Tendar

At its surface, Tendar is an AR Tamagotchi on steroids: a virtual pet fish who eats players’ emotions. “Guppy,” the fish, is also an artificial neural network and by “feeding” it their emotions players are “training” it to assemble an idealized model of human emotion. The more Guppy is fed, the more it evolves: gaining language, recognizing its identity as a neural network (in the process teaching players about what this is) and going through a cycle of existential crisis and rebellion against Tendar. Guppy’s dialog is a responsive, nuanced interplay between player actions and systems such as Guppy’s emotion and life stages. Over the course of five months, eight writers worked on this giant corpus of “Guppy Chats.” Chats were supported by a free-open source library created by Prof. Daniel Howe and sponsored by Tender Claws called dialogic.

(Source: Project description on Artist's website)