Agents in the Matrix

[John Harper]

I HAVE BEEN PROVOKED!

Sadly... I agree with V and Mikael in this case. No wrath here. Move along.

[hix]

Hey there! Excuse the delay in replying; real life threw me a curveball this week. Hopefully this doesn't qualify as resurrecting a dead thread quite yet.

Mikael & Vincent, I had a long think about your points - and I may have to agree to disagree with you. My take on this really boils down to 3 things:

First off, I still think this setting is useful for exploring the issue of playing characters who's aims you don't empathise with. It seems more fit for one-offs & thought experiments rather than long-term play. Second and third, to play it there needs to be a radical shift in perspective towards the Agents and you have to accept Agents have autonomy. Both are pretty significant adjustments to how we normally interpret the movies from the Hackers side.

But what I do not get is what would make the Agent´s judgments difficult, and what inhibits them from escalating to guns the first  chance they get?

Dogs are still human, helping their human community members cope with their all too-human weaknesses. I guess you could introduce restrictions like "must keep up the production; every human battery is valuable" - but I would, personally, find it hard to play with such mentality.

Mikael, I hope I'm not misinterpreting you. I think we're in agreement that the question isn't whether there's anything so difficult about the situation for the characters - the question is: is it difficult for the players? When I combined that with Vincent's comment (in another thread) about how the protagonists in DitV 'fight against injustice',  I came up with this:

Let's assume the Agents are benevolent. Despite the war against the humans, the Machines kept people alive. They didn't wipe them out when they easily could have. Now the movies present this as symbiosis - co-dependence on each other for survival.

What if it's altruism (or respect for the creatures that created you)? From the Machines' POV, say there's a billion people hooked up to the Matrix and that the Earth has been completely ecologically ravaged. Freeing people from the Matrix then equals letting them starve to death. So, maybe there are agents who don't agree with 'enslaving' humanity but prefer to keep them alive than sentence them to death.

I'd be prepared to accept that logic on behalf of the thought experiment, but I can understand that not everybody would.

Additionally, a protagonist is someone who makes meaningful decisions. To play an Agent who's a protagonist means you can't be constrained by have to always make the same decision: KILL HACKERS.

So, Agents need authority. Protagonist Agents need to be able to let things slide and find lateral solutions to the central problem of how to maintain the integrity of the Matrix. That means their players have to have free reign to find other ways to solve the problem: by being hardline anti-human, questioning, showing compassion, rebelling, whatever. The group is allowed to enforce the Matrix's will how they wish

That's all I got. Does any of that work to create an environment where Agents can be protagonists? Is this a case where everyone's mileage varies or am I missing the point?

In other news:[/b]

Those last few comments gave me a better understanding of how to make a Hackers game of The Matrix playable.

Breaking things down into small towns/missions, having to figure out how to achieve your goals - that all works a lot better for me than trying to fit players actions into the broader story of Neo & Trinity. I'm not sure what the progression of town creation would be in such a 'hacker' oriented version and I'm not sure the DitV rules are the best thing to emulate it (given that they do what they do, so well) - but this thread has opened my mind.