Comments on: No, It Won’t Be, But Don’t Count That Against It

By: joshua

joshua — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 05:46:29 +0000

Hm. I wonder if it's a misunderstanding about the moral stance of Shock:

Shock: is about the amorality of change, that it's a natural force that you can roll with or fight, but in the end, it's just bigger than you.

It could be that some players read that as the immorality of change.

By: joshua

joshua — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 05:43:53 +0000

There was a story I read, I think it was in a collection called Supermen, edited by Gardner Dozois, where there was a society of immortal humans. A fad developed where people could artificially get diseases and die.

I've always thought that it was a staggeringly conservative view of humanity, that we need to speculate about our own deaths for our lives to matter (cuz the real death, you don't really get to experience). I think that we'd adapt like we have in the face of every other paradigm-shattering experience we've had as a species.

That's what bothers me about the "anti-shock" strategy, actually. It points out the immorality of change. Hm.

For obvious reasons, I've been thinking about Robama a lot lately.

If anyone is reading this, Robama was the nickname given to our first-ever robot candidate for the Presidency. He was an almost Asimovian robot, a perfect human in every way.

People had it in for him. Curiously, he represented not so much race relations as idealism and optimism in the face of the machinery of conservative politics.

By: Remi

Remi — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 01:58:34 +0000

Also, I seem to have misplaced my copy of the Surrogates trade. Drat.

By: Remi

Remi — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 01:56:56 +0000

It's hard to define yourself solely as anti-something, which is what you end up being when you're against something as big a immortality.

I think back to our Robama game and what made the people working against the robots interesting wasn't that they were anti-robot, but that they denied the humanity of the robots. They were drawing a line in the sand about what it means to be human, and that's powerful stuff.

A person who is against immortality can put it in that language, but essentially they end up being pro-death, and that's a creepy, alienating place to be. Plus, as Corey Doctorow points out, they immortals can just wait around for the anti-immortality people to die out and their problem is solved.

By: joshua

joshua — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:02:54 +0000

Interesting.

You know, that happens a lot on con games of Shock: Like the Shock will be, "immortality" and a Protag will be an anti-immortality religious fanatic. It doesn't work well most of the time. Sometimes it's OK. I can't figure out what makes it work or not.

By: Remi

Remi — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:53:16 +0000

No, it was conceived as a single story of . . . 6 parts? 5? I'd have to check, but the series is the whole story. It just gets a little wooly and passes over the interesting stuff (living in a world where identity is extremely malleable) by focusing on a character who is against the interesting stuff (anti-surrogate separationist dude). As a result it's more a stand-off than an exploration. And a stand-offs that end in huge uprisings against the status quo, especially when the status quo hasn't been thoroughly explored, just isn't that satisfying.

I feel like I should re-read it, I might come out of it with a different opinion.

By: joshua

joshua — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:32:16 +0000

Does it go from A to C+ because the writer saw the end coming and wanted to keep going?

By: Remi

Remi — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 11:58:43 +0000

The comic is pretty good. There's lots of body-identity stuff, and some cool action. I'd need to reread it again, but I remember it getting a little bogged down in the political details of its situation, which didn't do much to help the air of menace that the rest of the script tries to carry through the whole of the story. The opening chunk is A material, the rest is more in C+ territory.

And there is a fair amount of violence and mayhem mixed in with the identity stuff.