10 KiB
Rational Terrain of Magical Expertise?
-
Author: u/Sailor_Vulcan Champion of Justice and Reason*
-
URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2u8tgj/rational_terrain_of_magical_expertise/
-
Score: 4
-
Created: 2015-01-30T22:18:09
Post:
I'm considering attempting to write a rational novel version of Christopher Niosi's TOME webseries:
Meet Nylocke, a smart young british gamer whose overly emotional nature often gets the better of him. He loves to play in the hit virtual reality gaming and social networking phenomenon, TOME: Terrain of Magical Expertise. Then his character got infected by a semi-intelligent computer virus with unknown motives that can cause harm to other players in real life, which a group of hackers desparately want to get their hands on. To stop the hackers and the virus, Nylocke will need wits, courage, and the help of his friends: Alpha, a shy uber-fanboy with an equally uber inferiority complex and a great memory; Infernalexis, a defensive, slightly judgemental, quick to anger but ultimately good-natured computer-programmer who thinks fast on her feet and is fiercely protective of her friends; Kirbopher, a snarky, sarcastic, witty, cool, slightly badass, hardcore gamer who's unafraid to give the middle finger to all the stop-having-fun-guys, especially hackers; and Gamecrazed, a mysterious, serious, reserved, and intelligent player with inscrutable motives.
some of the ideas I've come up with so far:
the semi-sentient computer virus is known as “the forbidden power” because it doesn't really have its own intelligence. Rather, it borrows the host's intelligence to achieve its goals.
Also, something that really popped out to me:
TOME character models are to the forbidden power as Pokemon are to Missingno
I was thinking about how TOME players would need to have some way of using their virtual bodies (character models), and still be able to live as normal humans outside of the game. If the person's mind is somehow temporarily converted to fit their character models when they're playing, or something, and the forbidden power is a copy of the template for all character models programmed into the game (but without having been converted into an actual character model yet), then that might have something to do with how the forbidden power could have access to its host's mind/intelligence in the first place, since the game would need to access the player's mind to temporarily convert their human mind into its scifi/fantasy race equivalent. But that seems really complicated, and it feels like it would be a lot simpler to just have the character models be like costumes over a human-shaped frame without some crazy complicated maybe impossible "make a human brain temporarily able to feel and control x virtual body part as if it was their own" But if I go the non-invasive route, then how the heck would the Forbidden power work?
Any ideas?
Comments:
u/gabbalis [+1] (4 hours later)
You know... virtual reality always seems to have way too much brain access in fiction. In various series whatever VR tech they use seems to be able to cause real pain, kill you in real life, control your personality... I know that if i wanted to play one of these games I sure as hell wouldn't be using the official tech (Which probably already comes with some sketchy matrix brain plug), I'd be wiring an oculus rift and a joystick to interface with the game or something.
Then again... What if the virus can do what it does with just a video and audio feed? Maybe it works through some sort of subliminal messaging.
u/OffColorCommentary [+1] (5 hours later)
Personally, I've always pictured the video feed that reprograms people into obedient sock puppets looking like a rapid series of old fashioned test patterns, or maybe just static.
Maybe the dark secret is just that it's easier to take total control over a person's brain and stream the experience of playing a virtual reality game directly into their memory than it is to make the game directly.
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (15 hours later)
If that's the case, how do players log in and log off? And how would such a secret possibly be kept hidden from the public, when the alternative is using something less invasive like the occulus rift? People would wonder why they weren't using something like occulus rift, right? Maybe I should make it so that players are trapped in the game like in Swort Art online? That way the secret being let out wouldn't be enough to shut the game down right away. But then that begs the question of why people plugged themselves in in the first place? Maybe because either A) people were dying and wanted to live on in the game, or B) they wanted to spend time with someone they cared about who was living in the game, or C) because of A and B the trend catches on and people go there all the time to hang out and enjoy themselves. Not sure if I like that explanation though. Although if the players become trapped in the game together, that might explain how the main characters become such close friends.
Something that I wondered was why in the original TOME, Alpha kept logging back in even though his character model was infected with the evil virus. He should have just stopped playing, since it was technically his character model and not him that was infected. If he logged off and didn't come back online, he would have been fine and the virus would not have been able to follow him. If the virus DID infect his actual mind, he should have stayed in the game so as not to let the evil virus loose into the real world.
u/FeepingCreature [+2] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (6 days later)
Maybe I should make it so that players are trapped in the game like in Swort Art online?
I really like SAO's depiction of this.
The people aren't, in principle, "trapped" in the game. They're using the official tech almost exactly as it was meant to be used. Their motorics are simply shut off while they're playing, similar to how dreaming works. Normally you're supposed to be able to log out, but as part of their social experiment, that function is disabled. (This is super illegal, probably.) You could still just take their headsets off, but the guy who built them added a boobytrap in the design.
To clarify: you're not "in" the game in the sense that your body is abandoned, it's just that being forcibly logged out kills you as a deliberate design choice by the person who set up the scenario. You can still starve to death IRL; the scenario relies on society not just letting the players die.
u/Angelcupcakes777 [+1] (2 months later)
"He should have just stopped playing," Chris Niosi said himself in the commentaries that this game means so much to Alpha and the gang that they just can't stop playing. Also the fact that this is were all of his friends are at is another reason.
u/therearetoomanydaves [+1] (a day later)
First, a disclaimer: Haven't read TOME.
Second, a lot depends on how people interface with the VR environment. One method would be sorta-like high-resolution MRI, where the game inteface reads (and possibly writes) state to/from the player's brain. This would let the player 'feel' pain, but there wouldn't be any physical consequences. (Maybe the interface could be used to control the player's body, zombie-style). In this model it may be possible to "lock" people into the game. See James P Hogan's "Giants" series.
Third, how are characters represented in the game? If as a set of values, (strength, intel, mana, persuasiveness, etc) operated on by a generic character-interface program running natively on the game system then this "forbidden power" might be a sort of debug interface that can be enabled by the right combination of certain values, or the result of a value being set to an illegal value and the "player interpreter" jumping into an unexpected part of the code when it uses the value.
If, instead, it's a program of some type running inside a virtual machine (VM) that makes game actions and senses available to the player, then a proper virus infection is possible, but its effect is limited to what the VM-to-gameworld interface allows. The VM sandboxing might have a bug that the virus exploits, but normal player programs doesn't.
u/Sailor_Vulcan [+1] Champion of Justice and Reason (30 days later)
I came up with two different ideas for how the forbidden power(s) could work and not sure which one to pick or if it might be possible to combine them.
Idea 1: There are TWO forbidden powers: One that messes with the information feed from your brain to the game (in game actions, like not being in control of your own virtual body), and another that messes with the information feed from the game to your brain (sensory). If someone's virtual interface gets infected with both forbidden powers, then their connection to the game is completely disrupted. They will still be conscious, though. However, they will be trapped in the virtual machine since they are unable to log out or quit the program, and if the virtual machine is still filtering out real sensory information. This could cause total sensory deprivation.
Idea 2: It's called the forbidden power because the forbidden power glitch involves the game sometimes having trouble correctly identifying an infected character model. This can give them access to abilities that they aren't supposed to have access to. Think of it like the move “metronome” in pokemon, but in real time in a game where players normally have complete control over their virtual bodies.
Ideally I'd like to combine these two ideas, but I'm not sure how. In the original story the forbidden power wasn't actually a character ability, but a semi-sentient computer virus that temporarily possesses a player's mind through their infected character model (which begs the question of why it's even called the forbidden power). (IMO) the forbidden power was very obviously inspired by the glitch pokemon Missingno from the pokemon videogames, and the most likely theory (that I know of) behind the glitch pokemon's existence can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQeedFtYckw
I would love to hear your suggestions. Thanks!