Oo! Let’s Make a Game! Episode 3: Human Evolution!

Philip K. Dick lives in the Uncanny Valley.
58:55 long & 56.6 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), discuss what character creation should be like in the transhumanist science fiction game they’re designing—before your very ears! What are the characters going to do? What are the meta-fictional mechanics going to be like? What will the system potentially care about? We get a lot of substantive design work done here and come up with a nascent mechanic that I know Joshua and I are both very excited about.

– We start with listener feedback: Simon C and Nathan Wilson
– Talking about eschatology
Rob’s and Joshua’s homework from last episode
Thor Olavsrud and Terry Hope Romero got shock: to do some interesting things at JiffyCon
– We talk about a possible initializing phase of the game (character creation, only not)
– Joshua’s blog post about memory erasure
– What can you use technology to change in the game?
– A Radio Lab episode called (and about) Memory and Forgetting
– We don’t want the world to crush characters like it does in shock:
Linus Torvolds
– Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky and Accelerando
– We talk about whether the technological singularity will necessarily be a part of the game
Lyndon LaRouche
– Waffling on libertarian transhumanism
– The tv show Connecti ons
– Jared Sorensen, of Memento Mori Theatricks, was the first person to suggest to Joshua the idea of non-person-based relationship maps
– The technology web mechanic
Vincent Baker and his idea about capping things
– Our homework: describe what a session of play would be like
– Listener homework: Tell us about protagonists undergoing change in transhumanist fiction; what are your favorite examples or trends?

Rob’s during-the-show notes from episode two and this one. Also, initializing-phase 2.0 (aka character creation but not).

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The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. For outgoing, rather than music this time, we have a talk by Joshua’s old professor, Slavko Milekic, on the important role touch plays in human nature.

2 thoughts on “Oo! Let’s Make a Game! Episode 3: Human Evolution!”

  1. So, isn’t maybe the “Technological advancement allowing true individuality” the point of the “Libertarian Transhumanist” movement?

    At least, that’s what I got out of it.

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