[Headcanon] Version Drift

[tungstenTinkerer]

It has been mentioned that many different versions of SBURB exist, some not even called like that. I have an headcanon about how that works, thought I'd share.

Maybe at some point I can turn the POV to IC and post it somewhere, who knows. Not sure where, haha.

So, there are two ways possible ways SBURB comes into being

• Standard: The game is distributed by the mysterious SkaiaNet industries. Who is actually behind these is a mistery (someone suspects the Others) but one thing is certain, if you except some patches, the game distributed is the "vanilla" SBURB, with standard (and mostly known) glitches and, notably, GGtG's 22 "canon" aspects
  
• Custom: The game is written and coded by an independent programmer (like Sollux). This happens rarely, but in this case the programmer usually has a chance to fiddel with the code some. That opens the way to all sorts of custom aspects and new glitches (or maybe some other glitches are fixed, who knows)
  

The point of version drift is that after the end of a session, you can only be transfered to one that plays a version that is "close enough". It's not that important to decide how this is determined - maybe "close enough" means that there can only be that many different characters in the code. There is someone who has two thumbs and doesn't care, an that one is me.

The visible effect is that the set of glitches and the set of aspects any player experiences, especially if he started with a weird version and as such is "drifting" rather far from the much more common standard, will be evolving, between sessions, but slowly.

On the other hand, people in a standard session will usually face a situation where the game has many more standard sessions to transfer a player to, than he has custom ones, meaning it's very probable that they keep the usual set of aspects and bugs, but they still have a chance to wander away from the standard.

[grindinglyGodliest]

This is all kind of cool.

[genesisArtificer]

This makes all the sense.

Also, I have the idea that the "new" Aspects appeared with the most recent change in game. Every veteran can swear that the rules has changed at least one time before (IC!gA wrote about it in the Clown section of the forum). That is why there is a crop of new Players with Aspects nobody knew about before.

[tungstenTinkerer]

I guess that with time some patch are released and it becomes more and more probable even for players playing the "standard" version to get into patched releases with new aspects. But I think the process is slow. I have been referencing patches myself, when I hinted that an ability changed its name. Then again, so has done other people (among which possibly GG, I don't remember).

It would be interesting to decide what aspects are in what version.

Maybe for when I post it. I dunno, it could make a good article for either LC's staff blog or something like that. Posting it on the AO3 by itslef doesn't seem right, haha.

[tungstenTinkerer]

An interesting consequence of the concept of Version Drift is that people in weirder version branches have less sessions and less players to chose from (because most people play the standard SkaiaNet inc. version, or version close to the standard where "standard" players can easily drift to) so they will meet more often than "standard" players do.

[bryoSynthesis]

I think it'd make sense if the custom games had less glitches because if someone like Sollux was going over the code he'd notice the mistakes like , instead of . for example.

Plus it'd make for interesting conversations, comparing sessions.

[tungstenTinkerer]

Some of them do. Sadly, there is nothing that ensures that the person putting their hand in the code is, you know, competent. Sometimes while coding you create three problems while trying to solve one.

I could definitely see custom sessions lacking some of the major glitches we talk about, but some other may appear!

[timelyTurnabout]

I like all this. I wonder - would that play a role on which sessions can communicate with each other?(or sburb.org?)

[tungstenTinkerer]

Yes and no. I guess that frog incest and these fancy things are possible only between versions that are the same version or at least "close" (as in, "a player could drift between these versions in one step"-close).

Sburb.org, however, uses trans-timeline tunnels that make it available for everyone everywhere, provided they possess some kind of tunnel access. You must ask for those, people cannot sign on the fora by themselves to prevent weird time shit. Further details on this should be asked to lucidChthonia, since she is the one that came up with the "the sburb.org fora are a thing that is a thing" idea anyway and she has tons of ideas on how the time management works over that.

[walkingUnwoken]

I look at it as being hereditary, glitches, titles, aspects, and other game abstractions and limits are passed down (or left out) from frogs. Occasionally evolution will edit it a little, and major differences are from player editing. But it would work like an upside-down tree, with each universe having many sessions, the few of which are destined to be successful become Alpha Timelines.

[disasterAverted]

^ Building on what he said, I don't really agree with your definition of "drift" in the OP. I think the you're missing the important part. My headcannon is that if universe A has a 1337 haxxor butcher the code of sburb, two dozen teams play and three sessions survive to reach the ultimate reward, you'll create three universes B, C and D which'll all play the hacked version--even Skaianet will distribute whatever version created the universe. That's the "drift" part of version drift; not that that person A will see sessions from person B, but that people at time A will see different sessions from people at "later" time B (to the extent that there appears to be some way of synchronizing the linear progression of people on the forum from different sessions).

That'd explain apparent "changes" in the rules. So originally there were no clowns, then a hacker was looking at the code and said "why's that commented out" and unlocked clowns, and he won, and people from his child sessions won, and pretty soon there's a huge cluster of sessions where clowns are in-bounds and the role changes from "impossible" to "uncommon" (since there's still even more sessions without the clown patch). Presumably, to add further complexity and further the analogies between universe reproduction and biological reproduction, there's some mechanism for crossover between mutated sessions. Maybe if you put a bunch of seers of space together in a room they'd be able to figure out what it is for you.

Compared to that, correlation between what any one person sees is a little boring and unimportant from a metagame standpoint.

Random side note: There would still be a tendency towards sburb NOT acquiring mutations which favor nonhumans. Why? Because even if a member of some bizarre alien species hacks together a version of the game that suits hir biology and wins the session, most sessions in newly created universes will still star humans. These sessions will be ill-suited to the mutated game and die, so the pool of sessions in the child universes which even stand a chance of winning is lower. As the frequency of a species in the overall sburb population grew, however, the viability of sburb versions adapted to that species would grow--someone who tried to slip a troll-friendly patch into their session might stand a decent chance of spreading it, though someone sticking in a weird-slime-creature patch would produce mostly-infertile child-sessions.

[tungstenTinkerer]

I think you are missing a point. It's not that most sessions star humans. That doesn't make much sense. there is no a priori reason for humans to play this game more. Rather, most people in the fora are in sessions that star humans. The exixtence of a "standard version for humans" serves to justify the fact that humans have a tendency to get in sessions with humans, and the like. This is still a thing. Most sessions are not mixed.

The way I see it the SBURB version in a "son" universe follows a Darwinian dynamics - it is usually the same as the "parent" SBURB, with a small chance of mutations. The point is that the replayers in a session are not going to replay in the universe they generated. But the universe they are going to play in is going to sport the same SBURB version as the one they came from, or one similar enough.

Version drift was not supposed to make any assumption on the replayer population. Rather, it was supposed to justify why the people on the fora keep being mostly humans, while the natural tendency would be towards equal numbers for all races: the point is that the main mechanism for the fora to acquire users are sessions sporting a forumer and other replayers, that get pointed to the fora. But since most forumer are humans, they'll have a tendency to end up in human sessions.

The boom of troll players on the fora is compatible with drifting - possibly it started a few sessions at a time in the past, and now it's spreading to the "troll standard version" where most of the sessions are.

[disasterAverted]

Huh, actually that does make sense. I still like the idea of hacked versions passing along their changes though, to account for the more "directed" changes (such as doing away with gender-Title associations and adding aspects).

[tungstenTinkerer]

That happens because of drifting in the official release from Skaianet. There is a significant number of sessions all with the same version but what that version is is slowly evolving.

At least as far as I am concerned, my headcanon is that the last patch added mist and void, tried fixing the gneder assignment scripts without actually managing to do so, and added a few lines of code in the earthsea borealis script that resulted in saccharine doppelgangers. The one that is being released just now, instead, is adding, Sound, Sight, Flux and Stage and removing gender preferences altogether.

[disasterAverted]

I dunno if I even like the idea of "official patches". To me, sburb seems more real if the originators are nebulous and nowhere to be found; the game *is*, and while it was probably created by someone that someone is only important in the degree to which they screwed it up. They set it adrift in the multiverse and gave it the ability to be self-replicating, and after that point they aren't really necessary to the continued tragedy anymore.

Any changes it undergoes over time would be organic and out of the original creator's direct control--whether they're random mutations or intentional hacks by the players. It's like if you made a bunch of self-replicating grey goo nanomachines and turned them loose; you can be blamed for anything and everything they ever do, but as of three seconds after you uncorked that test tube nothing else that happens to you or by your hand matters.

And anything that ''appears'' to be the direct intervention of the creators, such as the "orange guy" that occasionally shows up if you mess with your session disk in the magicant, is probably just a game feature programmed to pretend to be the game's creators. Since they couldn't possibly watch over every session personally anyways.