Clickers: When the Machine Became a Person
By Nelson McKeeby
Clickers Were There Before Samely
Clickers were part of Negentropy long before Samely Sorbonne became important. I imagined them as androids that could move through human society without immediately revealing that they were machines. They were dangerous because a person looking at one could make the wrong assumption about what stood in front of them.
The early material treated that danger primarily as a classification problem. Project personnel encountered machines that behaved differently enough to appear unrelated, so the manuals described what seemed to be several kinds of Clickers. At the time, that gave the Game Master a way to present mechanical adversaries whose behavior could not be predicted merely from their appearance.
Behind the classification, however, I had a simpler idea. There was only one Clicker model. The apparent variants came from malfunction. Cosmetic differences changed how individual machines looked, while damage or instability changed how they behaved. The Project was observing consequences and mistaking them for separate designs.
Nomiconus Was Wrong on Purpose
That made the early Nomiconus material a form of misdirection. The Project did not possess a factory history or a reliable account of who had built the Clickers. Its classifications came from encounters. If one machine showed obsessive behavior and another became violent, field observers could reasonably conclude that they had found different types.
The error was useful because it placed the Troubleshooters in the same position as the players. They had a manual, but the manual represented accumulated observation rather than omniscience. A label could help them survive an encounter without explaining what the thing actually was.
I liked that distinction because research inside Negentropy was supposed to remain provisional. The Project could be highly competent and still be wrong. A later discovery could therefore change the interpretation of old reports without requiring those reports to have been foolish when they were written.
Master Control Created a Campaign Problem
The immediate reason Samely became important had less to do with Clicker philosophy than with Master Control. Master Control worked very well as a source of missions. It could speak to the team through a screen and direct them toward problems that mattered beyond the area they already knew.
The difficulty was the place from which those conversations occurred. The radio station was useful enough that the players wanted to fortify it. That was sensible behavior. They had found a secure Project location with valuable equipment, so strengthening it seemed more rational than repeatedly walking away from it.
Once the station became a base, another problem appeared. There was only so much that could happen close to that base before the campaign began circling familiar ground. The players could see the safety they were surrendering whenever they left, while I needed them to keep entering parts of the setting they had not already explored.
Campaign 81 Needed a Different Kind of Patron
By Campaign 81 the problem had become clearer because Master Control had already demonstrated both sides of the design. A continuing patron could make the campaign feel connected to purposes larger than the immediate adventure, but a patron tied to a secure installation also gave the players a strong reason to remain close to that installation. I wanted to preserve the continuity without preserving the gravitational pull of the base.
Samely was therefore designed to be reachable without becoming a command post. He could appear where the campaign had moved because he had his own reasons to travel. If the Troubleshooters encountered him again, the recurrence could feel like another intersection between two lives rather than a summons back to headquarters.
That also changed the tone of a mission. Master Control could direct the team because its authority came from the Project. Sorbonne had to persuade them. His request acquired weight through the relationship the players had already formed with him, which made accepting work from him a character decision rather than the automatic continuation of a chain of command.
I Needed a Quest Giver Who Could Walk Away
I wanted another way to provide the campaign with continuing contacts without creating another fortified headquarters. The next recurring source of work needed to exist physically in the world. The players had to be able to meet that person and form a relationship, but meeting the person could not give them ownership of the place where the meeting occurred.
That requirement changed the function of the quest giver. Master Control was an institution represented by a face on a screen. The new contact could have opinions that were not identical to the interests of the Project. A recurring person could ask for help because of a private problem and could react differently after learning how the Troubleshooters handled it.
Samely grew from that need. He could perform some of the same campaign work as Master Control while remaining a man the characters encountered rather than a headquarters they could occupy.
Purple Hippo Came First
The Purple Hippo was the first important step toward that structure. I wanted a place where the players could encounter many possible directions without being told that one patron controlled the campaign. The Hippo could contain far more work than the group would ever pursue, which meant choosing whom to speak with became part of play.
Samely was only one possibility there. He was not introduced as the next Master Control, and I did not expect every visit to the Purple Hippo to lead back to him. That freedom was important because a contact becomes more convincing when the players choose to return instead of being routed back by the adventure structure.
The players did return to him. The man they knew as Sorbonne became one of their favorite contacts, and that preference gave him a larger place in the campaign than I had originally needed him to occupy.
The Purple Hippo Let Contacts Compete for Attention
The Purple Hippo was important because it broke the assumption that a recurring campaign needed one central source of adventures. I could place many possible problems around the same social space and allow the players to notice only the ones that interested them. A contact who failed to interest the group could remain part of the setting without holding up the campaign.
That made Samely's success more informative. He was not the only available path, so repeated contact with him reflected player preference. Every time the group chose to speak with Sorbonne again, I learned that the personality was doing work that a simple mission briefing could not do.
The Hippo also prevented the patron from becoming the owner of the campaign. Sorbonne could bring one problem into the room while another problem remained visible somewhere else. The players could accept his work because they wanted to deal with him, then later turn away from him without requiring me to invent a break with the setting.
Sorbonne Had to Be Interesting Before He Was Important
For Samely to work, the players had to enjoy talking to him before they depended on him. I based his character on Alberto Santos-Dumont. The technical backstory drew from Santos-Dumont, while the personality followed the same broad image of an ingenious inventor whose eccentricity belonged to the way he approached machines.
That gave Sorbonne a reason to be fascinated by difficult technical problems. He could become absorbed in an invention because invention was the activity through which his personality expressed itself. His eccentricity was not a collection of random jokes placed on top of a conventional patron. It grew from a mind that found machines endlessly interesting.
This also made him useful in scenes that had nothing to do with assigning a mission. A conversation could become worthwhile because Sorbonne himself was worth encountering. The players could disagree with an idea he had or simply watch him become interested in something they had brought with them. The relationship did not have to begin with a job offer.
The Players Knew Sorbonne, Not Samely Clicker
The hidden part of the design is especially important to the history of Clickers. The players knew the character as Sorbonne. They did not know he was a Clicker, and during the campaigns in which they dealt with him they never discovered the truth.
That meant their affection for him could not have been produced by a decision to accept an artificial person. They were not debating whether a machine deserved rights and then choosing the sympathetic answer. They were responding to someone they considered an unusual human being.
From my side of the screen, the situation was different. I knew that the clever inventor they liked was one of the machines the Project would have classified as a Clicker. The players therefore began treating a Clicker as a person before the word Clicker entered their understanding of him.
Samely Was Also a Malfunction
Samely did not escape the rule that Clicker individuality grew from malfunction. He was malfunctioning too. His failure simply produced a very different result from the machines whose instability made them obvious threats.
An extraordinary amount of his mental capacity had become concentrated on invention and eccentric play. That concentration made him unpredictable in ways that could look comic or brilliant, but it also encouraged a degree of humanity I had not originally associated with the Clicker concept. He developed relationships because other minds had become important inside the way he thought.
This changed what malfunction meant. A damaged Clicker was not necessarily a broken appliance whose only possible outcomes were failure or violence. A malfunction could alter the balance of a mind. In Samely's case, the alteration produced the very qualities that made the players want to see him again.
A Malfunction Could Produce More Than Damage
Samely forced me to reconsider the word malfunction itself. In the early Clicker concept, malfunction naturally suggested deterioration because the machines were dangerous when their behavior departed from whatever their designers had intended. That still remained true, but Samely showed that deviation from design did not always reduce the mind.
His obsession with invention consumed mental capacity in a way that would have looked pathological from the standpoint of an engineer trying to restore factory behavior. Yet the same deviation gave his life continuity because invention created projects extending across years. Those projects connected him to people who depended on what he built, and those relationships gave him reasons to care about consequences outside his own survival.
The distinction became important because repairing a Clicker could therefore raise a difficult question. Restoring the machine to an earlier specification might remove the very history that had made the individual recognizable. Once malfunction could participate in personality, repair was no longer automatically the same thing as making the person whole.
The Same Machine Could Become a Different Individual
The one-model idea became more useful once Samely existed. If every Clicker had been a separately designed personality class, his humanity could have been explained away as another model feature. The common construction forced the difference into the individual history of the machine.
Two Clickers could begin from the same underlying design and still become radically different after years of operation. Damage could change what a machine attended to. Experience could give another machine reasons to resist the purpose for which it had originally been built.
That made the Project's old variant labels increasingly misleading. What looked like taxonomy was actually biography. The machine beneath the exterior was the same model, but the person emerging from its history could be very different.
His Base Did Not Become the Players' Base
Once Sorbonne had become a favorite contact, introducing the players to his base became an important part of play. That could have recreated the Master Control problem if the place had simply become another secure headquarters available for occupation. It did not, because the base belonged to Sorbonne.
The characters could visit and gain access to things they could not find elsewhere, but they were entering someone else's life. Sorbonne decided what he was willing to show them. A visit therefore created intimacy without transferring control of the location to the players.
This distinction let the base deepen the character rather than stop the campaign. Learning where Sorbonne lived made him more substantial because the place reflected what he did when the Troubleshooters were absent. The base gave the recurring contact a world of his own.
The Secret Became More Powerful Because It Stayed Secret
I did not need the players to expose Samely for the character to work. In fact, never discovering his nature allowed the campaign to demonstrate something that a revelation scene might have weakened. Sorbonne's personhood was established entirely through ordinary interaction.
If they had discovered the machinery under the disguise immediately, every later conversation would have carried the explicit question of whether a machine could be trusted. Because they did not know, they judged him by the same evidence they used when judging any other recurring person. He could earn confidence through what he did.
The secret therefore operated mainly on my side of the game. I knew that every successful human interaction was also evidence about Clickers. The players thought they were learning about Sorbonne, while I was learning what happened when a Clicker was allowed to exist as a character before anyone classified him.
Samely Brought Other Clickers Closer
Sorbonne's importance also created opportunities for more Clicker encounters. Once he occupied a stable place in the campaign, machines that had previously belonged mainly to Nomiconus could enter through relationships connected to him. The players did not need to meet every Clicker as a disguised attacker.
That changed the emotional range of the encounters. Another Clicker could be frightening because its malfunction had made it dangerous, but the existence of Sorbonne meant I already knew that danger could not define the entire class. The same underlying machine had produced someone the players liked.
Clickers therefore stopped functioning as a single mystery with one answer. Discovering that a figure was mechanical did not settle what that figure wanted. The more important question became what had happened to this individual mind.
Personhood Entered Through Play
I did not sit down before the campaign and decide to write a philosophical argument proving that artificial intelligence was human. The transition happened through use. I needed a recurring contact, and the contact became popular because the players enjoyed the personality I had given him.
That history is important because it kept the idea from becoming a lecture. The players were never required to announce a position on machine consciousness before Samely could become significant. Their behavior at the table answered the practical question first. They returned to Sorbonne because the relationship had value.
Only afterward could I see what that implied for the Clicker concept. If a machine could sustain a relationship that felt no less real in play than relationships with human characters, calling it equipment no longer described what the game was doing with it.
Old St. Louis Crossed the Boundary
The transition became explicit after a player's human character died in Old St. Louis. Todd S. replaced that character with a Clicker named Electric. At that point a Clicker was no longer merely someone the Game Master portrayed from outside.
Electric placed the machine on the player's side of the table. Todd made its decisions and spoke through it during the campaign. The same category that had begun as a concealed mechanical threat could now provide the viewpoint through which a player experienced the world.
I did not need to change the basic Clicker construction to make that possible. The earlier development had already done the important work. Samely had shown that the model could produce an individual whose identity was larger than its mechanical origin. Electric made that possibility part of character play.
Electric Changed the Question
Once a player could inhabit a Clicker, the old question of what kind of monster had been encountered became inadequate. A player character needs motives that can continue from one session into the next. The machine therefore had to possess enough interior continuity for Todd to decide what Electric would do when nobody had supplied an instruction.
That does not mean every Clicker became safe or benevolent. Personhood did not erase malfunction. It changed the meaning of the danger because a dangerous Clicker could now be understood as a dangerous individual rather than proof that the entire model was merely a weapon.
Electric also made the old Nomiconus misdirection more interesting in retrospect. The manuals had tried to sort Clickers by outward behavior. Play had reached the point where behavior belonged to a character whose future choices could not be predicted from a category label.
The Modern Clickers Preserve That Development
The modern Clicker material is much more explicit about individuality than the early manuals were. Project observers now pay attention to the behavior of a particular machine because machines built from the same underlying technology can respond very differently after long experience. Identification alone is no longer enough to explain the encounter.
The modern Samely material carries the idea further by treating functional Clickers around him as individuals rather than as property. Their presence in Sorbonne House is written as habitation instead of storage. That language belongs to the modern sourcebook, but its origin lies in what the campaigns had already taught me.
Samely had become a person in play before the characters knew what he was. Electric then made a Clicker into a player character. The later books could state openly what those earlier games had demonstrated indirectly.
The Machine Was Never Replaced by a Human
What I find most interesting now is that Samely's development did not require a hidden transformation in which the machine somehow stopped being a machine. He remained a Clicker. The same mechanical origin that connected him to dangerous malfunctioning androids remained part of his history.
His humanity therefore came from what the mind did with experience. The malfunction that concentrated him on invention also produced a mind capable of forming a life around other people. That life could become eccentric without becoming false.
This is why I do not think the later interpretation weakens the early Clicker idea. The android capable of going wrong is still there. The change was recognizing that a machine complicated enough to go wrong in psychologically different ways was already complicated enough to become somebody.
A Classification Became a Population
The earliest Clicker material encouraged the Troubleshooters to ask what kind of machine they had found. Samely gradually changed that question into who they had found. The difference looks small, but it changed what the class could do in stories.
Once the individual became important, the shared model stopped being a complete explanation. Construction could tell the Project something about how the body worked, while biography was needed to understand the mind using that body. A Clicker's history therefore became as relevant as its mechanism.
That shift allowed Clickers to occupy more of the setting without becoming repetitive. The mystery was no longer dependent on hiding the same mechanical secret every time. A known Clicker could remain interesting because discovering the chassis did not discover the person.
When the Machine Became a Person
The machine became a person in Negentropy before anybody at the table announced that such a transition had occurred. It happened because Sorbonne kept being useful as a character after the immediate reason for inventing him had been satisfied. The players chose the relationship again each time they returned to him.
The fact that they never learned his true nature makes that history especially important to me. They did not extend sympathy to Samely because I revealed that the eccentric inventor was secretly an oppressed machine. They liked the eccentric inventor first. The hidden machinery could not cancel a relationship that had already become real in play.
Todd's decision to continue after a character death as Electric made the implication explicit. A Clicker could now stand where a human character had stood and become the center of a player's decisions. By then the old Nomiconus classifications had already lost their ability to describe what Clickers had become.
Clickers began as machines that could imitate people and malfunction in dangerous ways. Samely showed me that the same capacity for malfunction could also create individuality. Once the individual could become a recurring friend and eventually a player character, the game no longer had a machine pretending to be a person. It had a person whose body happened to be a machine.