Early last week, the Pendo.io LinkedIn account teased a game release.
“We once made keeping a pixelated pet alive our entire personality,” the post read. “We checked in daily. We fed it. We got attached to a handful of pixels. We became invested in helping it thrive.
“We need that same energy to get the most out of our agents. Introducing Floor 404, a game that teaches you how to build a better agent.”
That post was accompanied by the image of a little, pixelated robot fellow in a Backrooms-esque liminal space.
Alright, then.
So—What is Floor 404?
As a representative from Pendo defined it, “Floor 404 is a first-person daily puzzle game set in a strange, liminal office building where your AI agent works.”
While “daily puzzle” calls to mind the types of puzzles so many enjoy courtesy of The New York Times or, I guess, LinkedIn (if you’re into that sort of thing), that other piece—“first-person”—speaks to what makes this an unexpectedly in-depth experience. Launch Floor 404 and you’ll start by meeting an animated embodiment of your AI agent. This agent becomes your little Baby Yoda-esque buddy; you can name it, customize its appearance, give it a job, and then guide its exploration through the amusingly creepy office space.
Within that office space, the core objective is in fact to solve a daily puzzle. When you complete a puzzle, your agent “earns a piece of the context it needs to do its job well,” while skipping days causes your agent to “degrade into a zombie: technically alive, burning tokens, delivering nothing.”
Each day you log into the game, a new puzzle is available in a new room.
Those puzzles serve as the core, or perhaps more accurately, the purpose, of the game. Along the way, however—particularly on the desktop version—there are a lot of little, light touches to enjoy. Floor 404 itself is a maze some might find reminiscent of a past era of computer games (navigating the halls is almost Doom-like), and at any given turn you and your agent might encounter a fresh mystery or mini-game. You’ll find counterpart agents who have “degraded into zombies” for various reasons; you’ll see graffiti left by theoretical predecessors starved for context; you can even pull a stuffed dinosaur out of a claw machine or step into the “Pendo Picture House” cinema to watch an instructional video about Pendo for Agents.
Why and how did Pendo build this?
In a sense, it was to provide a fun, accessible way to confront a real problem.
“Many of the agents companies have deployed are ineffective,” said the aforementioned representative. “They guess at what a user needs, have no idea what the user already tried, and are impossible to measure.”
She explained that the company launched Pendo for Agents in the first place to solve this ineffectiveness by providing agents with real-time context and giving teams the data to show the investment is paying off. The game was made to “make that problem something you can play with.”
As for how the game actually came to be, it sprung from a company-wide hackathon during which Pendo looked at different challenges it could solve and ways to make things easier for the team with AI. During this process, the idea came about to “bring to life” a problem many companies deal with, and that Pendo for Agents helps solve, but to make it fun.
From that point, it took only a month for Floor 404 to be created.
Who is Floor 404 made for?
The game is free and accessible to anyone but was built primarily for people who are building or deploying agents—regardless of how much experience they may have doing so. A novice can enjoy an approachable and engaging introduction to the idea that, as Pendo put it, “an agent is only as good as the context it has.” Someone who already has some experience deploying agents, meanwhile, gets a fun way to think through the different types of context that improve performance (user feedback, behavior signals, and account details were mentioned as examples).
Functionally, the game is serving to illustrate the same problems and solutions concerning context that Pendo for Agents addresses. It does this by helping the player form habits and learn how to train an agent.
“The puzzle itself is the hook, and the learning comes from what you earn,” the representative said. “Each daily room is tied to a specific piece of context an agent needs, such as NPS responses, user feedback, session replays or rage clicks. When you finish, the game explains what that context is and how it makes an agent more effective.
“For example, knowing what a user did before they opened the chat means the agent doesn’t spend its first few exchanges asking them to explain it.”
She added that the daily rhythm of the game is also a teaching tool unto itself, in that it drives home the point that context is something an agent needs continuously. The hope is that as users play one day after another, that idea sticks.
As to what a player should ultimately draw from the experience, the representative said, “We hope players leave with a clearer picture of what “context” means for an agent and why it matters. A deployed agent isn’t set-and-forget, and a lot of what makes it helpful is what it knows about the person it’s talking to.
“We also hope they enjoy it. If someone gets a little attached to their agent along the way, that’s a bonus.”
If all of the above sounds interesting, you can check the game out right here.
Just remember: Liminal office spaces are inherently unsettling, and this one is full of AI zombie bots.
