system piece: the Human Machine

[anonymouse]

Had this thought today inna shower.

The characters have the ability to alter aspects of themselves while they sleep, via dreams. Maybe they want to speed up their metabolism, or unlock some memory, or tap the Akashic Record or something for knowledge about kung-fu. When they wake up, or maybe a few days later, the changes take effect. This is like a soft reset, in computer terms.

More dramatic effects would only occur if a person had a hard reset; think of it as un/installing something core to the system. The character would have to die, and probably remain that way for a certain amount of time to make sure the "RAM" was completely flushed. Then someone needs to bring you back.

The risky part is.. what happens if the change you made messed up? Maybe you had a virus that corrupted the code, maybe you just put that neuron in the wrong place, maybe it was more severe.

The character would start back up, some baseline functions would begin working again.. and then the body would hang (coma) or crash (die again). And how do you get into someone's brain to fix that? What kind of boot-recovery disk do you use? Or maybe you'd come back up but have serious hard disk errors.. yeah, you run, but you can't -do- anything.

[Comte]

You know its kinda strange that about a month ago I had an idea very similar to yours.  The diffrence is that a person's personality is determained over the course of thier first dream.  The player's each play a small fragment of emotion, or personality, and the goal is to become part of the game world which is actualy the mind of some nearly born child.  

After I get that idea done with I was planning on making a game that worked very much like the one you described.

[Harlequin]

In another parallel, I've had this image in my head for a few years about a very baroque SF setting (cf. Tanith Lee's Biting The Sun or Melissa Scott's wonderful Burning Bright) in which each member of the society woke each morning to a "dispatch" (in the baroque mode, something like a tarot card on their bedside) from some central authority, telling them who to be that day - perhaps from a shortlist of personae that each person reasonably commonly assumes, but with an open end for occasional curveballs.  And an update of skillset would be part and parcel of that, although in the vision less important than the social aspect of keeping up the relationships of that persona even though all you have is the journals of previous "owners" to work with.

Again mostly a "me, too" and "cool idea" post, but I figured worth mentioning to encourage you to chase that ghost - it may be that you'd have a wider audience (esp. given the popularity of the Matrix, of course) than you might suspect.

- Eric

[Emily Care]

The characters have the ability to alter aspects of themselves while they sleep, via dreams. Maybe they want to speed up their metabolism, or unlock some memory, or tap the Akashic Record or something for knowledge about kung-fu. When they wake up, or maybe a few days later, the changes take effect. This is like a soft reset, in computer terms.

Reminds me of the concept of "hypnotapes" I recall from '70's-'80's sci-fi.  Like subliminal tapes that really worked :) that would allow you to learn an alien language in a few days, branches of science etc., while you slept.

The idea of having the whole mind being "writable" seems more interesting to me, though.  Puts me in mind of ghost in the shell, total recall (or better yet the original We Can Remember it For you Wholesale), and the like.

What kind of system do you see it having?

Regards,
Emily Care

edited 1ce for typo

[Harlequin]

Mmm - something about Emily's post prompts a corollary which might prove very interesting.  I don't know if you've ever looked at much Shadowrun, but its advanced decking rules included the concept of "keeping up with the SOTA," the latter being an acronym for State Of The Art.  The idea was that unless you spent some effort (money, social grease, or programming skill) on keeping up with the changing climate of the stuff "everybody knows" then your precious programs would become obsolete and useless.

This could be a fascinating addition to the concept you suggested... "Your kung fu is strong, but your moves are months out of date, kemosabe... everybody knows those counters, these days."  Or, remembering a line from The Princess Bride, "Naturally, but I find that Tybalt cancels out Capaferro, don't you?"

One way to bring the 'downloading' mechanic into prominence, if that's desired - though IMO you could do as good things by downplaying it as well.

Another cross-reference: the RPG Continuum, a game about time-travel, has a related mechanic emerge from its basic assumptions.  If you're presented with the controls to an Apache attack helicopter and have never so much as played Flight Simulator, then one very feasible strategy is to blip out, do a little travelling, enroll in the U.S. military twenty years earlier and four thousand miles away, serve a stint as a pilot in Vietnam, go AWOL, and blip back to the present combat sequence as an expert.  All handled in as many words and as much game time as this paragraph.  It basically becomes a currency issue: years of your [extended but not indefinite] life, in exchange for knowledge you need now.  I recommend checking it out and possibly even playing it awhile (though it'll make your brain hurt) if you want to pursue this idea - see what players do when you give them this freedom!

- Eric

[Paul Czege]

Have any of you read When Gravity Fails, by George Alec Effinger? Characters make themselves effective in challenging circumstances by running personality programs. If I recall, the main character runs a Nero Wolfe program at one point when he needs to solve a mystery.

There's a supplement for Cyberpunk based on it.

Paul

[anonymouse]

Ironically enough, Harlequin, both Continuum and Shadowrun were what sparked this little thought. ;) So we're on the same page there.

As far as system.. not a clue. This was just a random seed idea; I post 'em sometimes to Theory to see if anyone runs with it (see: WTF? ;).

[Paul Czege]

Hey Michael,

On the subject of "random seed ideas," I submit that probably most Forgites have an abundance of nifty ideas. The great challenge of game design isn't coming up with an idea, but of ability and determination to do something with some of the ones you have.

Just so you know, although they're not expressly prohibited in RPG Theory the way they are in Indie Game Design, a lot of folks probably scowled upon discovering this was a seed idea post.

Paul

[Ron Edwards]

Ah, that might be more of an Indie Design forum point, Paul. As long as the idea has enough meat for discourse, it's cool here in RPG Theory. So far, it looks good (game titles mentioned, threads referenced, people working to discover where one another is coming from, etc).

Best,
Ron

[Harlequin]

Cool.

Back on thread - if the human mind/body is seen as a computer, subject to software installs (soft resets) and hardware/OS upgrades (hard resets) per the original post, (a) who is the "user" and (b) what use is the computer being put to?

Having the person in question also be the user is implicit in the first post, but might not be the only answer.  Perhaps sometimes the user is a remote user - brain-hacking (cf. Ghost in the Shell etc.) would be an interesting ramification of the concept.  Or perhaps the assumption is that the "user" is not human at all - aliens/unhumans among us (cf. Dark City) could be responsible for the resets instead of ourselves, or it could be shadowy organizations (a la U.N.C.L.E., et al) or corporate overlords being seen as either the users or perhaps simply the sysadmins...

Which question is, in turn, perhaps a specific instance of a more general question: what themes would this sort of mechanic support, in play?  Mechanizing the human spirit... you'd almost have to have a dark side to the themes, whether it be the bit in When Gravity Fails (or, more specifically, the followup A Fire In The Sun, IIRC) where the protagonist begins to become addicted to the power that having a personality other than his own grants him, or the fairly obvious "man as tool" ramifications, of which the above paragraph is one example.  You could stop at the level of "rebooting is risky" suggested in the original post, but IMO there's a lot more meat on the thematic bone than that.

- Eric

[Emily Care]

Mechanizing the human spirit... you'd almost have to have a dark side to the themes, whether it be the bit in When Gravity Fails (or, more specifically, the followup A Fire In The Sun, IIRC) where the protagonist begins to become addicted to the power that having a personality other than his own grants him, or the fairly obvious "man as tool" ramifications, of which the above paragraph is one example.

Seperating the one spirit-one body paradigm could change the face of the system. You could have life-extension a la Nephilim, where the spirit skips from host to host.  Or seed the setting with class/stratification issues: who can afford to have the best host bodies, with the poor having to sell their shells in order to survive and ending up in the weak, sickly or older bodies discarded by the elite.   Or, getting back to Eric's daily dispatch idea, bodies could be shifted and assigned at the whim of others for the purposes of the dystopia of your choice: the individual subsumed to the totalitarian society, flesh slaves of a capitalistic world gone wild--like houseing, having to rent your body day by day, or taking on assigned roles to pay your way out of generations worth of debt, etc.

But this may be a bit far from your original inception. The daily down-load and rapid obselesence of programs would be a great angle to play with your idea.

--EC