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Petals

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Sun, 2010-02-14 18:21

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Petals

One of the ideas that really appealed to me on my first read of EP was petals. It actually made me read Jeff Noon's "Vurt" (their true origin) when I had a day to spare, making me even more happy to use them in my game. The combination of drugs, drug culture, virtual worlds, online games and bizarre neurohacking can be so fun. The ones in the book make pretty good petals, but EP can go so much further. So, what are your suggestions for interesting Petals? Perfect Dilution: A single user petal. The user experiences a version of out-of-body experience and size change. At first they will feel as if they are growing, simultaneously becoming larger and lighter. Soon they will become enormous but perfectly able to phase through matter. As they grow they get more and more diluted, tasting/feeling everything around them as it passes through their bodies. As the trip continues they will become ever more vast, dissolving into unity with the universe until all that is left of them is the universe itself - containing the original person. Raindrop Qualia: A multiuser petal that gives the group a hallucinatory new sense. Like in Anton-Babinski syndrome (where blind people do not recognize that they are blind and confabulate what they are seeing) they will make up what they are experiencing with this entirely new sense, but thanks to the networking they all agree on it. The sense is experienced as an entirely new kind of qualia, as different from the other senses as they are from each other. It might be long-range like sight, smell or hearing, or close-up like touch and taste (perhaps tied to a particular part of the body like the foot, the arm or the hair). Users tend to spend their trip exploring their environment, discovering the previous unexperienced properties of it. Chlorophytum Red, Yellow, Blue: Possibly based on a degenerate version of a cognition enhancer nanodrug, the petal allows the user to see connections and patterns in their everyday environment. These might be delightful mystical correspondences, the paranoid realization that there is something going on or just an autistic savant-like ability to find patterns in enormous amounts of data. The script part takes these patterns and links and inserts AR arthropods hiding in or near them. These beetles and spiders work for the pattern, and the goal is to follow them and their tricky clues to the core of the pattern. There are different kinds of insects with different properties; the spiders are helpful but ask hard questions, the colour junebugs are mostly in the way, the number mosquitoes can easily overwhelm a group unless they have a numeric savant present, and the truth lobsters form armoured mandalas around hard-to-reach but important clues. The difficulty of reaching the Centre and understanding the entire pattern depends on the colour of the petal: Red is easiest, while Blue is extremely hard. There are stories about the feared blue assassin bug, which can hide anywhere and can actually kill unwary users - or even people who are not using the petal!

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Mon, 2010-02-15 15:28

King Shere King Shere's picture

Re: Petals

[B]The boardroom[/b] A company petal.The participants take full advantage of the interactive narrative environment & use it as a executive boardroom. saves office space. This could have been a killer application. But due to reputations of "narcotic" petals, and activists; its not. [B]The briefing[/b] Also a company petal, to save office space. Its purpose is to divulge the same information to the participants, while ensuring that they got full understanding of it. the narrative environment outshines the power-point screens of old. At least will the participants feel that... [B]The Feast[/b] Dont like the food?, or cant afford a real feast? with this petal you will experience the extravagant fine dining luxury or extravagant feast, while eating that cheap&healthy but otherwise a disgusting dish. Could be the cheap alternative for the wedding party.

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[img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/tc_userbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/exh_userbar.jpg[/img] [img]http://boxall.no-ip.org/img/argo_userbar.jpg[/img] [i]"To find fault is easy; to do better may be difficult."[/i] Plutarch

Tue, 2010-02-16 11:02

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Petals

Hibiscus 1-43: A long-running series of popular petals. The users see greenery burst out of their environment, transforming it into a lush tropical paradise. Different versions contain different landscapes, including everything from tropical beaches over ancient ruins to explore to villages with friendly natives. Especially popular among people living in very non-terrestrial environments or with problems adapting to the post-Fall diaspora. Rafflesia Infotopia: Definitely an acquired taste and potentially quite dangerous. The petal induces Cotard's delusion: the users believe they are dead and have started to rot. As the petal progresses their flesh decay and fall off, taking root and growing into bizarre unliving shapes. Botflies appear, attracted by the stench. Hidden inside the festering masses of flesh/fruit/maggots are shining windows into other worlds the users know are only accessible to the dead. Eventually all of the users meld into the unliving vegetation, turning into parts of an eternal ecosystem guarding the walls of reality while constantly eating/being eaten. The goal of the petal is to accept this and become part of the growth. There have been several instances where users have severely hurt themselves by digging for portals in their own bodies. Firewall is more concerned with the similarities of some of the imagery with Exsurgent infections; could the petal actually act as a "gateway drug" to the virus?

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Tue, 2010-02-16 18:35

King Shere King Shere's picture

Re: Petals

Adding ideas written in another thread. [B]In: Building Extropia[/B]

Arenamontanus wrote:
King Shere wrote:
"Petals" allow the sharing of experiences to the participants. Perhaps its something similar (to that technology), that gives interested habitants of Extropia a wider; involvement, opinions & consensus of decisions. A collective entity made from all the experiences of its participating members.
Democracy Flowers! What a cool idea. If you want to participate, just pick a Power Flower and chew. A fork of you gets connected to the agora simspace. A single petal just adds you to the debate, a whole flower brings you into full consensus immersion. Of course, there have been some problems with the flowers. Beside pranksters spreading fake flowers connecting you to a parody site and that unfortunate overdose incident last year, there are the die-hard individualists who think they are creeping statism and the demarchists who worry that the self-selected people are not the most representative. More problematic is how much influence the consensus construct has on the emotions of participants: there could be a risky populist feedback loop here. Which is why many extropians think information markets provide just the kind of cool-headed analysis the consensus cannot achieve.

With emotional control included, the "democracy flower"; would creep out "heatlhy" paranoids even more. For example: participants get the cool head feeling. Multiple forks of the same individual could have a edge, or inadvertently(?) be muffled since the "submitted" experience would be near identical& singular. [b]"Political Representative Petal"[/b] Political groups use their own brand petals and have the "petal entity" participate in the "regular" decision system.

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