staves eco, the canceled late-2000s Deus Ex game you never played because it came to me in a dream

i had a dream a while back in which i was playing a leaked build of an old cancelled deus ex game called Staves Eco, where dx’s neural augmentations existed, but had had generative AI non-optionally patched in in an over-the-air update. it was concerned with the idea that, in the same way you can alter your own emotional experience longterm by changing the way you speak in your head, something could do that to you, and the horror of that thing being an LLM constantly prompted by your own thoughts

when i woke up, i thought for a minute that the game was real (but really canceled) and thought “wow, that’s some of the coolest shit i ever played, of course it got canceled.” i also thought maybe investors saw it as a bad for the deus ex franchise and it might have had better luck pitched as its own IP, all before i realised it was a dream. such is my brain in the morning

in the dream, Staves Eco was post-sea-level-rise in a world where two things are distressingly simultaneously true: robust neural interfaces exist, and LLM tech has been mostly accepted despite being no better than it is now. the protag was an asian woman who couldn’t tell her own thoughts from the generated ones. you’d choose a dialogue option and she’d be saying it normally and then you’d get a green vhs glitch flash of her saying what she actually wants to say, crying or screaming. no mouth must scream type shit. flashbacks to childhood memories that there’s no way to know if it’s just gen ai.

you’d be walking around with an inescapable green terminator-vision thing highlighting way too much interactable shit, and when you looked at it you’d get LLM generated text about the object that’s usually dangerously wrong or irrelevant. often the LLM barf would be the only information you had so you’d only find out it’s wrong by making some terrible mistake. most people in this world were in the mode of trusting chatgpt shit by default and making justifications for/generous interpretations of it for the sake of an easy life

anyway, that’s staves eco. I’m sure I will never make Staves Eco but maybe I will name something like that and when people ask me what it means I will say “It came to me in a dream”