01:00:59 long & 55.9 MB big
In this
episode, Robert Bohl (designer of
Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of
shock: social science fiction), discuss what the transhumanist science fiction game they're designing—before your very ears!—should be about. What is transhumanism about? Where does the design want to focus?
- We start with listener feedback: Simon C, Paul B, and Sven Holmström
-
Sufficiently Advanced-
Eclipse Phase-
The Cyborg Handbook- The
Wikipedia article on transhumanism
- Squids
do have brains
- 12:00: Aboutness in game design
- I misquote Jared Sorensen's
big three game design questions, reading instead from
Nathan Paoletta's blog-
Dualism- The Radio Lab episode we're talking about is either
Choice or
Who Am I? (or maybe both (I think))
- Richard K. Morgan's
Takeshi Kovacs novels
- The game is (possibly) about "identity, change, and human nature."
- 25:00: What we know is in the game so far: a transhumanist game that supports narrativist play that involves character generation during play, wherein you see how your characters survive the
technological singularity- Charles Stross's
Accelerando- Possibly stealing
Ganakagok's tarot-like situation generation
- Vincent Baker's game
Rock of Tahamaat, Space Tyrant- Cards vs. dice and various systems that work differently for different things
- Connections between the characters
- Ben Lehman's
Polaris- Currents in transhumanist thought from the Wikipedia article
- The Jeepform
The Upgrade by Olle Jonsson, Thorbiörn Fritzon, and Tobias Wrigstad
- Homework: Aboutness, and a pass at character creation
- Talk about the show, do reviews
- The
Trapcast forum thread I was talking about
- Listener homework: Give us your "aboutness" answer
You can subscribe to the show by plugging the
RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher.
The intro music is "Gotta Whizz" by
Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is "Screamin' Demon Martians Ridin' Go-Karts in My Head" from the album Saucer to Saturn.
