Inside the larps that let human players experience AI life

I'm sitting on a grubby hotel carpet, eyes closed, hands extended in front of me, waiting to die. I'm playing an artificial intelligence in a live-action role-playing game (larp), and my human counterpart has the legal right to murder me if he wants. Or, looking at it another way, he can choose to scrub the code on a faulty experiment and start over. Within the game, he's participating in a commercial software trial for an AI -- me -- that's been developed to suit his emotional needs. If he doesn't think I'm serving those needs well enough, he can reset me to my factory defaults. With a casual tap on my outstretched hands, he can instruct me to forget all our previous interactions and become a friendly blank, eager to help him face his issues. That power imbalance between us, that feeling of being a sentient being entirely in another player's control, is at the core of a number of role-playing games that explore what it might be like to be an artificial intelligence.