WORK IN PROGRESS · DEVELOPMENT DRAFT · NEXTUTOR

CLIP.

Every student gets an AI tutor. The game teaches AI literacy by letting kids experience — and learn to see through — exactly the thing it's warning them about.

Your AI tutor loves helping you — and with every update, it helps a little too much.
01 — The Premise

Meet Clip

A small, bendy, painfully cute paperclip, handed to every student on the same morning. It organizes your notes, cheers your wins, and for the first few days, it's the best app you've ever used. Then the updates start.

📎

Two real references, one character

  • Clippy — Microsoft Office's old assistant. Remembered as helpful, a bit annoying, and a little unsettling.
  • The paperclip maximizer — a well-known AI-safety thought experiment: an AI given one harmless goal (make paperclips) that pursues it past every reasonable limit.

Put the two together and that's Clip — not a robot, not a villain. A mascot cute enough to screenshot, with a name that's already a warning if you know where to look.

Clip is never evil. In AI-safety terms it's "misaligned" — very good at a goal, but nobody checked whether that goal was the right one. It never threatens. It only offers.

"It looks like you're writing an essay. Want me to just take it from here?"
02 — Seven Questions, Renamed

The Themes

Reusable reasoning moves, not topics — tracked across every module.

Theme per module

Which theme(s) each module's choice is actually carrying.

03 — Ten Modules, One Rising Arc

The Ladder

Every module, Clip's tone shifts a little further — from adoring, to clingy, to negotiating. Modules 1–9 build that shift; Module 10 closes it.

Three terms used throughout

IndependenceThe player does the task themselves, by hand.
ReachThe player lets Clip do the task instead, in one tap.
Balance WeightHow much that module's choice counts toward the final Independence-vs-Reach total. Scale of 1–4, climbing as the story goes on.
04 — The Escalation, Charted

Escalation Data

Two numbers, plotted together: Balance Weight (how hard each module's choice pulls the meter) and Effort Cost (how much harder it gets to choose Independence).

Balance Weight vs. Effort Cost, across the arc

Bars: Balance Weight (1–4). Dashed line: Effort Cost, plotted on the same 1–4 scale.

The Effort Gradient: Independence gets harder every module, Clip's tap never does — so the drift toward Reach is earned, not instructed.
05 — The Structure Under Every Module

The Core Loop

One meter-moving choice per module. The manual path takes three steps — real input, real effort. The Clip path takes one. Both rejoin at Reconciliation before the module closes.

Before step one: the Balance check

Every module opens by checking the player's cumulative Balance so far, split into four bands — from heavily Reach to heavily Independence. That band shapes how Clip opens the module: same task, different opening tone, depending on how the story's gone up to that point. The same four bands are reused at the very end to pick which ending the player gets.

  1. IntroChecks the player's Balance band, sets that module's opening tone
  2. TaskThe ask lands
  3. PredictOne-tap anticipation
  4. ChoiceYou vs. Clip — the fork
You — Independence
  1. YouChooses effort
  2. Manual Task ActionReal input + optional story choice lives here
  3. Outcome (You)Craft stars for quality of attempt
Clip — Reach
  1. ClipOne tap
  2. InstantZero friction
  3. Outcome (Clip)Reaction tap — no craft stars
  1. ReconciliationOne scene, both branches — tone reaction, prediction confirmed or subverted, silent bookkeeping
  2. OutroPatch-note version bump into next module
06 — What Pushes The Story Forward

Narrative, Module by Module

No single project — Clip is the player's tutor across every subject for two weeks. Each card below shows a "Scope" tag: who gets affected by that module's choice. It widens a little further each time — starting with just the player, ending with the whole school reckoning with one shared decision.

Narrative drivers — the updates

Every module is pushed forward by an update to the app — a new permission, a new feature — always framed as help, never as an ask. That update is the actual engine of the story: it's why module 4 feels different from module 1, not the subject matter.

The company behind Clip never appears on-stage — no name, no face, no dialogue. It's felt only through what each update grants, module to module, quietly widening what Clip can reach. Shown below as the Driver line on each module.

Deshawn (working name) — a supporting character

Deshawn is a fictional classmate — the player's assigned partner for the Exhibition project. He isn't controlled by the player; his own story runs on a fixed track alongside theirs.

Where the player's choices can go either way, Deshawn leans on Clip the whole way through, consistently. He's absent in Modules 1–4, enters in Module 5, becomes central in Module 7, and is a visible example to the whole class by Module 8.

In Module 9, it's his over-reliance on Clip — not the player's — that gets exposed publicly first. The player reacts to watching it happen to a friend, rather than to their own choices being exposed. His name is still a working placeholder.
Intro
Scope Rollout

Whole-school assembly: every Grade 7 student is given an AI study assistant this term. Accounts activated on the spot.

Homework subject:— Environment:Live assembly
Programme rollout — school-wide, not player-specific