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Locations

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Sat, 2011-05-14 07:27

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Locations

I was just jumping torandom tvtropes pages, when I came across this one: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LoveHotels Comparing to EP, I think you can see many similarities (and there is a mention of how they were used in Planetes) - much of humanity lives in crowded environments with little privacy, yet most people do not want their trysts to be public. So it would make sense that something like this is pretty widespread out of necessity. That thought led to another: this is a kind of environment with obvious adventure potential (secret meeting place or hiding place, room for character development, setting for some event, way of evading pursuit, place to infiltrate, etc.) yet it is not a standard location to most people (in the West, at least). What are your examples of similar locations in EP that might be great for description, action or just exotic-yet-logical flavour? What is going on in the hydroponics bay, or robot storage compartment? When the eccentric contact wants to meet you, where does he set up the meeting?

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Sat, 2011-05-14 09:57

Axel the Chimeric Axel the Chimeric's picture

Re: Locations

I have to disagree on how common such areas would be. For one, in a world of omni-present tracking/surveillance, your location is always logged anyway. These hotels might not have cameras inside but outside, definitely. Anyone going in will be seen. For another, people can meet on the mesh and have their trysts in VR, if they're looking for privacy. Find a nice, anonymous online sex club and go there. That said, I approve of this thread, so here are some of my thoughts: -Freak Clubs: We've seen the rise of the goth and emo markets, to the point that stores catering both to them and to their wannabe groups have started to appear in places (Hot Topic, anyone?). Night Clubs dedicated just to people who like roleplaying vampires have appeared. Given the transhuman love of experimentation, why wouldn't clubs catering to these desires appear? Of course, these clubs will vary greatly by region. Everything from flesh freaks, who enjoy trying out new types of skin, to furries, who need no explaination, are going to exist. However, while anarchist habs with lots of uplifts will see chimeric creatures appear that are an actual cause of potential cultural tension, hab in the PC will see, at most, a pair of ears and a tail appear, or maybe even just neurowear integrated into someone's mesh inserts. Imagine your group meant to meet some contact in a club, only to find out they have to put on a headset and belt so that they look like an animal person. -The Zero Zone: In every cylindrical habitat, at that central point, there is a thin area where the microgravity is so low that it might as well be zero for most intents and purposes. In that zone, a lot of habitats might find useful purposes, such as a tram route, but most leave it open. What's the logical thing people do with open space? Use it, of course! What could be more fun than trying to escape a hot pursuit by grabbing an emergency jetpack and flying into this micrograv zone, having to duck and dodge between commuters and leisurely wanderers flying through with jetpacks or wings. -Forests: On many worlds, Luna especially, habitats integrate parks into their construction, both to produce oxygen and to relax their citizens. This very much means that a character could, one moment, be running through a crowded market place, then deactivate their magnetic boots, take a leap, and find themselves running through a forest at top speed. Not long after, they might be more worried about not getting gored by a rhino than getting shot. -The Exterior: Seems obvious, but every hab/ship has an inside and an outside (and problems arise when one forcibly tries to become the other). How exotic is it for characters to maneuver over the outside of a space station or ship? After all, long-lived life support systems and maneuvering systems are ubiquitous in the setting. A character could spend days standing on the surface of a habitat, being fed, watered, and oxygenated by his suit. Out in microgravity, with a jetpack and/or EVA thrust pack, characters can all essentially fly and use gravity as a plaything. It's also more dangerous in all sorts of ways. Wandering the exterior of a Jovian station can leave you fried (all sorts of fun ways to use that, including the obvious "Something important crash-landed here. You have to go get it before it fries." race against time). Wandering the exterior of, say, Ceres means you need to keep an eye on your asteroid tracking software. It's a whole new set of environments just a few metres away.

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Mon, 2011-05-16 09:59

nezumi.hebereke nezumi.hebereke's picture

Re: Locations

I would also tend to agree. In most habitats, having a room that caters primarily to SEX is probably not too common. There are plenty of cheaper ways to get your groove on (namely, VR). However, hotels dedicated to PRIVACY certainly have value. Sometimes you just want to be out from sousveillance, to conduct business, to deal with personal issues, to engage in socially stigmatized activities (including sex), or to just read a book in peace. The caveat there is, well, if you have a privacy room and 90% of clients use it for sex ... yeah, it's now a sex hotel :P

Mon, 2011-05-16 16:39

Axel the Chimeric Axel the Chimeric's picture

Re: Locations

A business based on being secret is a bit of a paradoxical concept, isn't it, though? Sex motels largely work because no-one gives a damn, they're just there to give people a quick place to have fun with prostitutes and so they don't have to have their neighbours/room-mates don't see them bringing a hooker home. A business succeeds on being known to potential customers and making itself seem useful. A business that tries to make a sector out of offering privacy is just asking for people with spy cameras to sit outside and watch the entrances. That's quite complex. I don't doubt that some hotels/resorts offer privacy packages (anti-sensor nanites sprayed before you arrive, dazzlers activated before your arrival, etc.) but places specifically dedicated to privacy? That's just strange to me.

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Mon, 2011-05-16 19:01

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Locations

Axel the Chimeric wrote:
A business based on being secret is a bit of a paradoxical concept, isn't it, though? Sex motels largely work because no-one gives a damn, they're just there to give people a quick place to have fun with prostitutes and so they don't have to have their neighbours/room-mates don't see them bringing a hooker home.

Note that love hotels are something different - they are mainly for *couples* to have fun without neighbours/pod-mates seeing them making whoopee. In the west we tend to have much more space and privacy than in Japan, so sex hotels are mainly dedicated to *illicit* sex. Right now we do not realize how much privacy we got, and we will probably be be missing it in a few years given current trends. A lot of businesses are about acting as interfaces, deliberately or incidentally providing privacy. Banks acts as trusted third parties for payments, and can both have numbered bank accounts or virtual credit cards. Thanks to postal order you can buy bedroom toys without having to face a shopkeeper (sure, he has seen it all, but the customers tend to be embarrassed and hence buy less). One reason it is nice to go on a holiday is to be free from your normal social network. Right now I am away in New York, and I could go cruising, visit a church or participate in an anarchist meeting with few or no social repercussions. That is pretty valuable. About other locations that might be interesting: Today I visited Ed's Martian Book, a nice bookstore in Greenwich Village. It sells a single book, Andrew Kessler's "Martian summer". It has shelves filled with it - a science section, a journalism section, a table with "Bestsellers" (the book, of course), "Staff picks" and so on. Very fun concept. In EP such concept stores are likely to show up to advertise new products - for a week you get a store selling the latest Skinthetic symbiote or Fa Jing food fabber, likely with some twist (the symbiote store might be womblike, the food fabber might be depicted in a amusing kitchen with a crazy staff straight out of Ratatouille - going in there means becoming part of the comedy). Another NY attraction right now is the play "Sleep No More" where an entire hotel has been turned into an ongoing installation. Visitors wander between rooms, experiencing fragments of a drama through what they see and find. Apparently very cool. Sure, it could all be turned into interactive XP. But then it wouldn't be unique and ephemeral - people pay well for having an experience that will be personal and never repeated. And the setting of a whole building filled with a kind of artistic nightmare, actors/bots, visitors and subtle manipulations sounds great for a location. Another fun part of habitats is the life support system... or rather, the sewer recycling system. In modern habitats this is a kind of fractal nano-gut that disassembles all forms of waste and sorts atoms into the right feedstocks. But that is how it looks in modern habitats, less than 20 years old or so. Older places have much more primitive systems - peristaltic tubes, filtering vats, eggshaped sludge digesters where genemod anaerobic bacteria break down things. Microgravity sewers might not be places you can run around, but the spaces where the gunk is processed will be accessible since there are a need for regular repair. Plenty of bots, plenty of fun when people start shooting around the tanks and pipes with pressurized filth.

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Tue, 2011-05-17 08:52

Axel the Chimeric Axel the Chimeric's picture

Re: Locations

I'm going to have to double-take and inquire as to just what you mean by "seeing". I doubt that's a problem in most places in EP either and, anywhere it is, they're not going to be spending resources on sex hotels. Anywhere in the system, there's going to be aerogel sound dampening between walls in apartments. Even if people share a room, you can just filter noise, or even imagery, out with your AR. I also understand and appreciate that people don't want to be seen doing things, of course, and can imagine more than a few companies rent out servitor bots or even pods that use the company's ID instead of the person's ego ID to conceal their identities (though the company, of course, monitors who is using what bot in case something illegal happens). If we're on the subject of antiquated features, one that a lot of old settlements, and especially Scum Barges, might have is junkyards. Most places are likely garbage-free, since people have disassemblers to reclaim waste, and street garbage such as cigarette butts and other simple waste is either collected in garbage cans for later disassembly or swept up by roving robots. However, some places have to deal with their trash the old fashioned way, or lack the disassemblers to deal with it efficiently enough. Interestingly enough, junkyards are probably more common in large, modern cities than frontier towns. The garbage takes time to disassemble, so companies build disassembler factories outside the city borders and store the garbage there. If the garbage builds up at the same rate it's disassembled, you get a continual junk pile.

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Wed, 2011-05-18 10:24

Jay Dugger Jay Dugger's picture

Re: Locations

From actual play in "Martian Autumn," secure rooms, memorial sculptures, and weather parties. Elysium City's Neil Armstrong Memorial Hospital contains an old-fashioned operating theater with observation room, and a secure room. --- An operating theater wouldn't necessarily exist in the Eclipse Phase setting, having been made obsolete by healing vats. The room appeared in play during the post-mortem interrogation of three morphs whose egos had destructively farcast instead of permitting Direct Action to capture them. I did this on purpose, as the players might have paid too much attention to the exotic description of a healing vat partially disassembling its occupant. (See Sterling's "Holy Fire.") I wanted them instead to pay attention to the contrast between a slightly squeamish description of a post-mortem interrogation (see Egan's "Distress") and the futile gesture it represented. The PCs watched from the observation room, and then discussed the lack of results in the hospital's secure room. That facility combined a faraday cage and a clean room with active countermeasures to produce confident privacy during a physical meeting. Not so good as a zero-knowledge contract negotiated between two short-term forks, but that sort of thing is a little too high-tech for Mars. I hear they do that sort of thing out by Extropia. --- In Land of the Ten Suns, an simulspace Mars set far in the future of E.P., a player character carved the face of her lost love onto a mountain. He presumably died in the Fall, but the PC hopes he made it safely off-Earth. This memorial sculpture resembles Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Memorial, or Stone Mountain Memorial. In game, it'll amplify the extant tradition of empty graves for the unknown dead of the Fall, and combine with terraforming equipment to make actual carved rock faces of lost loved ones increasingly common on Mars. Yes, we all made jokes about Richard Hoagland and about Invader Zim. No, there is no body feature on Mercury. --- Parties among the wealthy pro-terraforming factions of Mars sometimes recreate weather phenomena from Earth or realize those that might occur on a fully terraformed Mars. These usually happen outside under large temporary structures. XP recordings provide a reference, but lack the status and expense of a unique physical event. The cost of such usually restricts the guest list to those transhumans who can provide something valuable to the event organizers: high reputation feedback, memetic spin, or skilled XP salable to those to poor or low-status to attend. Cognite sponsors these from time to time to test their efficacy as memetic vectors. While possible in principle, no one alive now really thinks recreating dust storms will have any appeal to the inhabitants of a fully terraformed future Mars.

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