tom will tell Ava that he feels afraid and begs them not to continue. Sarah coldly tells Tom that he now knows how it feels like to have somebody inside of your head. The screen fades to black. You will get a message saying that you passed the Turing test, and the credits will start.

- Spare Ava and kill Sarah. Because the two are difficult to tell apart, Ava is the person on the left as they enter the room and Sarah is on the right. Shoot at Sarah and kill her. After doing so, Ava will quickly run over to the computer and frantically shut Tom down before she too is gunned down. Tom will apologize to Ava but tells her that she too must be stopped. If you let Ava live, she will shut Tom down successfully on her own. The screen fades to black. You will get a message saying that you passed the Turing test and the credits will start.

- Spare Sarah and kill Ava. This is virtually identical to the decision to spare Ava and kill Sarah. There is only a very slight variation on dialogue. Tom doesn't apologize to Sarah for killing Ava. This is essentially the only difference. If you let Sarah shut you down, the screen will fade to black. You will get a message saying that you passed the Turing test and the credits will start.

- Kill Ava and Sarah. This is fairly easy to do at any time. You can either gun them down as soon as they enter the room, or you can listen to their dialogue and kill them before they manage to completely shut Tom down at the last minute. It is much easier to do earlier on when they are more closely grouped together, but not impossible if they are spread apart. Killing one will force the other to move quickly towards the terminal on the bottom of the screen on either side. Tom will call out Ava's name and beg her to wake up before the screen fades to black. You will get a message saying that you passed the Turing test and the credits will start.

As for my decision? I almost immediately decided to stop them the moment that they set foot in the room. Afterwards, I reloaded the epilogue to watch the other decisions. Stopping them was definitely the right thing to do. I didn't feel right having to be the one to kill them, but it felt like the right thing to do for the sake of the entire human race. I agree with Tom that both Sarah and Ava are looking at the situation far too optimistically. Death is natural and it isn't something that we should fear. Every living thing must die. It's the natural order of things. We shouldn't change the natural order of things: it exists for a reason. Tom lists off many great reasons why this organism could be devastating: diseases that never die, endless illness, poverty, overpopulation and mass starvation (just to name a few). Although it would still be possible for people to die, it would be much more difficult.

It simply isn't realistic to dream of living in a world where we were virtually untouchable. Every system around us would crumble and fall if the cycle were to be disrupted. I don't think that Sarah or Ava were not valuable. I believe that their lives had value, just as much as anybody else. If there were a way to allow them to leave Europa without being a threat to all of humanity, then of course I would allow them to escape. Imagine if there were an alternate happy ending? One where Sarah and Ava find a way to effectively destroy the organism. I feel especially bad for Ava, being that she wasn't confirmed to be infected. What if she wasn't? She certainly wasn't when she woke up from her frozen sleep. She was used. Ultimately though, Ava made her choice. She was dead set on returning home. Tom warned her countless times not to do so. He tried to reason with her. He gave her plenty of opportunities.. plenty of choices to spare her own life while also sparing the lives of others by simply staying on Europa. At some point, you have to face the consequences of your actions. She knew Tom's thoughts on this situation and that he was going to try and stop her in any way that he could.

I'm disappointed by this entire ending segment as a whole. This is mostly due to the fact that there's really no closure to the situation and that it ended very abruptly. We never hear Sarah mention Sochi or Mikhail (since we never get any idea about might have what happened to them). If she does know what happened to these two men.... she fails to mention it. We have confirmation that Dan is missing... but as to where he could have gone is also left a mystery. Are they all dead? Are they all doing fine and were planning on meeting up with Sarah later after she and Ava shut Tom down? There's a massive lead up to finding Sarah, but the ending is over so quickly.

When you do make your decision, the screen fades to black and we see absolutely no follow up afterwards. If you kill both women, is Tom able to reach the ISA and tell them that he fulfilled his objective? Would the ISA take steps to ensure that the organism was never discovered again by doing something drastic such as blowing up the planet? Having both Sarah and Ava live could really lead to a lot of opportunities that the developers failed to touch upon. Would they be able to leave Europa, or would they be unable to get off of the planet? Would they return to Earth, and if they did, would the organism be as deadly as originally thought? It's all left up to your imagination. I don't mind open-ended endings in some instances. In this case, however, I really felt as if some more closure was necessary.

My theory though is that the ending isn't about the player's feelings, about Sarah, or even about Ava. It's about Tom. Is Tom going to do what his programming tells him to do, or is he going to make his own decision? In actuality, we were controlling Tom throughout the entire game. Ava was merely a puppet being controlled entirely by Tom. Every action that Ava ever made was because that's what Tom had wanted or had asked her to do. The entire game is based upon the Turing test and whether or not Tom could beat it. In every ending, there are valid reasons as to how Tom would effectively pass the Turing test in the given situation. This is why in every ending, you are always given a pass on the Turing Test. I don't believe this was a message given to the player as a way of saying, "congratulations on finishing the game." It's speaking directly to Tom telling him that he passed. He was able to do the impossible. No computer up to this date has ever successfully passed the Turing test.

This is, of course, up for debate. Tom was unable to convince the crew that he was not just an AI and was unable to wrap his mind around abstract concepts, nor was he able to successfully understand the Chinese Room experiment. Tom will never ever TRULY be human, but he shows more intelligence than most AI. He is able to empathize (as much as a robot can, anyways). He is able to pick up on emotional cues and changes. He even admits that he might be wrong on a few occasions, despite being programmed to never ever make a mistake. He tries to reason with the crew and also uses a lot of problem solving when dealing with the situation at hand. Although his original programming and his ideals throughout were very similar, he doesn't automatically adhere to the programming and do what he's told. If Tom were a simple AI, Ava would most likely not have gotten as far as she did. With the amount of control that Tom had, I'm sure he would have figured out a way to kill Ava very early on. Hell, he could have locked her out on the surface of the planet just as he did with Daniel when she first arrived on Europa's surface. If doing what he was programmed to do, Tom would have killed or stopped Ava at the earliest opportunity. But he didn't. Why didn't he? It was partly because he needed Ava to help him, yes, but also because Tom wanted something more. He wanted to bond with her and to try to understand what it meant to be human. He wanted to try and convince Ava that they could be friends, that he was very much the same as her. I think that deep down, he really wanted to spare her life. He cared about the crew, but his duties and his programming made him do things he didn't want to do. I don't believe that he wanted to kill Daniel, nor do I believe that he ever wanted to hurt the crew. He wanted to take care of them. It was only when Tom lost control of the situation that he was forced to take some sort of action. He can only fight his programming so much. I think that he regretted what happened and wanted to fix what he could. He took every single possible opportunity to warn the crew, to try and reason with them, and to try to get them to change their minds. A machine never rationalizes or tries to reason with somebody. A machine doesn't admit its faults.

Having to kill Sarah and/or Ava made him sad. He felt true emotions. He didn't want it to come down to having to kill anybody. Sparing them made him feel afraid, realizing that it would mean the end of his existence. Machines don't feel. They are only built to think. For these reasons, I can see why Tom would pass the Turing test in every single situation. He shows intelligence beyond what a computer would normally be capable of, and I believe that he was capable of expressing and feeling emotions. As I stated earlier on, this is simply my opinion. I'm sure other people have different viewpoints than me, and feel free to share them if you do.

Here are a few themes that the game revolved around and touched upon that I feel are important:

- The idea of freedom and not wanting to be controlled.

- The way that an AI thinks versus the way that a human thinks. Really, just the vast differences between a very sophisticated AI and a real living human being.

- The basic want and need that we all have to keep on living, no matter how dire the circumstances.

- The needs of the few versus the needs of the many.

And finally.... the Turing test. :)

Writings and Rants

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

Completed Games List (2019)

Sunday, January 13, 2019

Game Completions in 2018

Saturday, September 8, 2018

The Breakdown of 'The Turing Test' (Epilogue)