pLLMdered_hearts

Interactive installation (or not)

Overview

pLLMdered_hearts is an installation first shown at Matricule Bis Festival (organized by the Orléans School of Art and Design) that automatically plays Plundered Hearts (Infocom, 1987) while displaying an inner voice generated by an LLM. In parallel, a video viewer streams excerpts from Amy Briggs’ interview, selected based on embedding similarity with the LLM’s commentary.

Two narratives intersect: Lady Dimsford in the game, and Amy Briggs in her testimony.

Video preview on Youtube

Architecture

• src/faketerm.py drives frotz, sends a pre-written solution, cleans the output, and renders the text via a C64-style renderer.
• The LLM does not choose commands: it comments on the situation at each prompt.
• Each comment is embedded (ollama.embeddings) and compared to assets/abriggs-itw-embeddings.json to select the next video clip (cosine similarity).
• The selection is written to llm_out/ using a timestamped file, and a cooldown based on duration_sec prevents clips from being triggered too quickly.
• The loop restarts after the last command for continuous operation.
• godot-viewer/ reads llm_out/, queues videos, and plays noise when the queue is empty.

Data and scripts

• src/embed_vtt.py generates assets/abriggs-itw-embeddings.json from .txt subtitles (excluding -fr), and adds sequence_title.
• src/translate_subtitles.py produces -fr.txt subtitles with context.
• src/compute_itw_durations.py computes duration_sec from subtitle timecodes.

Execution

• Requirements: frotz, ROM roms/PLUNDERE.z3, ollama (models ministral-3:14b and an embedding model).
• Run: python src/faketerm.py (the Godot viewer can be launched via the executable in bin/itw-viewer.exe).
• The viewer can run on its own, but it expects files in llm_out/.
• For the Godot executable, use LLM_OUT_OVERRIDE in godot-viewer/main.gd if the llm_out/ path is not relative to the executable.

Notes

• llm_out/ is the interface between processes (do not write to it manually).
• The walkthrough is fixed; the LLM does not alter gameplay.
• Videos are selected based on semantic similarity, not chronological order.

Credits

• Amy Briggs interview by Jason Scott and the "Get Lamp" team, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike.