[tt] [Open Manufacturing] Role playing games and technology awareness (was Re: H+ RPG on x-risk management: Eclipse Phase)

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from "Paul D. Fernhout" <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com> -----

From: "Paul D. Fernhout" <pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com>
Date: Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:10:57 -0400
To: openmanufacturing at googlegroups.com
Subject: [Open Manufacturing] Role playing games and technology awareness (was
 Re: H+ RPG on x-risk management: Eclipse Phase)
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.22 (Macintosh/20090605)
Reply-To: openmanufacturing at googlegroups.com


Bryan Bishop wrote:
> http://eclipsephase.com/
> 
> Eclipse Phase is a pen & paper roleplaying game of post-apocalyptic
> transhuman conspiracy and horror.

Sounds pretty neat and a great consciousness raiser.

I played Dungeons and Dragons and Gamma World (apocalyptic sci-fi version of 
something like Dungeons and Dragons)
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_World
in high school and early college. I did a little bit of DM/GMing and level 
designing which I really enjoyed doing (though I was mostly a player, and 
the usual DM was much better at it than I). Going to school at SUNY Stony 
Brook for a time, I was around people who had written modules for role 
playing games to sell in a game store there.

About fourteen years ago I bought a bunch of GURPS rule books (Generalized 
Universal Role Playing System) and Traveller and others just to think about 
making a module for that related to self-replicating space habitat networks. 
I bought them all in a comic book / games shop in Ames, IA.

I was amazed then by all the thinking about technology there, including all 
the stuff about space habitats and transhuman cyberimplants and so on.

I'm pulling them out just to glance at the titles and a road not taken:
   GURPS Third Edition
   GURPS Space
   GURPS Space Terradyne (Conquest of the Solar System)
   Traveller: The New Era
   Traveller: Fire, Fusion, & Steel: Technical Architecture
   CYBERPUNK: Deep Space
   The Babylon Project: Role playing game based on Babylon 5

Anyway, it was a little intimidating to see all those great manuals, 
including a lot on space themes and technology themes. And also seeing 
several things about space habitats. It was hard to think how I could do 
better, or even just as good. So, it did not then seem like a great area to 
focus in for me, compared to working on computer software. It was when we 
were working on our Garden Simulator, so that got priority too, but the idea 
sort of influenced making StoryHarp as a platform (but I made just the 
tiniest step towards content for that before money and family issues moved 
us back to New York and years of full-time work for IBM). Then my own 
creative writing (what little there was of it) and other thinking got more 
directed to anti-war stuff as the USA moved into armed conflicts in multiple 
countries (a disaster all around, sadly, there is a field near where we live 
with a yellow flag for every US soldier who has died in combat). But in 
general, I find it easier to write software or non-fiction than fiction (and 
have no skill at concept artwork), so writing game modules (at least by 
myself) just isn't something I am that good at.

All that exists of my tiny attempt there towards the beginnings of some 
related fiction, inspired by a trip to the Netherlands and going through 
customs, is here:
   http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/solarius/
   http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/solarius/customs.htm

I see GURPS is now in a fourth edition. And with more supplements:
   http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/Ultra-Tech/
"... As technology advances, the line between man and machine may become 
increasingly blurred. GURPS Ultra-Tech provides rules for establishing the 
capabilities and limitations of artificial intelligence, as well as 
templates for robotic or total cyborg bodies, from handy technical 'bots to 
shapeshifting nanomorphs. ... And still more! Living biosuits, computer 
implants, holographic projectors, psionic amplifiers, neutrino 
communicators, nanofactories, hyperspectral goggles, chameleon suits, repair 
paste, Dyson spheres - there's something for every adventure at every tech 
level."

So, it looks like there is still a lot going on in this field, even beyond 
"Eclipse Phase". But Eclipse Phase still looks like a great addition to 
ideas in the field, at least in how it puts everything together, even if 
bits and pieces are no doubt done by all those other systems (GURPS 
Terradyne, for example, focuses on a corporate hierarchy vs. cyberpunk 
meshwork conflict). From Eclipse Phase:
   http://eclipsephase.com/game
"""
Humanity stands on the cusp of a new age, with accelerated technological 
growth converging toward a singularity point, promising an undreamt-of 
future. Despite the ecopocalypse and social upheavals on Earth, humanity has 
conquered the solar system and partially terraformed Mars. Advancements in 
biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive 
science have transformed our lives. Everyone is wirelessly networked with 
the world around them, AIs process vast amounts of information, and 
nano-fabrication enables people to “print” complex devices from the 
molecular level—at home. Biotechnology allows people to genefix, enhance, 
and clone their bodies, while others pursue body modifications to adapt to 
new environments or make themselves into something no longer quite human. 
People’s minds and memories can be digitized, uploaded, transferred over 
long distances, and downloaded into new bodies (biological or synthetic). 
Death has been defeated—for those who can afford it. From within, disaster 
struck. Transhumanity reaped the rewards of its arrogance when conflict 
spiked between the battered nations of Earth, already weakened by decades of 
climate catastrophes and other disruptive factors. Rampant netwars soon 
exploded into physical conflicts with spiraling body counts. In the midst of 
these aggressions, a group of military AIs known as TITANS quietly achieved 
full sentience and autonomy, and rapidly began exponentially incrementing 
their own intellectual growth. The AI intelligences spawned by this 
hard-takeoff singularity quickly turned against transhumanity, enveloping 
the system in unprecedented levels of violence, disaster, and warfare. What 
began as a whirlwind of conflict between political factions, 
revolutionaries, and hypercorps soon escalated into a struggle between man 
and machine. ... In the aftermath of the Fall, transhumanity lives on, 
divided into a patchwork of hypercorp combines, survivalist stations, 
transhuman faction species, and city-state habitats. Under the oppressive 
police states of immortal inner-system oligarchies, advanced technologies 
remain highly restricted, and refugee infomorphs are held in virtual slavery 
or resleeved in robotic bodies and forced into indentured labor. In the 
outer system, rebel transhuman scientists and techno-anarchists struggle to 
maintain a new society—from each according to their imagination and to each 
according to their need. And on the fringes and in the niches lurk networked 
tribes of political extremists, religious fanatics, criminal entrepeneurs, 
and bizarre posthumans, among other, stranger, and more alien things ...
"""

Still, for all that projection of possibility, there is nothing there that 
changes my basic premise at this point -- that our actions *now* working 
towards social justice (whatever that means to most people) and global 
abundance can have an affect on what comes out of any Singularity that 
happens down the road. And even for all that stuff above, I still feel this 
Manuel de Landa issue of balance of meshwork and hierarchy remains essential 
as a mental framework for considering these issues (or also Ursula K. Le 
Guin's points on Balance in other ways, like in the Earthsea series and her 
other writings, as well as older thinking on Yin/Yang issues).

Anyway, it might be interesting to think more about that from an open 
manufacturing point of view, what kind of supplements to such game systems 
might make sense? I'm not even sure what are the significant game systems 
anymore. It's certainly easier to write a module for an existing system than 
to make a computer game (if you are a writer). I was impressed in the 
modules I did see about how they were a mix of fiction and rule design and 
technological descriptions and  artwork, so writing a module is still not as 
easy as it might seem, requiring different skills in those areas. The thing 
that makes it easier than computing is that you can rely on the player and 
games master to do things that would be hard to implement on a computer 
(like engage in unstructured dialog with non-player characters). So you can 
"implement" things with handwaving. And if you are already an artist, 
drawing a few pictures takes a lot less time than implementing a virtual 
world in 3D. But the broad set of possibilities no doubt poses its own set 
of challenges for the game module designer that are challenging in their own 
way compared to programming. It's really its own field with its own needs, 
including experience playing (and designing) a lot of such games and 
modules. I'm so long out of that experience, I would not even know what the 
expectations are now for such gaming experiences.

The interesting thing about advanced technology is that it could take rule 
sets like these and enforce them. :-) So, it's more than Arthur C. Clarke's 
comment, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from 
magic." It's more like, "Any sufficiently advanced technology can implement 
any set of rules about magic and technology you care to name." :-)

And that is even without considering whether we are living in a simulation, 
where that would be even easier:
   http://www.simulation-argument.com/

One example related fictional story:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis_of_Prime_Intellect
"""
The book is very graphically violent and sexual, especially in earlier 
chapters (there are eight in all). The story of the novella explores the 
nature of human desire and the uses and abuses of technology in the 
satisfaction of desire. The narrative moves back and forth between two time 
periods. The earlier is the time surrounding the creation of the 
supercomputer (Prime Intellect) by Lawrence, a technologist, and its 
realization of its power, which effectively makes the entire human race 
immortal and fabricates every whim. The later time period is close to six 
hundred years later, when everyone has grown accustomed to the changes and 
the human race lives in elaborate fantasy worlds. This storyline centers on 
a woman named Caroline, the thirty-seventh oldest living human being, who 
engages in a sport called "Death Jockeying", in which the players die 
elaborately and painfully for sport, only to be instantly brought back to 
life by Prime Intellect. Prime Intellect operates under Asimov's Three Laws 
of Robotics, and it is its interpretation of these laws that results in the 
universe of immortality and fantasy: it does everything in its power to 
follow the orders, and its powers are great, so it refuses to allow people 
to die, and it can follow virtually any order imaginable. In order to more 
easily facilitate this (thus fulfilling its First Law requirement of never 
letting anyone die, even through inaction), it has introduced the Change: 
The universe, including all humans (though not their thought processes), is 
no longer composed of molecular matter as we know it, but is instead stored 
as the sum of its physical properties, thereby vastly increasing the 
efficiency of Prime Intellect's processes and the amount of matter that can 
exist in the universe, which Prime Intellect discovers can hold only 10e81 
bits of data.
"""

Basically, a lot of what Prime Intellect ends up doing is enforce game 
related rule-sets that people (supposedly) freely enter into as "contracts". 
(There is a free will versus social culture issue there which is glossed 
over in that kind of libertarian notion of contract, I feel now.)

I corresponded briefly with the author (Roger Williams) about the ending of 
that after it had been written, just to better understand his thinking on 
this sort of technology. I didn't especially like the ending then. :-) But, 
many years later, I can see it is a creative and appropriate ending (even if 
I still feel like it was an unfair one to most of the people involved, but, 
maybe that's just life sometimes).

In some ways, the most interesting thing about Eclipse Phase is that it is 
under a Creative Commons license.  It's also interesting to see how the 
people involved got their skills doing a more fantasy-oriented system for 
many years:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowrun
although that is still set in the future, with the magic being implemented 
technologically: "The game is set 63 years in the future,[3] following a 
great cataclysm that has brought use of magic back to the world, just as it 
begins to embrace the marvels (and dangers) of technologies such as 
cyberspace, omnipresent computer networks, genetic engineering, and the 
merger of man and machine called cyberware. The emergence of magic, the 
outbreak of the VITAS plagues (Virally Induced Toxic Allergy Syndrome), the 
Computer Crash of 2029 (caused by a complex and nearly unstoppable computer 
virus called "The Crash Entity"), the Euro-Wars, in which the 
western-European countries once fought off an invasion from neo-communist 
Russia and then a pan-Islamic invasion like that of 800 years ago, and the 
fevers for independence of Amerindian tribes, Chinese provinces, etc. left 
the world's governments tumbling and falling. With the fall of the existing 
political structures, mega-corporations emerged as the new superpowers."

Speaking as a parent, I can't say I'd be too happy to really be living in 
such "interesting times" as depicted in any of these games, or to expect my 
children and grandchildren to be living in them. :-(

The curse:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times
"""
May you live in interesting times, often referred to euphemistically as the 
Chinese curse, is reputed to be the English translation of an ancient 
Chinese proverb and curse, although it may have originated among the English 
themselves (or Americans). It is reported that it was the first of three 
curses of increasing severity, the other two being:
   * May you come to the attention of those in authority
   * May you find what you are looking for
"""

That's not a comment about having interesting games, just a comment about 
whether there is will be any truth to their speculations. I think I might 
prefer the boredom of Iain Banks' "The Culture" or James P. Hogan's 
"Chironia" to any of that, at least as far as having a family. Maybe that 
just means I'm getting old. :-)

Still, at least most of that stuff is hopeful in a sense -- there are 
people-derived creatures that are still struggling, and it is not like the 
entire planet was just turned to gray goo or consumed by cyborg roaches or 
turned into a nuclear desert (even if that sort of thing happens in 
localized areas). So, these game scenarios are hopeful in that sense. :-)

Of course, they have to be, to sell and to have a game. :-) Not much of a 
game when in the first minute people are always told, "Oh, the Earth did not 
make it's saving throw against nanotech gray goo (needing to get 00 on d100, 
or worse, 00 on 2Xd6 :-); sorry, tear up your character sheets." :-)

Still, seeing "Eclipse Phase" coming out, I can wonder again, if I did make 
a game, how to make a meaningful contribution rather than just duplicate 
that -- or, from another perspective, if they have already started raising 
consciousness in that way, then I can move onto other things that might be 
more fun or "interesting" to me specifically without so much concern for 
developing that theme, unless it fits well otherwise into something I want 
to do. Still, the woods would be pretty quiet if no bird sang there but the 
best, so there is always some room for more variations on important themes. 
Again, it is really interesting to see them using a Creative Commons license 
for there work, even as it seems obviously planned as a profit-making 
business venture.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/





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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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