Brian's Biopolitics Talk Online

Submitted by RobBoyle on

The talk EP co-creator Brian Cross gave at last year's Biopolitics of Popular Culture seminar is now online in MP3 format. The topic of his presentation was "Talking Transhumanism at the Table: Designing Games for Non-transhumanist Audiences." Here's a summary:

In creating, publishing, and promoting Eclipse Phase we wanted to make a product that made an deliberate effort to engage with explicitly transhumanist and political themes but would deal with these issues in a way that complete novices to them would be able to grok.  I’ll discuss some of the issues that we encountered in making a game with an agenda, how we tried to make complicated transhuman and ethical issues interesting to play with, and some of the complications that have arisen since the game was published.

The slides from the talk can also be found in PDF format here.
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Fri, 2010-03-05 07:58
750 750's picture
Re: Brian's Biopolitics Talk Online
did he say that there was a point where people where considering to reboot SR as transhumanism?
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Fri, 2010-03-05 17:57
RobBoyle RobBoyle's picture
Re: Brian's Biopolitics Talk Online
We weren't actually discussing about rebooting Shadowrun as a more transhuman setting, but while we were working on SR4, we did also discuss a potential game/setting that took place in Shadowrun (and also Earthdawn's) future. We tentatively called this Shadowrun 2600, and the idea was that it would be a future where the horrors had returned and basically taken over the Earth, and metahumanity was forced to live in space, but they still raided down to Earth (maybe even exploring hi-tech kaers down there). Anyway, we decided we didn't want to develop an IP that we didn't own, so we took things in a different direction and eventually ended up with Eclipse Phase (though as you can see, some elements of that initial idea seed, like the ruined Earth, still remain).
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Sat, 2010-03-13 03:04
Decivre Decivre's picture
Re: Brian's Biopolitics Talk Online
RobBoyle wrote:
We weren't actually discussing about rebooting Shadowrun as a more transhuman setting, but while we were working on SR4, we did also discuss a potential game/setting that took place in Shadowrun (and also Earthdawn's) future. We tentatively called this Shadowrun 2600, and the idea was that it would be a future where the horrors had returned and basically taken over the Earth, and metahumanity was forced to live in space, but they still raided down to Earth (maybe even exploring hi-tech kaers down there). Anyway, we decided we didn't want to develop an IP that we didn't own, so we took things in a different direction and eventually ended up with Eclipse Phase (though as you can see, some elements of that initial idea seed, like the ruined Earth, still remain).
I actually got hints that it was originally an offshoot from Shadowrun just reading the equipment lists. Many of the implants have names that harken back to Shadowrun bio- and cyberware. Psi even works similarly to magic... you might as well have wrote [s]d[/s][color=#FF0000]st[/color]rain in each sleight's infoblock. :D That said, I'm glad you guys decided to go with a new IP. I love having a transhuman game like this, and I just can't see Shadowrun as a post-apocalyptic game. The horrors fit better as a "coming evil".
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Wed, 2010-03-17 08:59
The Doctor The Doctor's picture
Re: Brian's Biopolitics Talk Online
RobBoyle wrote:
We weren't actually discussing about rebooting Shadowrun as a more transhuman setting, but while we were working on SR4, we did also discuss a potential game/setting that took place in Shadowrun (and also Earthdawn's) future. We tentatively called this Shadowrun 2600, and the idea was that it would be a future where the horrors had returned and basically taken over the Earth, and metahumanity was forced to live in space, but they still raided down to Earth (maybe even exploring hi-tech kaers down there).
It sounds as if that idea formed the core of [url=http://www.redbrick-limited.com/cms/index.php?categoryid=60]Equinox[/url] by Red Brick.
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