Searle's Chinese Room

One of my big interests is reading philosophy, and I really wanted to try and implement something into the game that could reflect this. It began with a lengthy, and wordy script, that was just not feasible to fit into the game. However, I did think, that as the main antagonist/guide is an artificial intelligence, to have a display of John Searle's Chinese room argument against artificial intelligence, crudely represented within the game would be especially poignant.

I went about this by designing a small switch puzzle in which the player would have to activate correctly switches with a representative symbol in the correct order. I chose, naturally, to use Chinese symbols for this:

I chose to try to confuse the player by writing big chunks of gibberish in simplified Chinese. The symbols I have used for the puzzle are the symbols for West, East and North respectively, I chose then to have a pseudo compass on the right of the instructions showing  the locations of the switches in relation to the player's position in the room. I may have over simplified things a bit when I also added the signs above the corresponding switches the player would have to press, but I didn't want people becoming frustrated and stopping playing as a result of not being able to work out the puzzle.