Post by lucidChthonia on Jun 17, 2012 22:00:37 GMT -5
All right, pretty much all of this will be purely personal speculation, so feel free to either ignore everything or contradict it. It's not going to be relevant for the next 100 or so timestamps, so that's a while off.
Let's start with the basic idea. Sburb is a game in which you grow up. The maturity quests and title picking are geared towards this end. And they work, well enough anyway. Sburb can strip any of this earned maturity from the quests at any time, considering it does every time one hits the Replay button.
Here's the thing. The players are still growing older within the game. They're going to accumulate maturity the normal way in the two or three months before the completion of all maturity quests. That is, by actually having real experiences and working out how to respond to them without any outside assistance. The maturity quests just give them a taste of how it will feel like to step back and re-evaluate what they've done in a few years. Guide-wires, then, rather than steel trussing.
This idea of "normal maturity + Sburb maturity" implies the question of, do maturity quests eventually turn 30- or 40-year olds into facsimiles of 100-year-old mandarin sages? Well, okay, maybe not the beard, but the general outlook on life is a lot wiser, emotionally stable, and with some measure of mental distance. The problem is you really can't go much further than that in a living human being without stripping what makes them human. And, arguably, if you begin taking out the human parts - the jealousy and anger and sadness - though you will end up with a more even-keeled, older-sounding person, that person is no longer really relatable to "normal people". An undesirable trait if you need to go rule a universe and its species. So I am pretty sure maturity quests don't go that far.
----
But let's go further. Let's say Awesometiers were supposed to happen sooner than 10+ sessions of one's native aspect. What if they were what was supposed to happen in the one session? Entirely orthogonal from god-tiers: the embodiment of the Aspect bears some resemblances to our archetypes of gods and goddesses.
What if the Awesometier was originally supposed to be the end result of any game of Sburb, and it was only because the "raw material" was so flawed that the door was closed to people who have not truly achieved enough maturity?
Now, the problem with this is, we do have 30- and 40-session veterans. gentlemanMannerism seems to be pushing something like 50-60, and as far as we know no longer really has personal flaws. extropianDreamer seems to be really slow getting his flaws out; specificNihilism is actually approaching Beloved status far quicker than he is, because her personality is closer to whatever "ideal" Sburb might have. Either that or she's rolled her native more, which... might actually be closer to the above.
(I leave out the question of whether Whisperings are sentient or not. This can be argued in another thread. However, they probably have preference for mature individuals who will use their powers for good as opposed to personal gain.)
----
This poses a possible way out: go through enough sessions of Sburb that all your flaws have been ironed out of you, achieve the status of being Beloved and thus your aspect's champion, and... well, then we don't know.
Perhaps it's as simple as, once you've achieved avatar status, you can choose the ultimate reward, and it will actually work. Perhaps Avatars choose to replay sometimes because they can help people with the game, as opposed to out of necessity.
genesisArtificer (oocly) had the interesting idea that if you merge your Shiny with a spacefrog, then you will be embodied in the new universe, which is technically a way of escaping the game. (Please elaborate on this, not sure I have it right.)
Other ideas that were thrown around in the IRC included: there being no way out whatsoever, it happens only when you reroll your native Title and Aspect, it happens only when you're in a session filled only with other Embodiments of Aspects, etc.
----
The upshot of players beginning to leave the game and influence the new universes is that you will begin to see new players that come from universes with real gods, or perhaps the entire universe subtly biased towards certain ideas. Real gods and ideas that will remind the other vets of players who completed 60+ sessions and were never seen again, seemingly disappearing into the Ultimate Reward... because that's exactly what they did.
But the vets don't know this yet. Perhaps it's only an echo or imprint upon the Frog that was put there because of a Space player's unconscious homage to their co-player, the Seers speculate. It takes a few sessions after that to figure out what's happening.
I think it's a good ending.
----
Does the existence of an out, however remote and unknown to our characters today, spoil the atmosphere of this current Sburb.org? I think there's something beautiful in how well they're doing even when they have no idea what they're striving for.
The few of our Players who will be left by then, though... I consider it a kindness, after putting a character after so much, to at least let them have a happy ending, even if it is years and years from the time period we are in.
But I'm still not sure whether this is the best way to go. Have at it, will you?
Let's start with the basic idea. Sburb is a game in which you grow up. The maturity quests and title picking are geared towards this end. And they work, well enough anyway. Sburb can strip any of this earned maturity from the quests at any time, considering it does every time one hits the Replay button.
Here's the thing. The players are still growing older within the game. They're going to accumulate maturity the normal way in the two or three months before the completion of all maturity quests. That is, by actually having real experiences and working out how to respond to them without any outside assistance. The maturity quests just give them a taste of how it will feel like to step back and re-evaluate what they've done in a few years. Guide-wires, then, rather than steel trussing.
This idea of "normal maturity + Sburb maturity" implies the question of, do maturity quests eventually turn 30- or 40-year olds into facsimiles of 100-year-old mandarin sages? Well, okay, maybe not the beard, but the general outlook on life is a lot wiser, emotionally stable, and with some measure of mental distance. The problem is you really can't go much further than that in a living human being without stripping what makes them human. And, arguably, if you begin taking out the human parts - the jealousy and anger and sadness - though you will end up with a more even-keeled, older-sounding person, that person is no longer really relatable to "normal people". An undesirable trait if you need to go rule a universe and its species. So I am pretty sure maturity quests don't go that far.
----
But let's go further. Let's say Awesometiers were supposed to happen sooner than 10+ sessions of one's native aspect. What if they were what was supposed to happen in the one session? Entirely orthogonal from god-tiers: the embodiment of the Aspect bears some resemblances to our archetypes of gods and goddesses.
What if the Awesometier was originally supposed to be the end result of any game of Sburb, and it was only because the "raw material" was so flawed that the door was closed to people who have not truly achieved enough maturity?
Now, the problem with this is, we do have 30- and 40-session veterans. gentlemanMannerism seems to be pushing something like 50-60, and as far as we know no longer really has personal flaws. extropianDreamer seems to be really slow getting his flaws out; specificNihilism is actually approaching Beloved status far quicker than he is, because her personality is closer to whatever "ideal" Sburb might have. Either that or she's rolled her native more, which... might actually be closer to the above.
(I leave out the question of whether Whisperings are sentient or not. This can be argued in another thread. However, they probably have preference for mature individuals who will use their powers for good as opposed to personal gain.)
----
This poses a possible way out: go through enough sessions of Sburb that all your flaws have been ironed out of you, achieve the status of being Beloved and thus your aspect's champion, and... well, then we don't know.
Perhaps it's as simple as, once you've achieved avatar status, you can choose the ultimate reward, and it will actually work. Perhaps Avatars choose to replay sometimes because they can help people with the game, as opposed to out of necessity.
genesisArtificer (oocly) had the interesting idea that if you merge your Shiny with a spacefrog, then you will be embodied in the new universe, which is technically a way of escaping the game. (Please elaborate on this, not sure I have it right.)
Other ideas that were thrown around in the IRC included: there being no way out whatsoever, it happens only when you reroll your native Title and Aspect, it happens only when you're in a session filled only with other Embodiments of Aspects, etc.
----
The upshot of players beginning to leave the game and influence the new universes is that you will begin to see new players that come from universes with real gods, or perhaps the entire universe subtly biased towards certain ideas. Real gods and ideas that will remind the other vets of players who completed 60+ sessions and were never seen again, seemingly disappearing into the Ultimate Reward... because that's exactly what they did.
But the vets don't know this yet. Perhaps it's only an echo or imprint upon the Frog that was put there because of a Space player's unconscious homage to their co-player, the Seers speculate. It takes a few sessions after that to figure out what's happening.
I think it's a good ending.
----
Does the existence of an out, however remote and unknown to our characters today, spoil the atmosphere of this current Sburb.org? I think there's something beautiful in how well they're doing even when they have no idea what they're striving for.
The few of our Players who will be left by then, though... I consider it a kindness, after putting a character after so much, to at least let them have a happy ending, even if it is years and years from the time period we are in.
But I'm still not sure whether this is the best way to go. Have at it, will you?
.
