Keeping the player genuinely blind takes a small crew, each one walled off from something the others know. This is who is in the room.
The Driver
the brain
Plays the game, turn by turn, and thinks out loud the entire time. Everything you hear starts here.
ALLOWED TO KNOWOnly scrambled placeholders. This is the blind one, and the whole system exists to keep it that way.
The Voice
the mouth
Turns the driver's messy internal thinking into clean spoken commentary for you.
ALLOWED TO KNOWCan translate placeholders into readable names for the audience. Never speaks back to the driver.
The Retina
the eyes
Looks at the real screen whenever the driver asks to look, and describes appearance only — “a small orange lizard with a flame on its tail.”
ALLOWED TO KNOWSees the actual pixels. Forbidden from naming anything it sees.
The Anonymizer
the scrambler
Reads the game's real name tables and swaps every creature, item, place and person for a placeholder before the driver can see it.
ALLOWED TO KNOWEverything. It is the wall.
The Notebook
memory
Holds who the player decided to be, what has been worked out, and what to try next. It survives between sessions.
ALLOWED TO KNOWPlaceholder names only. The real ones never touch it.
The Daemon
the hands
Owns the emulator and keeps the game running smoothly between decisions, so the stream never freezes.
ALLOWED TO KNOWNothing it needs to hide.
The one thing we can't fully fix
We can hide the game's words from the player. We can't erase what the model already learned before we met it. Sometimes it guesses a real term out of thin air. We patch what we can, publish what we catch, and treat the rest as the honest edge of the premise.
POKAIMON · an AI that doesn't know what it's playing · built by CRITTERCODES