[ExI] Transhumanist exploration game (Adrian Tymes)

[Jay Dugger]

>> Any other explicitly transhumanist games? (I will of course hold up Sid
>> Meier's Alpha Centauri)


> Setting aside the many, many RPGs (seriously, if anyone on this list is up
> for running an Eclipse Phase game I know a guy who's been begging me for
> any word of one he can get in on)...

Not interested right now. What little gaming I do still lies on hold,
but contact me off-list.


Immortal Defense - http://store.steampowered.com/app/298360/ - definitely
touches on it.

Good recommendation! I hear good things about the Talos Principle
(http://store.steampowered.com/app/257510/), but I haven't played it.
I feel tempted to mention Sid Meier's Beyond Earth, but haven't yet
played that either. See also Robert Swigart's Portal, a piece of
ergodic literature from 1986 about an astronaut returning to a
seemingly abandoned post-Singularity Earth. (Playable at
https://archive.org/details/msdos_Portal_1986, but the book derived
from the software is better.)

> There are other games, such as Deus Ex, that claim to touch on it but
> mainly as a source of nifty powers rather than exploring the themes.

I think you do the original game of Deus Ex a bit of a disservice
here, but I generally agree.


> Part of the problem may be, transhumanism by definition alters the common
> experience  and that can be difficult to reduce to gamable form.  It can be
> captured in story, sure enough, but what do you actually do all day when
> you're uploaded and free from life's needs?

Worry about the power supply and long-term space weather. I.e.,
complain about the food and the weather, just like meat folks do. Some
things don't change!

Seriously, though, you have a good point. I joke along those lines
because it made a useful way when playing Eclipse Phase to provide
players a means to hook into the fictional setting. "The Hyperelite
still go to parties, but they go to weather parties to watch dramatic
terraforming events such as ice deliveries aerobraking the upper
Martian atmosphere." Which was much less bizarre than some of the
possibilities familiar here. It still helped players understand the
setting by analogy. Rich people on Earth have fireworks for their
parties. Rich people on fictional Mars build a huge dome and have a
choreographed thunderstorm therein for their parties.

This also served nicely \to foreshadow the destructive potential of
the setting and so served the ongoing plot of an impending Martian
World War. Which would have been fought right up to the story's
equivalent of WMD: Unfriendly AI.

-- 
Jay Dugger
(314) 766-4426