Re: The games are all crap; let's make a decent one.

From: Emlyn (onetel) (emlyn@one.net.au)
Date: Fri Jul 21 2000 - 00:54:43 MDT


A lunatic otherwise known as Jeff Davis wrote:
> Friends,
>
> Name of the game is Effing Quale. (Well, maybe not, but I love the
phrase.)

??? got an explanation? Being on the bottom of the earth, and so upside down
all the time, the blood pools in my head. This means I have trouble with
comprehension. So type slowly.

>
> Awaken to >H. Then LE, then cryo, then bio, then upgrades, then self rep,
> then ai, then off planet locally, then nano, then augmentation, then si,
> then uploads, then off to deep space in search of the wherewithal to
> transcend.
>
> Find transhumanism. Find your fellow transhumanists. Forge the bond.
> Work to develop the tech. Race against time to get it before you die,
> and/or work on a scheme to get to the future (cryo) while preserving your
> competitive resources (your surviving transhumanist pals may be of
> assistance here, so you socially challenged,
> I-want-the-Jupiter-brain-all-to-myself-geek-boys might just want to
> consider working on your geniality a tad) . Fight the luddites for your
> right to the tech. Fight the govt for your right to freedom. Fight the
> ruthless and mighty corporate competitors (or join them is that feels like
> a winning strategy) for your place in the race. Dodge/survive biowar,
> nanowar, old paradigm revanchists, rogue ai/si, ill-chosen strategies of
> self-enhancement, and finally, the siren perils of the galactic vastness.
> Onward!
>
> In an ordinary game when you lose, you--the game character-- very often
> die. Then you --the game player--go to a saved version of the game--if
you
> were mindful to make one--and resume play. In this game, the same
> functionality would be required of course, but your "return" to the game
> could be "explained" as the consequence of having >H "life
insurance--saved
> backups of yourself. If the game consists partly in learning what a
> transhuman is, how to think like one, and how to act like one, then early
> on in the game you discover there is no "save game" functionality. In its
> place you must learn to equip yourself with a synaptic inventory-and-state
> recorder /transmitter--a >H "flight data recorder"(>Hfdr)--which records
> and broadcasts updates of your vital identity data to a remote secure data
> haven. In the event of lethal misadventure that you see coming, there's a
> final burst transmission which gives you, upon "reboot" into your
> reinstantiated self, a high definition replay--complete with optional
> true-fidelity physical discomfort metric--of your most recent terminal
> screw-up. If on the other hand, you get terminated so abruptly that the
> data record is truncated, then you might have to make do with your most
> recent data update. If it were particularly important to your future
> success that you have a detailed record, then you might upgrade yourself
> with a whoopass robust >Hfdr, go back to the scene of your last
> deanimation, and sift through the debris for your last "flight data
> recorder". Or, you could just send a remote. Naaah. You got backups,
use
> 'em. Toss another shrimp on the barby, *be* the shrimp. Onward!
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> at your would be polled for the "most recent data"
>
> Best, Jeff Davis
>
> "Everything's hard till you know how to do it."
> Ray Charles
>

I like all this stuff. I was going to suggest something like that actually;
a race-for-singularity game. Mostly it'd be a race for technology, with lots
of feedback between types of technologies (eg: nano and ai), and lots of
room for more-than-exponential growth; for instance, getting the tech to
make uploads of a certain calibre might allow you to make uploads who
substantially reduce cost/time to increase upload tech. You know the drill.

Of course, to make it truly realistic, you want to upgrade the *players'*
minds as higher tech is discovered, which would have an effect on tactics.
Wishes.

By the way, the idea of save-games as personality backups is investigated
nicely in the RPG Paranoia. In it, you are a stored in the central computer
(an insane, all powerful AI), and a new clone is produced when you die.
Further, there is a social structure, much like a caste system; the computer
rates you when you die, and reincarnates you into the social structure it
thinks you deserve (I think this is accurate; it's all second hand, I never
played paranoia). A very cool concept (but I wouldn't want to live there).

Lots of people here have great ideas on this; let's hear some more.

Emlyn



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