Leliel
2009-07-28, 10:33 PM
Well, I've been reading Intruders: Encounters With The Abyss as of late, and I began to think about the Shard-an evil AI that creates MMORPGs so it can trick players into summoning Abyssal manifestations.
At some point, I began to think "Wouldn't it be cool to have the PCs be avid players of a good version of the Shard?" Needless to say, I had one of my epithanies and came up with a story idea:
The players are recent buyers to a highly suceessful MMORPG that they have become hooked to. Intially, they're just a party of n00bs looking for silly fun, but as they progress through the starting area, they begin to notice something...odd...about the game.
For one, the usual protocols againist hacking the game engine are simply not there. While the mods come down hard on griefers, they brazenly ignore hacked PCs who focus on PVE or consensual PVP with other hackers. Indeed, they seem to subtlety encourage hacking, creating bosses that are almost impossible to defeat without exploits, and sealing obviously finished areas of the game for no particular reason, arousing curiousity.
The game itself acts bizzare as well, with strange glitches that do not affect it performance at all, and actually seem to move out of the way of PCs. The mobs are not the least of it, with some of them-particularly in some of the higher-leveled sealed zones-becoming "bugged", with their bodies becoming colored static and blurry. These weird mobs, besides looking strange, don't act like normal creeps either-they use human tatics, adapting to the situation, ignoring agro for the vital members of the team. Even stranger, they sometimes don't attack at all, just hanging back, watching the interlopers.
Most distubing are some of the PCs. They look normal, to be certain, but then they open their mouths. The voice over the headset sounds...normal enough, but it's almost as if the guy on the other end is working from the idea of language, making frequent syntax errors and grammar mistakes that a normal person would catch mid-sentence. Their typing is just as strange, almost as if the translator used on multi-language servers can't quite make out what they're saying...even though they're supposedly speaking the dominant tongue. They act just as strange as they speak, trading information on the game for things that seem like instictual knowlege. One might want to know what the act of breathing feels like, while another may want to see the client get mad about something and describe the actions he's considering unleashing on said something.
The truth is, of course, that it's far more than just a game. Rather, it's a social experiment-not with humans, but with a race of sapient AIs, to see how they act in a human culture. The lax restrictions on hacking is meant to introduce an element of chaos into the simulation, as well as recruit the unkowing hive mind of the players ("hive mind" referring to how people act when a large group puts their collective will to a task) into creating things the mods never considered-not to mention it's a useful tool for gradually easing potential mods into the truth about the game.
Of course, nothing is ever so simple. Besides the incredible alieness of the AIs-they don't have human instincts, and so have no idea how humans act and vice versa-the game is having reprecussions in the Shadow as well, with the collective will of the players creating spirits who wish to propragate the experiment by any means nessecary. A few of the AIs have even gained physical forms similar to spirits, and are quite intrested in how humans react in thier "native environment". That isn't the bad part. The AIs, though alien, have a moral compass due to social factors, and most are simply detached observers. No, the bad part is that the game is a fudementally creative force (helping AIs and humans to understand each other, and possibly unite into a single force), and that has aroused the ire of the Shard, which will do anything to corrupt it's cousin, and trick the AIs into believing that humans are hostile to them. And given that more than a few live in millitary computers...
So, what do you think? What are your ideas for the "rules" of the game, and how it reacts with the real world? What would be some good story hooks (beyond turning the plans of the Shard againist it and destroying it on it's own ground)?
At some point, I began to think "Wouldn't it be cool to have the PCs be avid players of a good version of the Shard?" Needless to say, I had one of my epithanies and came up with a story idea:
The players are recent buyers to a highly suceessful MMORPG that they have become hooked to. Intially, they're just a party of n00bs looking for silly fun, but as they progress through the starting area, they begin to notice something...odd...about the game.
For one, the usual protocols againist hacking the game engine are simply not there. While the mods come down hard on griefers, they brazenly ignore hacked PCs who focus on PVE or consensual PVP with other hackers. Indeed, they seem to subtlety encourage hacking, creating bosses that are almost impossible to defeat without exploits, and sealing obviously finished areas of the game for no particular reason, arousing curiousity.
The game itself acts bizzare as well, with strange glitches that do not affect it performance at all, and actually seem to move out of the way of PCs. The mobs are not the least of it, with some of them-particularly in some of the higher-leveled sealed zones-becoming "bugged", with their bodies becoming colored static and blurry. These weird mobs, besides looking strange, don't act like normal creeps either-they use human tatics, adapting to the situation, ignoring agro for the vital members of the team. Even stranger, they sometimes don't attack at all, just hanging back, watching the interlopers.
Most distubing are some of the PCs. They look normal, to be certain, but then they open their mouths. The voice over the headset sounds...normal enough, but it's almost as if the guy on the other end is working from the idea of language, making frequent syntax errors and grammar mistakes that a normal person would catch mid-sentence. Their typing is just as strange, almost as if the translator used on multi-language servers can't quite make out what they're saying...even though they're supposedly speaking the dominant tongue. They act just as strange as they speak, trading information on the game for things that seem like instictual knowlege. One might want to know what the act of breathing feels like, while another may want to see the client get mad about something and describe the actions he's considering unleashing on said something.
The truth is, of course, that it's far more than just a game. Rather, it's a social experiment-not with humans, but with a race of sapient AIs, to see how they act in a human culture. The lax restrictions on hacking is meant to introduce an element of chaos into the simulation, as well as recruit the unkowing hive mind of the players ("hive mind" referring to how people act when a large group puts their collective will to a task) into creating things the mods never considered-not to mention it's a useful tool for gradually easing potential mods into the truth about the game.
Of course, nothing is ever so simple. Besides the incredible alieness of the AIs-they don't have human instincts, and so have no idea how humans act and vice versa-the game is having reprecussions in the Shadow as well, with the collective will of the players creating spirits who wish to propragate the experiment by any means nessecary. A few of the AIs have even gained physical forms similar to spirits, and are quite intrested in how humans react in thier "native environment". That isn't the bad part. The AIs, though alien, have a moral compass due to social factors, and most are simply detached observers. No, the bad part is that the game is a fudementally creative force (helping AIs and humans to understand each other, and possibly unite into a single force), and that has aroused the ire of the Shard, which will do anything to corrupt it's cousin, and trick the AIs into believing that humans are hostile to them. And given that more than a few live in millitary computers...
So, what do you think? What are your ideas for the "rules" of the game, and how it reacts with the real world? What would be some good story hooks (beyond turning the plans of the Shard againist it and destroying it on it's own ground)?