There are also new cultural differences that probably don't come as naturally to players. Think of the AR differences. I imagine someone going from a hypercorp to an Anarchist hab would be highly disconcerted by the fact that most of the random AR messages that pop up aren't sleek professional ads, but simple messages from individuals offering or asking for favors or expressing views about local issues. Also, remember that different morphs are going to be fashionable in different places. Keeping the same example, our visitor is from a hab where the wealthy are probably in beautiful, customized morphs, and most everyone else is in simple, respectable, non-outlandish splicers. On the anarchist station, people probably look a lot less samey. Let's say beards are out of fashion and have been for a while. Most people in the middle class in the native hab are probably in splicers that have been modified to grow beards more slowly (so you only have to shave once a week to keep a smooth face). Our traveler has maybe a couple times in the last decade seen someone in person with more then a simple mustache. Now, the guy he's meeting has a large, burly, unkempt beard just because he likes it, and his associate has sleeved in to a neo-sapian for some reason, and before they can really help they want to ask this other guy in their collective who has a goatee with the horns to match. After that, he goes to a techno-socialist hab where 60% of the population are in government issue splicer morphs, of which there are only 3 standard models of each gender, so besides cosmetic alterations, one in 10 of the people he sees on the street look exactly the same. Walk down the street for long and this gets very disconcerting. After that, he hitches a ride on a Scum Barge, and the people he met in the Anarchist hab seem morphologically conservative by comparison.

My conceptual take on them, would be related to shopping malls, airports. that sort of thing. Same facilities & types of shops at almost every spot. Like they were clones or something. The rulebook say that travel are frequent between the habitats, thus most of the visitors would be similar. In EP companies & shops can ensure that the customer will have a identical experience regardless of where they visit. For example, Forked sales clerks.

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'I'll sell it for less, and that's cutting me own throat.' Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler, Discworld salesman, suspected fork :)

Decivre wrote:

I should think that not all businesses would exist identically on every habitat. For instance, I'd imagine that a hab ran by a hypercorp would consist solely of businesses controlled by that hypercorp. Those same businesses will have no presence on an anarchist habitat, however.

Actually, go to any big corporate compound and you will notice plenty of other companies doing work. I doubt an encryption hypercorp find it economically efficient to branch out into food services, clothing or communications. Similarly, the book actually points out that many hypercorps do have representatives in the outer system. A single person per hab is enough to provide access to all the services of the corp. That actually suggests a new form of mall in the smaller habitats, perhaps a bit like the venture capital cafe in "Annabel Scheme": a bunch of tables where the representatives of various corporations hang out and network. Some people represent several corps at the same time. You need to get some Exodynamics services, you walk up to their local representative and ask for their offerings. Sure, you can contact them via mesh too, but this way you can try to get the Teratech guy to outbid Exodynamics.

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I think it's more of a case of "competitive conformity", where the success of a habitat design forces other habitats to match the design in order to compete for popularity. For instance, if one habitat moved its body bank and morph broker next to the egocasting center, it might be positive for business (since people don't have to track everywhere to get their body needs taken care of). Other habitats would notice the success of this design, and likely follow suit. By doing so, tourists and visitors feel more welcome, and it increases trade. It also means that travelers have less difficulty getting suited to other habitats when leaving this one.

This works in regions where people travel a lot, so this would be strong in the inner system and especially around Mars. Setting up a recognizable space syntax is already something architects and mall managers think a lot about. Conformity is a way of giving security: you have gone somewhere else, but you can always rely on seeing a SomaStore close to a Hertz Body Rental, a Cognite TravelShop and a fast food place for those post-resleeving munchies. But just like coffee places compete by being similar, they also try to be unique enough to stand out. So the end result is the same mix of identicalness and studied uniqueness one finds in malls. Meanwhile the real differences in habitats show up in the uncontrolled social spaces: how people dress and behave, the set of morphs around, the grafitti, the nanosecurity, the layout of personal spaces, the sound and smells. There is a great deal of difference between this drive for conformity and the real utility of standards. There are no rules that say there has to be a Hertz Body Rental close to the TravelShop, but if Hertz doesn't pick up the place Teletouristic SA will snap it up. Some habitat may have more or less sensible appearance rules (in Valhalla every store front and public mesh interfaces must have a soft wood-glass-concrete Alvar Aalto look, while Chrysoprase demands organic architecture with a faux Tudor feel), but often people also adopt/construct local rules spontaneously - in Jade Heaven the old Chinese hutong style has been reinvented in 3D for microgravity and people have invented iridescent jumpsuits as their local uniform.

nick012000 wrote:

Personally, I imagine that what they meant by that statement that all the big habitats are quite similar is sort of analogous to how all the big cities in the first world countries are basically the same nowadays. They might have differences in layout and architecture, but that's basically it; a city in a first world nation is a city in a first world nation.

At least some parts are amazingly identical. Here in Oxford (which of course has some very unique places literally around the corner) Cornmarket street could be located in any European city. A pedestrian shopping street surrounded by the big chains of clothing stores, fast food and coffee places. The crowd outside McDonalds looks identical to the crowd outside McDonalds in Stockholm or Milan. But this kind of convergence is sensible only for the things everybody want in the same way. In a pure synthmorph habitat things suddenly look very different - no food places, clothing becomes purely aesthetic and optional, bodyshapes much more variable, the average salary is noticeably lower. In a neotenous beehive ghetto things get really different.