Despite my best efforts, it's still very routine for me to get stuck in traffic. Minutes pass by, and all I can wonder is how much I could be
So, I made a game out of it. I'll see who's behind me (or to either side, or even in front, but it's easier behind), and make up a story of their life. It's never anything really deep, but this is purely reflexive. It's practice for if a player asks about someone I haven't really thought out yet. And, if I like an idea enough, that person might just show up in an RPG somewhere. The guy behind me today might be a post-man of the future.
Sorry you had to get stuck behind me, dude.
-TSA Scanners
The ability to rapidly "scan" someone's exact body dimensions is the mother of motion-capture technology. It takes graphic artists dozens of hours to just make a single body for a game, and that's only one body type. Notice how most characters are exactly the same build, even if they've been scaled up and down to simulate height?
So, my thought for the dystopian future: Game developers "buy" people's scans for about $100 each, then use them as models in the games. The technology would have to improve slightly for the image to be turned automatically into something workable on computer, but it's not that far off. As a bonus, it's a naked scanner: You don't have to digitally edit the clothes off of someone.
Taking this a step further, if there was an x-ray function, you could map the bones inside someone's body, then wire them up to the "skin" mesh you got from the regular scanner. Hair would still be a biatch to work, but it's the dystopian future: they'll figure something out.
It's a little creepy, but I'd actually be okay with my likeness being in a video game... for about $50.
-Mythic Cyberpunk
I was talking with an associate, and the subject of Neuromancer came up. He mentioned that after the first book, the magnificient William Gibson started to learn about computers, then felt bad for not making them realistic enough. So, the next few books were more "in tune" with computers and their processes.
It's been a really long time since I last read any Gibson, so I'm not going to comment on the actual book. Instead, it's the idea of a mythic theme in a cyberpunk genre that interests me.
The net, cyber-decks, and black ICE were all very loony and unrealistic at the time- cyberpunk, not Commodore 64 punk. So, Gibson was writing about large, intrinsic events in places that didn't really exist, that we could only fathom through a close representation. The same could also be said about Norse myths about Valhalla.
As a fictional construct, the net was a large mythical location. No one could understand how it works, and it might as well have had the same functionality as Limbo or Purgatory. The only difference was how it was treated- instead of drunk Viking heroes, it was filled with drugged-up net runners.
The book itself even regarded it with reverence- I remember a bit at the very beginning, before Case gets his brain fixed, where he talks about the net for pages and pages. It might as well have been heaven to him.
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