micro as macro

[gfish]

Fun question stolen from theferret: What do your RPG characters say about you? What is the common thread?

For me, my characters are almost always about seeing the world through an unorthodox technological filter. My high school Masquerade character was a scientist convinced vampirism had a viral cause. In the D&D game corivax used to run, I was an elf who had been banished for his tendency to use his nature magic to create Frankensteinian chimeras out of cute fuzzy animals to solve random problems. My 4th ed D&D character last year was a neolithic ranger and master flintknapper sent into the wider world to discover if this new "metal" menacing his tribe was a force for good or evil. Less well developed characters tend to be techies, weak in combat but always looking for clever hacks to get around it.

I'm always a sucker for technological metaphors. They're how I primarily tend to understand the world -- and therefore learning new technologies means learning new ways to understand the world. Being able to take that to a radical extreme is absolutely a form of wish fulfillment.

So, what's your story?

Comments

[rollick.livejournal.com]

I'm with Vix. Mine are almost always artists with skills I lack — they're dancers, singers, gymnasts, painters. I've read enough Charles De Lint and Emma Bull to be all moony about living an artist's lifestyle, but I could never support myself that way in the real world, so I head that way in fantasy.

Apropos of your response, do you read Cory Doctorow, and have you read his new one, Makers? Like pretty much everything I run across these days about crazy genius technical experimentation and the making of neat new things, it's making me think of you.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've read a decent amount of stuff by him, though I'm a bit behind now with Little Brother and Makers. I often have conflicting feelings about him as an author, but I have to admit that Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has really influenced my thinking about the possibilities of the adhocractic future. I'm really starting to get into the vibe of "capitalist vs. socialist is so last century, the new fight is centralized/hierarchical vs. decentralized/self-organized".

I'll skip the grad-student-emo protestations of lameness and just say thank you to the later. I hope I can live up to it soon. :)

[spinnerin-ftw.livejournal.com]

He's more interesting when he's not overtly trying to beat you over the head with his ideas (infodump attack!). But yes, decentralized/self-organized is the awesomest.

[rollick.livejournal.com]

He's really gone in a different direction with these last two, which are more like Magic Kingdom than like anything he's done in between. I loved Little Brother, and I'm enjoying Makers, though I constantly have reservations about him as an author too. He almost has a Michael Moore-like tone as he sets out this version of reality where he tweaks reality to prove his points — neither his technology nor his people are entirely believable to me. I tend to feel like he cheats. And yet I often WANT to believe in his shiny happy vision of the future, where technology is the answer to everything.

And so far Makers is exactly about that new fight you mention, in terms of driving innovation, business, employment, the economy, and entrepreneurship in the next century, so now I'm even more curious for your take on it.