So... Yes! Let's do that!

it's another way to make it distinct from shock: (and Misspent Youth for that matter).

I'm confident that, the more specific your situation, the more specific the rules can be, and therefore support specifically what you're doing. Shock: is for doing science fiction where the fate of your society is in the balance and you want to see what it costs (or just what you'd pay) to keep the parts you care about. It kinda sucks on a personal level — the level where Prime Time Adventures and Dogs in the Vineyard succeed.

We can do a different thing here. We can come up with specific interests that stem from the Transhumanist philosophical interests and point them at each other. We can figure out who's going to drive whom into what irreconcilable situation.

I think it'll be way easier, too. In this project, we will clearly benefit from simplicity and clarity. What we learn from it, we can develop into larger projects, if there's something worth keeping that's applicable in some interesting way. You and I both want game rules to be construction blocks, where all the creative endeavor is done by the players, coming up with setting, protagonists, antagonists, and situation, but we can still do all those things and leave a lot of handles to control the machine, and it will be a lot of fun. Remember how much fun The Upgrade is? There's flexibility in all the right places, and we're given all sorts of material up front. We're even told what our relationships are with the other characters.

Makes sense to me.

So that's cool, but I'll be watching you!  If you don't make the game exactly how I want it, boy will there be trouble!

Vincent and Rob, for the purposes of recording this thought, which we've discussed privately: I think that, in the interests of making the game simple (to compensate for the challenges of our format), I think we'll probably make a very specific game with a very specific kind of situation. Rob, what do you think about that?

So create one to work with, at least, even if you don't intend to bake in into the game.

I see what you mean.  I get that you're not going to be all like "each character must sign up to one of these philosophies", and I'm happy with that.

I guess I'm more talking about this "what does your character care about" thing.

I think this is tied to a wider concern I have about how caring about stuff is construed in RPGs.  Some games get you to write down on your character sheet something your character cares about, or another character or something.  Sometimes that's cool, but oftentimes you really quickly discover that as a player you don't care about that stuff at all, and then it's one of those "lame duck" attributes hanging off your character sheet, like you were talking about.  It's just drag.

Caring about stuff is a really mercurial thing.  It's hard to predict what you'll care about as a player, and what your character will end up caring about.  I guess what I'm saying is that I'd like there to be scope for this stuff to be discovered in play, rather than nailed down at character creation.

We already discussed this. What's going on is that you're hearing us talk about what we're talking about. We're a long way from working out presentation.

Simon C said:

I'm also still worried about these “threads in Transhumanism” things.  I don't care about that stuff, and I think play that tries to revolve around those things is going to be all abstract and cerebral and sucky.

Oh yeah. I was definitely thinking this too (for the last two episodes), if by "threads" Simon is referring to the different factions of transhumanism you are pulling off of Wikipedia, e.g. Libertarian Transhumanism. Just hearing the names make my attention gray out a little. They aren't all that meaningful. It might help just to rephrase them as motive or statements of personal idealism, like "h+ will make me free" or "h+ will save us from pollution." That's probably a sucky suggestion, but I guess I would like to see them tied into character hopes/wants/desires somehow. Otherwise, yes, they seem all "abstract and cerebral and sucky."

I think the question about "one immutable thing" or "two immutable things" is a really interesting one.  I'm with Joshua in being extremely skeptical.

Here's an implementation I think would be cool: Through play, something changes about the character, and it makes you realise "hey, I'm not playing the same person anymore.  This character is done."

Here's an implementation I think would suck: In play, you realise something about your character is immutable, so you write it down, and it's taken off the table - it's never going to change.

The second implementation seems to directly contradict what the game is about, in my mind.  The game is about questioning what makes a human being, and the mechanic answers that question directly, mechanistically, and unambiguously.

I'm also with Vincent on wanting some baked-in situation for the game, or at the very least some way of inventing that in play (a bit like you do in Shock).  As soon as you take it to that level, the game becomes hot to me.

I'm also still worried about these "threads in Transhumanism" things.  I don't care about that stuff, and I think play that tries to revolve around those things is going to be all abstract and cerebral and sucky.

I just thought of another novel (or rather pair of novels) that is definitely trans-humanist. It didn't occur to me earlier because the books were written by Tanith Lee, who traditionally does fantasy, and they were written in the 1970's. The books I'm referring to are Don't Bite the Sun (1976), Drinking Saphire Wine (1977), later gathered together in one volume under the title Biting the Sun.

Here is a short description from Amazon.com

The far future has brought freedom not only from material want but also from rules, responsibilities, and risk. You can change bodies and genders like clothes, make love with whomever you want, live forever, and kill yourself as often as you like. You can have everything, except a meaningful life. Then one day a restless soul discovers an act so shocking and terrifying that human society has forgotten its existence. --Cynthia Ward

So, what I remember about this book.

1. People are living in a utopia. Abundance has saturated the society with leisure time.

2. People "play" around with bodies. They will be one thing for a while, then they will go trade their body in for another one. As the blurb above says, they swap genders, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. (Though the changes are sometimes purely superficial and don't really change the person underneath, only the way they interface with others ... which is perhaps much the same thing anyway, but I'm not trying to debate philosophy here). I can't remember, but it seems like they might get "psychic surgery" too and change their personalities. I don't recall.

3. Often this trading of bodies takes the form of the person committing suicide, and one gets the sense that this is an underlying mass psychosis of the society. An overall malaise infects people and they sort of "run down".

4. The main character [PLOT SPOILER], as I recall, decides to let herself grow old ... she no longer feels like swapping bodies. She also withdraws from society and lives as  a hermit in the desert. I guess you might say she decides to "sit out" the singularity.

1. I thought the one real step forward was the idea that each player either managed their own version of the social network and/or got to monkey with other player's character sheets in that regard.

2. The rest of the discussion seemed to wander a bit for me into tangential areas. For example, a garbage eating animal has broad implications but I honestly don't think of it as transhumanist because it doesn't (directly) relate to artificially evolving/altering/redefining humanity. Some of the other issues you raised as well seemed like beating around the h+ bush.

I'm not criticising. In fact, I think I have decided to stop any kind of second guessing since what you are recording is process. Too much critique is really inappropriate. I think it should only be aimed at things you “declare” as “this is the way it will be.” The rest is speculation and attunement. I figure there is a subtext between you two that you know what you are talking about and how it relates to h+ even when I don't.

And, if this doesn't make any sense, then my defense is that I am two BIG scotches into Friday evening.