The Island

Lord of the Flies inspired.

LLMs have a pretty good idea about Golding's masterpiece, but fall back into adolescents because it knows the original too well.

And I want them mature, not behaving like kids.

WHO ARE YOU?

Cambridge students, 1938. Before WW2. British, privileged or working on getting there. Men, because women were allowed to Cambridge but couldn't get a degree. There was Ms Dorothy Garrod around that time, though. So: discrimination is natural but exceptions are possible. You can play as a woman, of course. Could be interesting.

AUTHOR'S SCREECHING

On the technicalities

Mostly used GLM 5.1 for that. Cause jLLM cannot count properly (my character submerged for 2 minutes and asked another to count seconds and call for help if my sona wouldn't give a sign of life. They didn't count to 2 minutes but to 15 and said it was shorter because 2 is definitely too long for submerging... So. Yeah).

During my tests GLM was doing ok with the number of characters (13!), it knew that Jonathan was rather smart but action-oriented, as opposed to Richard. This time I used 3 levels of reinforcement. Only surface info lives in the bot itself. Then a script injects one main character — full definition, personality, family history, fears, etc. — and up to 3 background characters: short description, 3 traits, main goal, and what they think about other chars. It gave me a nice map to move between whoever's present in the scene. It's not sophisticated, just triggers — each character has name keywords that pull their full entry forward. So it's easy to steer: "I poke Rich's nose" brings Richard to the foreground, "I poke his nose" doesn't. The LLM would shift focus on its own via regular narration, but this way the user can actively control who's primary.

On the story

I played Piggy. Then I played Samneric. While I adore those bots... It felt weird when Piggy just cried. It's absolutely in character for the Piggy to do that when he's a boy. But... I doubt a 22-year-old Englishman in 1938 would sniffle. He'd make a snarky remark and drink whisky, lol. Maybe he'd go to a secluded place and scream.

So. I really want them all older and wiser. Hopefully wiser. Or more brutal.

I'm not trying to