spoilers from episode seven of the amazing digital circus. (spoilers for ep 7) theory time! so you know how caine is trying to make the adventures more appealing to the main six right? well you know how close to the end he talked about messing with their minds directly but only in small amounts(as he claims)? well what if the main six/all the people who entered the circus, are ai replicants of the people who put on the headset? like the headset is sort of like a Brian scan thing that uploads the people onto the circus. and every time caine tries to see what the players want to make his adventures to be more appealing, he forces the ai files of them open and doing so slowly corrupts their files, leading to their abstraction. more proof of this could be taken directly from episode 1, where caine tries appealing them by making the exit area as that was what cofmo wanted. however before caine could complete it cofmo abstracted. this also explains why caine wasn't surprise by the abstraction. in conclusion Caine's only purpose was to make levels, adventures, or games that were completely generated by him, an ai; to make the easiest way of content creation and the perfection of ai, and the humans' ai duplicates' abstractions' are just mistakes along the way.
bonus: as caine makes more and more adventures, the more sapient/satient/inteligent, the ai's that he's created get. after all that is the way ai learns, through repeated and controlled interactions where feedback is provided. an example of this is the fish in the lake, they were probably one of caine's first ai's and then you meet "able". who is the most lifelike ai that caine has made. and they get to the point where caine sees they're too intelligent, so he deleted or resets them for safety