#pre-cognition

I’m like an intuition ninja

I’m 34. How that’s relevant to this blog post I’m not sure. I think it’s just an ominous way to start writing. Dum, dum, dum, I’m not a kid anymore and this aint Kansas Dorothy. But my name is Adin. So let’s move on.

It’s come to my wife and my attention that my “intuition” is more than just that. There have been a few occasions in the past few months that I have “called it”. Things like, “Oh I…

Imagine if you could see things before they happened. What would you do? You'd change the bad things, I guess, right?

But that gets complicated really, really quickly. This is a game about how quickly it gets complicated.

You play an otherwise normal pre-cog. Characters are differentiated by the Clarity of their vision, their ability to Focus that vision, their scope of their Presence within a single parallel causal region, and the length of their Reach along a causal chain. There are some complexities still being finessed, but the basic concept will remain as in this simplified example: these four features are described with two numbers such that selecting a Clarity/Focus of 4 means that you need to roll under 4 for matters of Clarity and over 4 for matters of Focus. Likewise for selection a Presence/Reach number from 1-6. Of note, you can have a 0 in one of these traits. Having "0" focus, clarity, reach and presence will be mechanically meaningful; it doesn't mean your ability to see is literally, say, impossible to focus on, but merely that your control is all but absent such that you end up having exceedingly clear understanding of things somewhat at hazard. That makes sense. As for Reach and Presence, it gets a little more complicated but again there will be reasons to want such an imbalance even if it makes you a very strange pre-cog.

The basic mechanic revolves around the Timeline. The Timeline is broken up into measures, each with a certain number of beats, like a musical staff. The exact number of beats in a measure or measures in a Timeline is not enforced; it is mechanically relevant, but it is up to the players. Game mechanics will reference measures and beats so adding beats to a measure and measure to a Timeline will change the pace and mechanisms of the game.

The game begins with unpleasantness. The players are in a stable, mundane situation. Proceeding from this initial condition in time, space, or both, the situations takes a turn  (mundanely or fantastically at the group's option) for the worse. Before I go on, I want to make that first bit clear: stable. This starting place is not dynamic and action packed. It shouldn't have a lot of fluctuating variables and it should represent a point where the character is likewise relatively stable in time--they didn't just come from a situation likely to breed conflict or regret (put another way, they would have no reason to be currently experiencing the future in order to avoid THIS moment or the things that happened immediately before--they are content with their fate and/or unable to alter the parts of it they are not content with at this immediate time). It need not be an exact moment in time; if can be an early morning train ride. A stop at the grocery store. The precision to which it is stable is not important; what is important is that the event can be considered contained in time and place even if it is a LARGE container (such as a 30 minute train ride, or an empty basketball court).

So, unpleasantness overtakes us. To borrow from the movie Source Code, that train ride is interrupted by  bomb going off. The players experience a snap. The hit a repeat. Or a Kick, if you like Inception better. They return to the mundane, stable situation with a sense of understanding. Nothing more. Just .... understanding that something is wrong. Take two index cards--one is your initial condition--the stable situation--and the other it our crisis. The game then consists of creating a causal chain of events--filling our Measures with Beats--with the goal of avoiding the Crises, disrupting it's prerequisites with contradiction or simply walking a causal path that ignores it altogether.

Players will navigate through a bunch of parallel, interacting causal chains represented by index cards that explain the outcomes of points of conflict (places where resolution has to occur in order to determine an outcome and/or places where Timeline-specific mechanics were engaged to create conflict) and other special points marked by the use of mental abilities that affect the character's perception of the timeline. For the players, this experience is non-linear. The end-game result is not a story, exactly, but a map--depending on the abilities of your character it might represent a series of impressions you receive at the last second, just in time to react to them, it might represent things you aren't even aware of that guided you imperceptibly, it might represent an elaborate rush of visions and thoughts and reactions and plottings that occur to you before your character begins to act in the world making you like an upgraded version of Adrian Veidt or Sherlock holmes, or Watchers from Push. It probably represents a little of all of these.

Play itself dances around this map, with the present not being quite so relevant as the EPP--the Earliest Possible Present, the earliest point your character could experience as the present given the points in the Timeline they have access to. Or rather, you can allow your character to commit to actions way back in the EPP in order to forge ahead and get a better glimpse of the future. Of course, you can also ask a pre-cog with a longer vision to fill you in. That is ... assuming you know that anyone else on the train is capable of such things!

Some information we keep track of then: which characters have access to what knowledge in the timeline, where a character's EPP is at and what events they have committed to (and any requisite other changes their committed behavior wreaks on the Timeline and the other characters :P ), what Beat and Measure the event is part of (determines parallel events, the possibility of linking to new events, the default causal chain, etc), prerequisites for events (to determine if an event is still possible as the timeline develops and/or changes), and the effects of special abilities (warps, bridges, memories, erasures, paradoxes, etc).

I've got a lot of stuff built into this already, but it's not ready for testing yet, or even pre-test proofing. So I don't really feel careful slinging the rest of it out yet. This is my concept-sketch, if you will. There's more to come and it's already been cooking a good ways past the sage seen here. :) A few things I'm still toying with: hidden information (i.e. changing player-facing information as well as just character-facing information--I want to emulate not just the sense of complexity and inter-linkage but the sense of confusion and over-load that having a glimpse of the future could bring ... I could do this with some sort of time limit, or I could do this by hiding information and having players try to remember certain things or else gamble if they don't quite remember ti all), time limits (see above), removing the standard resolution system I've got presently to go with GM-fiat free-play unless temporal/pre-cog mechanics are engaged (sort of a big deal ... told you it's in rough shape), rules for explicit time travel fit easily into the systems I'm building so I'm toying with those,

So there it is. More later,

I experimented with scanning and manipulating a carved lino sheet I used to make a print I made for "The Plains'" album artwork, just for fun, to see how it would differ from the print. This is what it looks like. I think the texture is interesting. I like making lino prints because it's a slower, more arduous process than drawing.  The planning it requires, the process of carving out the sheet, is meditative. I suppose I also have an affinity for a semi-mechanical aesthetic. You could say a lino print in visual art is analogous to the pump organ as an instrument. Mechanical, but breathing.

In the wake of the shooting in Tuscon, there has been much discussion regarding the shooter's various social media profiles.  People are analyzing all the different things the shooter said and wrote through various mediums; YouTube and Facebook being the most quoted and analyzed.  Without delving into what his dark and seemingly incoherent blogs/profiles/videos said, the question is being asked, "Could we have seen this coming?" and "Should we have seen this coming?". 

This week, while in San Francisco, I spent some time with a great guy and new friend, Frederik.  He is from Sweden and is co-founder of the company www.Saplo.com.  Their product can scrape huge amounts of text, tag the important words in that text, and analyze the sentiment of the text.  One commercial application of this product is brand sentiment analysis.  For example, Coca Cola could pay Saplo money to analyze all the text on the entire world wide web and they would report back the overall sentiment of the world towards Coca Cola. By the way, they could do this in minutes.  

It got me to thinking, could we use these types of enterprise tools to analyze user profiles' sentiments?  Could we possibly monitor the content distributed by potential killers and mass murderers, and stop them before they commit a crime?  Would it be possible to sort of let a computer use "pre-cognition" to determine criminal intent?  Could the shooting in Tuscon have been avoided?

I think think the real question is should we do these things, not could we.  Where would the line be drawn?  Would everyone's online activity need to be monitored?  How would we delineate between feelings and actual intent?  How violating would a world like I am describing be?  Think about that....