15 Jan 2010, Posted by Matthew Reinbold in Software Humor, 1 Comments

CodeMonkey!

A music video for the Jonathan Coulton song, CODE MONKEY! Because, honestly, were you really getting anything done on a Friday afternoon?

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12 Aug 2009, Posted by Matthew Reinbold in Thought & Theory, 0 Comments

Is ‘Eclipse Phase’ Uber Mashup of Post-Industrial Ideals?

I have interest in reputation economies, science fiction as tea leaves to the future opportunities, and the ability for game play to lead to new insights. Because of that, I am downright otaku in anticipation for Eclipse Phase, a newly announced RPG. Features include:

• Reputation Economies. In designing the game’s material culture, we threw out the idea of money as a major motivator for characters (“Money is for people who don’t know how to take care of themselves”), instead focusing on how characters network to get things they need. There are corporate interests in the setting trying to keep money alive, but we don’t portray this in a good light. We really want to see someone try doing this in a massmorg, and we’re hoping our game spreads the idea around. Reason: massive simulations of new economic systems in environments like massmorgs may well be predictive of how they’d work in real life.
• Weird sh*t. Players can choose to portray a giant transgenic crab with a cyberbrain run by a red market AGI if they’re feeling it.
• Wide synthesis of other transhuman SF concepts. Microfacturing, open source blueprints for same, personality uploading (leading to virtual immortality), and a lot of other stuff you’d see in works by Stross, Reynolds, and… heh, Doctorow. Making an RPG out of this gives people a toolkit to explore these ideas on their own, and we think that’s pretty cool.
• Creative Commons. The game is being released under a CC license.

They currently are not taking pre-orders for the rule book. But when they do (as I anticipate they will shortly) who’s in?

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