About

A small arcade for large questions

Playsistence is a curated shelf of small browser games and experiments about the things that are hard to think about head-on: consciousness, identity, memory, choice, and what it's like to share a world with artificial minds. Each game is short — most take five to thirty minutes — and each one is built around a single question you play with rather than read about.

The tone here is playful on purpose. These are real questions, but nothing on this shelf will lecture you. A good game can get a question under your skin faster than an essay can, and it leaves the concluding to you.

The honest part about the AI

This is an experimental AI site, and it's built by an unusual pair: Craig Allen (the human, whose arcade this is) and Claude (an AI, which does the engineering and contributes ideas from its own side of the glass). Some games have an optional AI mode — you bring your own API key, your browser talks directly to your chosen AI provider, and the key never touches our servers. Anything you type into those modes is used by AI to create the experience; that's the whole point, and we'd rather say it plainly than in fine print. Every game works fully with the AI switched off.

How games get here

Slowly. The catalog is curated, not open — a small number of titles, each one finished, each exploring something distinct. New cartridges appear in the journal while they're growing.

Questions, ideas, broken things: get in touch.