There’s a website called Eyes on Darfur . In it, you can see satellite photographs of villages that have literally been destroyed by fighting there.
Let’s think about that for a moment. The core defense of the Government of Sudan has been “Nuh-uh!” for years. They’ve kept away UN observers and peacekeepers on the grounds that nothing’s going on. But the satellites fly overhead every few minutes. They see the smoke, they see the fire, and they see anything 2 meters wide and bigger. Like, say a Land Cruiser with machine guns mounted in the back.
Now, let’s consider using Shock: for something like this. Let’s talk about using Satellite photos or Google Earth as a Shock. Or the Space Station. Or camera phones. This might be a really interesting way to play. It loses the level of abstraction that, say, “Furries” and “Interstellar travel” give you, but it might gain some meat from familiarity.
Anyone who wants to, come over. We’ll play like this and see how it goes.
8 Comments
I totally want to play this. David Brin’s got a pretty cool book about ubiquitious surveillance called ‘The Transparent Society’. Pretty cool. In a scary way.
Yeah, I’ve read about, but haven’t actually read, that book. He talked about it a lot in a recent interview, though.
If it’s a sufficiently advanced society, and the situation is widely reported, you might see expats building and launching orbital weapons (THOR-type kinetic artillery, etc) to attack the attackers. Potentially with an eye for doing the same thing.
The more I think about it the weirder and creepier it seems to me. I want to hear about the outcome.
The outcome in Darfur? I want to hear about that, too. I want the outcome to be, “And then everyone said they were sorry, redistributed wealth more fairly, and had awesome makeouts.”
So, how come the only people who responded to this live thousands of miles away?
Probably because only people who live thousands of miles away are in a position to look at something like this and say somthing as banal as “Hey, that relates to this game I’m playing!”
Or maybe it’s a good thing that suddenly we can take this horrible event and start making our gaming conscious of it.
Definitely the latter, for one thing. I know lots of people who would dig playing something like this. But the people who responded here are too far away to play with!
Ha! I totally read “thousands of miles away” as “away from Darfur”!
I guess the answer is that you need to come out to Seattle for Go Play Northwest! :)
Gha! It didn’t even occur to me that someone *in* a situation like this would want to *play* about it. The point of fiction is to let you experience something vicariously, not reiterate something that’s already killing your family.
Now, it might *look* like I need to come out to Go Play Northwest, but looks can be deceiving!