Even with sleep minimizing circadian regulators, biomorphs require approximately two hours of sleep a day, a fact that frustrates many people to no end. Synths and infomorphs do not require sleep, but they are few people's first choice of morph. For those who must sleep, or who still find some value in sleep, there has emerged the service of programmed dreams.
Programmed dreams are most often designed for entertainment, with education as a close second. Specialized VR software, designed to synch with stages of sleep, presents the brain with the dream, overruling the normal dreaming process. Although there are many open-source, hypercorp produced, and microcorp produced dreams, those who can afford them agree that customized dreams are always worth the cost, and that Elizabethian, of Elizabethian's Bespoke Dreams, is the best of the best.
What sets Elizabethian's dreams apart from those of her competitors is her ability to stimulate crafted responses from the unconscious mind. She offers dreams to provoke insight, encourage certain moods upon waking, grant access to otherwise inaccessible portions of ones mind, explore symbolism and patterns of thought meaningless in waking life. She has mastered the difficult art of creating dreams that will customize themselves even while they are being dreamed, providing enough structure to enforce the nature of the dream, but allowing the dreamer's mind to fill in the blanks in whatever way will be most meaningful to it.
Mechanics
Time spent dreaming a bespoke dream counts as time required for psychosurgery, allowing for psychosurgical manipulation while asleep.
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
Friday, June 26, 2015
177. Storytellers
Most interactive media in the post-singularity age is intelligent and realistically responsive, either because of the actions of other players (such as in multi-user simulspace games) or because of sophisticated AI (such as in single-player simulspace games.) This trend goes farther than traditionally interactive entertainment, however, and into very old forms.
Partway between a customized choose your own adventure book and a single-player role-playing game, neverending stories (so-called because they are often designed to continue for as long as the user maintains interest) are low-tech presentation of high-tech content generation that are taking the market by storm. Entirely text-based, the stories can be run purely on mesh-inserts, and don't even requiring an ecto. The stories are usually of a single character, whose actions are determined by the user, the effects of which are determined by a specialized storyteller AI.
Storyteller AIs are typically designed to customize their content based on advice from the user's muse. Degrees of user control, writing style and the themes of the story are all customizable. Storytellers can also be used as educators, weaving lessons into the story according to the wishes of a parent or caretaker, which might encourage anything from problem-solving to adherence to certain ideologies.
Mechanics
Storytellers are AIs [Low]
Notes
Inspired by the primer from Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
28. Crusoe
Currently the most popular member of a venerable genre of interactive entertainment, Crusoe is an open source simulspace game challenging players to survive and build in simulated environments.
A new player will find themselves on an earth-like planet with a multi-tool as well as engineering and gardening hives. Players looking for a specific challenge can adjust their beginning states with custom morphs, equipment and environments. Common challenges include surviving as a splicer in an old-earth wilderness with no equipment, starting as a synth with only wrist-mounted tools and building your way up to a fusion reactor, and team games challenging players to defend against waves of hostile beings.
Because of the accuracy of the simulation, most things invented in Crusoe can also be built in real life. Crusoe has therefore attracted the attentions of some Argonaut researchers, who have begun a project collecting useful designs and turning them into real gear. Similarly Crusoe is of interest to social scientists, who have run experiments exploring how technology effects social structures and how populations respond to controlled stresses. Gatecrashers have used Crusoe simulations to experiment with approaches for exploration of various alien environments and to test new equipment, and there was a brief fad of Titanian microcorps holding team-building exercises in the game.
A new player will find themselves on an earth-like planet with a multi-tool as well as engineering and gardening hives. Players looking for a specific challenge can adjust their beginning states with custom morphs, equipment and environments. Common challenges include surviving as a splicer in an old-earth wilderness with no equipment, starting as a synth with only wrist-mounted tools and building your way up to a fusion reactor, and team games challenging players to defend against waves of hostile beings.
Because of the accuracy of the simulation, most things invented in Crusoe can also be built in real life. Crusoe has therefore attracted the attentions of some Argonaut researchers, who have begun a project collecting useful designs and turning them into real gear. Similarly Crusoe is of interest to social scientists, who have run experiments exploring how technology effects social structures and how populations respond to controlled stresses. Gatecrashers have used Crusoe simulations to experiment with approaches for exploration of various alien environments and to test new equipment, and there was a brief fad of Titanian microcorps holding team-building exercises in the game.
Friday, January 16, 2015
16. Hypothetical Handbooks
Hypothetical Handbooks are an open source project based out of Locus. Contributors to the project display a distinctly post-Fall preparedness oriented mindset, seeking to equip transhumanity with the knowledge to solve tomorrow's problems. The handbooks have ranged from the practical (HH-103 Combat vs. Known TITAN Warmachines) to the unlikely (HH-402 Diplomacy with Extant Iktomi) to the simply unusual (HH-224 Principles of Martial Arts Utilizing Arbitrary Numbers of Limbs.)
Hypothetical Handbooks, by design, seek to advise on problems that do not yet exist, so forming that advice reliably is a non-trivial problem. Sometimes appropriate instruction can be derived from first principles, informed by simulation. Other, more sophisticated methods have been developed, such as using genetic algorithms to evolve AIs to tackle sets of relevant semi-random scenarios. Once their success rate is deemed acceptable, the AIs evolved programming is analyzed and their evolved strategies are translated into rules and guidelines.
The handbooks have been of interest to Firewall ever since the project was begun. They have fed into a long simmering debate within Firewall about the extent to which operational security can or has been against the long-term interests of transhumanity. Several crows are regular contributors.
Plot Hook: A recently released handbook (HH-646 How to Outwit a Gestalt Mind) has too much in common with a recent Firewall operation. The players are asked to investigate the possible leak, and must decide whether to maintain Firewall secrets, or allow leaks to continue in the hopes of forewarning transhumanity.
Hypothetical Handbooks, by design, seek to advise on problems that do not yet exist, so forming that advice reliably is a non-trivial problem. Sometimes appropriate instruction can be derived from first principles, informed by simulation. Other, more sophisticated methods have been developed, such as using genetic algorithms to evolve AIs to tackle sets of relevant semi-random scenarios. Once their success rate is deemed acceptable, the AIs evolved programming is analyzed and their evolved strategies are translated into rules and guidelines.
The handbooks have been of interest to Firewall ever since the project was begun. They have fed into a long simmering debate within Firewall about the extent to which operational security can or has been against the long-term interests of transhumanity. Several crows are regular contributors.
Plot Hook: A recently released handbook (HH-646 How to Outwit a Gestalt Mind) has too much in common with a recent Firewall operation. The players are asked to investigate the possible leak, and must decide whether to maintain Firewall secrets, or allow leaks to continue in the hopes of forewarning transhumanity.
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