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Your cyberpunk games are dangerous (2015)
- dang 7y agoDiscussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9519956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9519956
- techer 7y ago“increment on May 11, 2015 [-] Yeah, ultimately I think the Internet today is a lot more open and a lot more beneficial to liberal society than any network was in 1990. I understand why you gag at that, but, I can imagine much, much worse outcomes than we got.” How fast things change.
- rcxdude 7y agoStill true.
- headsoup 7y agoNo it isn't
- sombremesa 7y agoIt is - compare the internet to the AppStore or the Play Store. The internet could've easily been something like that - a walled garden accessible only through proprietary clients, where you could only publish content through prescribed channels. Sure, people would've created open alternatives, but just like is the case with the AppStore alternatives today, those alternatives would languish for want of an audience.
- bordercases 7y agoYou don't need a commercial aggregator to deal with the problem of an audience. You just need a well-known aggregator. The mobile phone is seems like a good analogue of the walled garden model and unsurprisingly computers like Macs and Chromebooks show some of their roots there.
- Aloha 7y agoIt could have been AOL. The underlying power of the internet remains the ability to use it for virtually any application.
- headsoup 7y agoI was only responding in kind to the above poster who provided no context for their answer... And context does matter, because in some places the internet is basically Facebook, which is certainly not open
- dleslie 7y agoI don't want to go back to an archipelego of incompatible networks; at one point we were struggling to cross the WWW, BBS, CompuServ and AOL divides. It's different than the modern era of different and incompatible messenger software; at least Discord and Slack route packets on the same network.
- coldtea 7y ago>Yeah, ultimately I think the Internet today is a lot more open and a lot more beneficial to liberal society than any network was in 1990. Yes, but not from how it was in 1999.
- oarabbus_ 7y agoI still think the internet was a net good.
- unkulunkulu 7y ago> After a gradual dawning of awareness, he asks the computer, “Is this a game… or is it real?” With the aplomb of a delusional college student wandering the steam tunnels, imaginary sword in hand, the computer replies, “What’s the difference?” Hmmm, I have never met this perspective. An AI might be limited in perceiving reality in addition to being much stronger intellectually. A dangerous mix I would say. Imagine “See”, but with AI instead of the blind people.
- looper8 7y agoA binary AI would probably have to settle for an either/or situation. The result and therefore difference between a choice of reality and game, when picking from the core duality, will always be either reality or a game. A quantum AI would be able to view both equally (and be able to grasp all the intermediate states (that we call stable)) and therefore not be able to distinguish between what we call "real" and what aspects of reality we call "imaginary". Our quantum brain that we force into a binary perspective by applying logic is able to see the whole spectrum, but we choose not to use it except for a few parts. What is the difference between real and imaginary? In mathematics we have the real numbers and the imaginary numbers, which arise out of a necessity solely due to the existence of real numbers in the first place. We seem to have no problem accepting both as true and working with both. Each part of the real/imaginary number spectrum allow us to describe reality in different ways - or perspectives, if you will. We even call them real and imaginary and don't deny imaginary numbers their very real existence. So what's the difference, really?
- zaarn 7y agoI don't quite understand why a "binary AI" wouldn't be able to give you a probability on how much it thinks it's in reality (ie, an intermediate state). I don't think quantum AI has that much more advantages either and the human brain doesn't really qualify as "quantum" either in my books.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dangerface 7y agoGames are dangerous? What bs.
- 7777fps 7y agoI miss a time when people read articles before commenting on them. Just skimming the introduction could have told you that the title is not a reflection of an argument forwarded by the article.
- overcast 7y agoWhat time was that? Humans have always taken shortcuts.
- LesserEvil665 7y agoSkimming is a good enough shortcut to take to not sound like a fool.
- coldtea 7y agoThe idea that "human society/culture/habbit was always the same in X aspect" is as ludicrous as "human society/culture/habbit is always changing in X aspect".
- vorotato 7y agoFor as long as any of us can remember, the average person has tried to avoid wasting their time on potentially fruitless pursuits with no joy in the journey.
- coldtea 7y agoShortcuts is not just "skip the useless parts", but also cheat, lose subtlety, lower quality (as in "take shortcuts"), and so on. In this case "read[ing] articles before commenting on them" is not "wasting their time on potentially fruitless pursuits with no joy in the journey", it's the very basic prerequisite for responding to an article. And yes, there was a time when this happened less. In the mobile and social era, people are skimming more, jumping around from text to text more, and do focused reading of articles and books less -- this has been studied and written about several times (e.g. here's a high level article from a book author on the subject: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-goog... ).
- hajile 7y agoGURPS Cyberpunk is still available as a PDF and interestingly, is still the best generic cyberpunk toolkit ever printed. http://www.warehouse23.com/products/gurps-classic-cyberpunk http://www.warehouse23.com/products/gurps-classic-cyberpunk
- rubinelli 7y agoIt was translated to Portuguese by Devir in the early nineties, and I distinctly remember a sidebar discussion on whether separate wide-area networks would eventually join to become "the Net." It was the first time I saw the word Internet.
- wishinghand 7y agoI've become increasingly interested in collecting RPGs this past year and I've noticed that Portugeuse seems to be one of the next biggest translation targets, though mostly from people in Brazil, not Portugal. No idea why, just something that's become apparent.
- toast0 7y ago> mostly from people in Brazil, not Portugal. In Brazil and Portugal, Portuguese is the highly dominant language, but Portugal only has about 11M people and Brazil has about 207M. More people means more creative output (generally)
- thrownblown 7y agopeople just don't understand how big brazil is. the area is only a half million sq mi smaller than the continental us or china. 1 Russia 6.6 million square miles 2 United States 3.8 million square miles 3 Canada 3.8 million square miles 4 China 3.7 million square miles 5 Brazil 3.3 million square miles 6 Australia 2.9 million square miles
- HenryBemis 7y agoCreative output as well as revenue stream. A saturated 11m market of Europeans (that have a birthrate lower than 2) is nothing to a thirsty 207m that is mostly young people. Especially with games that are cheap to play (pen, paper, book) instead of a CPC6128.
- at-fates-hands 7y agoI'm surprised they left out the "made for tv" movie Mazes and Monsters that starred Tom Hanks. The movie paralleled the story of James Dallas Egbert III, the missing college student. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazes_and_Monsters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazes_and_Monsters
- justincredible 7y agoProbably because it's a movie everyone wants to forget.
- bynkman 7y agoGreat article. The Steve Jackson raid is the stuff of legend, and confusion. This article definitely clears up the fog of war regarding the ordeal.
- TedDoesntTalk 7y agoMore revisionist history from millenials who weren't there to know that things like GURPS and Legion of Doom and other things mentioned in this article were unknown at the time, even to other "hackers" and BBSs and usenet. Journalists decided to write about them and hail them as heros years later, changing what was pop culture to the cyberpunk world of those days to whatever they see as nostalgic and romantic and interesting. And for the record, no one who was actually IN the cybperpunk world in the 1980s (including the year 1990) actually used the term "cyberpunk", regardless of whether it was coined or not. Once the term was out there, it was definitely not a cool word and anyone who used it or labeled themselves that way was not at all a cyberpunk.
- StanislavPetrov 7y agoAs an older person deeply involved in the BBS communities of the 1980s and someone who played both Car Wars and GURPS I can tell you that these things were very well known among many of us.
- Accujack 7y agoNo. Maybe they were unknown to you, but not some of us. I first heard about the Phrack raids a week or so afterward, when certain of my peers in college began destroying floppies in a fit of paranoia. _Free_The_Atlanta_Three_
- alanh 7y agomisleading title :(
- StanislavPetrov 7y ago>This misunderstanding arose only five months after TSR obtained widespread notoriety in a similar confusion surrounding the disappearance of college student James Dallas Egbert III in East Lansing, Michigan. A private detective hired to find Egbert had learned that the young man played TSR’s role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons—at the time virtually unknown to mainstream America—and hypothesized that Egbert had come to believe the game was real. Famously, this led to calls for a search of the college steam tunnels, where presumably Egbert would be found wandering in a deluded stupor, questing for monsters and treasure. Tom Hanks starred in a 1982 made for TV movie called, "Mazes and Monsters" that used virtually this exact plot. In the 80s there was a massive hysteria about Dungeons & Dragons being linked to "devil worship" and other madness (yes really). It was so bad that TSR pulled Demons and Devils from the (then) new edition of the Monster Manual (and related books) in an attempt to quell the furor. Spoiler: In the movie the character played by Hanks actually does go crazy and end up lost in the tunnels. He is eventually found but he has forever lost his mind, driven insane by the evil game. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314/