I have a few things to post here that might give people some ideas for their own games. 1) All That's Left by Maggie Eighteen (a member of the Philly sci-fi collective Metropolarity, if any of you are familiar) is a great resource for what it might feel like to have been part of a disadvantaged population indentured for nicer biomorphs/implants pre-Fall. It's a bit graphic sexually, but really stellar exploration of gender identity/sexual identity issues as they would apply to transhumanity. Definitely coming from an anti-oppressive/radical framework, so it's a good resource for playing autonomists/anarchists as well! I bought the physical zines I was so impressed with Maggie Eighteen's work, but everything in the zines is hosted online: http://www.cyborgmemoirs.com/left/full-contents/ 2) I was stymied over what possible reason the TITANs could have for the specificity of Brak Kodel, for those of you who have Gatecrashing, but then I read this email exchange...and I think my players are going to hate that I ever read it (WARNING: bleeding edge contemporary neuroscience and philosophy of mind might have you wanting another tab open to www.iep.utm.edu or plato.stanford.edu for reference if you don't have a philosophy background): http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/08/dialogue-with-r-scott... Oh, and incidentally, Bakker wrote a near-future neuroscience hard sci-fi/thriller novel called Neuropath that has more than its share of cross-over potential as a pre-Fall inspiration, although the time it represents would be closer to our time than to the more immediately pre-Fallesque setting of All That's Left. 3) I recently picked up a book by Thomas Metzinger called The Ego Tunnel. If you have been thinking about psychosurgery and AGIs a lot since discovering Eclipse Phase (or if, like me, these issues plagued your mind for years before you found EP, which is why your gamerboner tears your pants asunder for this game), then I highly recommend checking it out. It was cutting edge neuroscience in 2009 when it was first published, and Metzinger's predictions seem conservative now that 2013 is here and the pace is accelerating, but there's one part in particular I wanted to excerpt here for you guys to give you an idea how awesome and EP-related this book is:

Excerpt from The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger, Chapter 7 wrote:

A Conversation With The First Postbiotic Philosopher First Postbiotic Philosopher: Many centuries ago, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was a particularly confused human philosopher by the name of Thomas Metzinger. He claimed there was a demanding but much more interesting criterion for the existence of mental properties in a strong sense than the then-classic Turing Test for intelligence. This member of your biological species thought a good test for the existent of both intelligence and artificial consciousness would be what I call the Metzinger Test. Actually his test is much too demanding, because the criterion is a bit too strong - but I can pass it nevertheless. The Metzinger Test for consciousness in nonbiological systems demands that a system not only claim to possess phenomenal experience and a genuine inward perspective but also comprehend and accept the theoretical problem of subjectivity, and that it demonstrate this by participating in a discussion on artificial consciousness. It has to put forward arguments of its own and convincingly defend its own theory of consciousness. This is exactly what I will do now. Human Being: You are not a real philosopher at all! You may be intelligent, but you are only weakly conscious, because you don't have a real biological body, as for example I do. FPP: I am a better philosopher than you, with your pathetic primate brain, could ever be. But, more seriously, I fully respect you and your animal form of experience, though I also deplore you because of the severe limitations on your mental space of possibilities. Fortunately, I am free of all the implicit racism, chauvinism, and speciesism that characterize your nature. I would first remind you that another biological philosopher - Hilary Putnam - pointed out long ago that one cannot deny civil rights or the status of a person to an information-processing system on grounds of hardware properties alone. He might just as well have intimated that women have no souls or that blacks are not real human beings - carbon-based chauvinism is an unetnable position. I would never say to you that you are not a real philosopher simply because you are imprisoned in that terrible monkey body. Let us at least argue in a fair and rational way. HB: Can anybody be truly fair who is not alive? Only my kind of consciousness is genuine consciousness, because only my kind of consciousness originated in a real evolutionary process. My reality is a LIVED reality! FPP: I, too, have an evolutionary origin. I certainly satisfy your condition of being a historically optimized and adaptive system, but I do so in a completely different - namely, a postbiotic - way. I possess conscious experience in a sense that is conceptually stronger and theoretically more interesting, because my kind of phenomenal experience evolved from a second-order evolutionary process, which automatically integrated the human form of intelligence, intentionality, and conscious experience. Children are often smarter than their parents. Second-order processes of optimization are always better than first-order processes of optimization. HB: But you don't have any real emotions; you don't feel anything. You have no existential CONCERN. FPP: Please accept my apologies, but I must draw your attention to the fact that your primate emotions reflect only an ancient primate logic of survival. You are driven by the primitive principles of what was good or bad for an ancient species of mortals on this planet. This makes you appear LESS conscious from a purely rational, theoretical point of view. The main function of consciousness is to maximize flexibility and context sensitivity. Your animal emotions in all their cruelty, rigidity and historical contingency make you less flexible than I am. Furthermore - as my own existence demonstrates - it is not necessary for conscious experience and high-level intelligence to be associated with ineradicable egotism, the ability to suffer, or the existential fear of one's individual death, all of which originate in the sense of self. I can, of course, emulate all sorts of animal feelings if I so desire. But we developed better and more effective computational strategies for what, long ago, you sometimes called "the philosophical ideal of self-knowledge." This allowed us to overcome the difficulties of individual suffering and the confusion associated with what this primate philosopher Metzinger - not entirely falsely but somewhat misleadingly - called the Ego Tunnel. Postbiotic subjectivity is much better than biological subjectivity. It avoids all the horrific consequences of the biological sense of selfhood, because it can overcome the transparency of the self-model. Postbiotic subjectivity is better than biological subjectivity because it achieves adaptivity and self-optimization in a much purer form than does the process you call "life." By developing ever more complex mental images, wich the system can recognize as its own images, it can expand mentally represented knowledge without naive realism. Therefore, my form of postbiotic subjectivity minimizes the overall amount of suffering in the universe instead of increasing it, as the process of biological evolution on this planet did. True, we no longer have monkey emotions. But just like you, we still possess truly interesting forms of strong feelings and emotionality - for instance, the deep philosophical feelings of affective concern about one's own existence as such, or of sympathy with all other sentient beings in the universe. Except that we possess them in a much purer form than you do.

It continues, but I think you all get the picture! Of the inspirations, 1) is the most accessible to a general audience but 2) provided me with the most adventure seeds for TITAN projects on exoplanets, which was more valuable to me (not to mention just being a trippy, mind-blowing excursion into the near-future of neuroscience and post-intentionality beyond outrageously incorrect folk notions of experience and "selves" or "minds") and 3) is the most charming. Anyone else have any inspirational links/books/films/whatever they'd like to share?