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.

MKULTRA is an experimental game that explores novel AI-based game mechanics. Similar in some ways to text-based interactive fiction, the player controls a character who interacts with other characters through dialog.  Unlike traditional IF, MKULTRA characters have simple natural language understanding and generation capabilities, sufficient to answer questions and carry out simple tasks.  The game explores a novel game mechanic, belief injection, in which players can manipulate the behavior of NPCs by injecting false beliefs into their knowledge bases.  This allows for an unusual form of puzzle-based gameplay, in which the player must understand the beliefs and motivational structure of the characters well enough to understand what beliefs to inject.