I have, for some reason I haven’t fully explored, always been attracted to violence in videogames as directed towards small non-common-household animals. Fable indulged me in this propensity to a certain extent with its wholly extraneous and immensely entertaining diversion of kicking chickens, including first the longest kick metric and later an entire competition built upon this hobby, replete with prizes.

Recently, I succumbed to temptation and signed up for a 10-day free trial playing World of Warcraft. At first, I largely left small animals alone as I tried a Troll Hunter. Later, I rationalized my desires by saying that I was “getting in character” when I smote chickens and rats as an Undead Priest, claiming that I hated all living things, and none moreso than the innocent vermin flocking about (yes, rats flock, more on that later).

But it was not until only just yesterday that I discovered true joy when, as a Dwarf Paladin, I absolutely crushed the unholy abomination that was the mockery of life called a squirrel with a gigantic two-handed mace I had recently acquired.

Once, I knew a kid who couldn’t pronounce the word properly, calling it a ’squirtle’, to rhyme with turtle. Let me assure you, o faithful reader, that this is precisely the sound the filthy creature makes when you smack it with righteous fury and a large blunt metal instrument of divine wrath. I now hail that child as a prophet, though he was an annoying little bastard at the time.

The power of the mace and club had called to me, an insidious siren song impossible to resist, ever since I had initially created this character. I was especially sorely tempted when I received a quest wherein I was responsible for rounding up deeprun rats via a magic flute. I almost could not complete the quest when I looked back and discovered myself thronged with rats, ripe for smashing, as the vermin flocked (told you!) to the sounds of my Pipes O’ Doom! It was only through a herculean effort of will that I was able to finish the quest without visiting extremely violent rat death all about the tram platform. I was, however, rewarded for my restraint with the tasty and crunchy deeprun rat kabobs, which I will cherish until the end of time. I would say, “Or until my supply runs out,” but you and I both know that I will be buying more whenever my stock starts running low.

Up until this point, I had once again been pretending to be ‘in character’ by not beating vermin mercilessly, claiming that a good paladin of the Light wouldn’t do such things. After the rat incident, however, I could no longer restrain myself, and I gave in to evil. I am assured by the nearest authority that what I did, and more importantly my enjoyment of it, was “very wrong”, with all the implications of moral culpability inherent in the phrase. Nevertheless, the next time I found myself in the woods, I pancaked the first squirrel I found. And no matter how wrong or evil, I will continue my exterminatory efforts until my 10-day trial ends.

I consider such work the only true calling of a Paladin of the Light, no matter the possibility of a subsequent slide into darkness. If the path of goodness and righteousness requires the hero to travel into unrecoverable moral oblivion, I still walk with my head and mace held high though I be damned for eternity for my sins.

That’s how much squirrel death means to me.

Of course we don’t. That’s why I get to talk about whatever I want, and you have no choice but to suffer, or convince The Almighty Boddhisattva to kick me off. Take it, and like it!

Conversely, other participants could post a deluge of contributions in an attempt to drown me out. Ideal? Yes. Realistic? Well…

So I’m reading the ever-thought-provoking Charles Stross today, specifically his new novel Saturn’s Children: A Space Opera, and I decided to invent a new word: nootype. Turns out I’m a little late, but only just. I can only find two references to the word on the amazing innarwebs, the earlier from 2003, the later from 2007, and both are used essentially how I intended. I was close, but hey, a five year lag isn’t that bad as far as word creation goes. Especially since the word isn’t exactly commonplace.

The word itself derives from the greek nous, or mind, and is meant to be a relative of genotype and phenotype, intending to function as a word describing the specifications of a mind, just as genotype describes a genetic specification and phenotype describes a physical specification.

I realized while reading Stross and reflecting on future computational personalities that we would need a way of classifying different types of minds. Mind types, thus, nootype. Hey, presto! New word. Well, almost.

Anyway, I expect that we’ll develop a whole new lexicon of nootypical descriptors to take the place of awkward sentences like the following:

I am of the mental type of unaugmented biological homo sapiens sapiens.
I am of the mental type of human 1.5, meatbrain plus external silicon-based long-term memory solution.
I am of the mental type of non-humanoid-derived machine-based artificial intelligence.

And so forth. You’ll notice that these sample descriptions are largely based upon foundational considerations, i.e., upon what physical substrate the mind is built, though the degree to which the mind resembles that of a human is also mentioned. It’s not hard to suspect that a hatful of factors will be described beyond these two basic differences, and so one can imagine that as our catalog grows, so too will our vocabulary to match. However, I hazard the guess that the category lumping all of these terms together will be ‘nootype’. Because I say so.

I also further imagine that this word and its particular descriptors will play a large part in categorizing the occupants of a world that sees the convergence of intelligence, identity and intellectual property in a future of corporate and computational personalities.

Personally, I really like the sound of that.

While discussing with my boss the possible advantages and disadvantages of having a HUD onboard automobiles, I came to a rather stark realization:

I wish technology would kill people stupid enough not to know how to use it properly.

Seriously. My boss claimed that we would have many road accidents if we installed HUD capability on vehicles. While I concede the point, I also submit that this is not a bad thing. I want cars to kill people who drive like idiots. I want toasters to strangle people who stuff forks in them. I want tech to go Transformers, and up and kill the meatbag morons who misuse them. I want unnatural selection. Survival of the smartest.

I’m not sociopathic; I just despise incompetence.

Every couple of years, someone decides to release a new console, and the gaming community at large touts the marvels of the “next generation” of gaming. Usually what this amounts to is some oohing and aahing over slightly improved graphics, and another 8000 EA Sports games to ignore. Once in a while, we see an update to the hardware, like more buttons or a hard drive.

You’re still playing a fancy Atari, people. That isn’t next-generation, except in the very literal sense of one console having generated another like some dark sweaty beast pushing out yet another dark sweaty progeny.

But occasionally, we see flashes of true gaming evolution. I think we are on the verge of sighting on of those rare gleams.

In his book Halting State, Charles Stross mentions a new type of gaming. It’s something Shadowrunners have seen coming since the release of 4th Edition: augmented reality games played on mobile devices, with the virtual overlapping the physical. Stross puts his games out around the 2015-2018 mark, whereas Shadowrun has it about 2070.

I think we might see them a lot sooner.

You see, Stross also mentions in his blog that technologies are on their way to achieving a few critical milestones in the development of augmented reality games. I’m sure you’ve already seen the videos for Wii-remote head-tracking VR or SecondLife avatars invading the office. Put together with a broadband mobile phone and a head-mounted display, we see the beginnings of ARG’s.

Let’s push the envelope a little further.

Head-mounted displays, you say? How about bionic eyes? Or direct brain connections? Not really looking for an implant? Well, you could always try the contact lens display. And since we’re on the subject, why worry about remembering what’s happening in the game all on your own? Why not get your very own memory goggles to help?

But every great game needs great audio, even if you don’t want everyone else listening in. But who really wants to walk around with headphones, earbuds, or, the gods forbid, those annoying and idiotic Bluetooth earsets? Why not just stick the audio device in your head, with none the wiser?

Implants looking better, maybe?

Speaking of audio, and speaking, as long as you are playing your ARG in public, you don’t always want people listening in while you discuss strategy with your friends in other cities. Soon, you could just stop talking altogether, and still get your point across.

Better still, we have an input device to beat all other input devices, the Emotiv helmet, which can actually read your mind!

Start putting these together, and you have a system capable of delivering visual and audio information directly inside your skull and overlaid on the real world your normal senses are delivering, the ability to have your device remember everything about the game you are playing, and the possibility of controlling and communicating in your game without lifting a finger or making a sound. All while you stroll down the street to the coffeeshop.

And just in case you have a seizure like so many video game manuals promise, there’s always a way to check what’s happening to you, reminiscent of Shadowrun’s BioMonitor: the subdermal display.

Now for the fun part: developing the ARG. Not the simple pre-existing examples like Majestic, i love bees, and Perplex City. No, I’m talking something completely different. And there’s already an interesting new category of game that will work just fine. Called Passively Multiplayer Online Game, or PMOG, this new gametype is described as a plug-in for your browser that works while you surf, whether you actively participate or not. The idea is simple, and boring: you surf online like normal at your computer, whether at home or work, the game plug-in tracks where you go, and depending on your actions and those of other ‘players’, you can gain or lose data points. Your points can buy weapons, or mission-creation tools, etc. Lame.

Let’s stick this on a gps-enabled mobile phone, connect it to A/V implants, and tweak it to be a true ARG.

Everywhere you go in the world, you are playing the game. Every business you walk into, every purchase you make, every turn you make in your car, everything affects the game. You make a stupid statement on a public bus, and a stranger might just whack you with a virtual sword. Your secret admirer can leave you virtual flowers strewn up the entire length of the walkway to your front door. Organize an AR assault with some friends as you try to crack your way into a local club without being on the guestlist. Paint a 300 foot statue of yourself over MSHQ and proclaim yourself the King of Redmond, and challenge Bill Gates to a duel.

Now let’s get creative. Suppose you walk out of your house one morning, and trigger an AR trap. A virtual boxing glove appears out of nowhere and slams you in the beak. It’s a little annoying, slightly funny, and mildly childish, but no one else saw it so everything is cool. You check the tag and see it’s from your friend who thinks he’s king of practical jokes. Later, on your lunch break, you and some friends hit Hooters, only to have a 3 ton cartoon weight fall from the ceiling and land on you. Still annoying, but this time, every player in the restaurant can watch your humiliation. Not only that, but Hooters recently installed an extra bigscreen devoted to showing the AR happenings in the restaurant. So everyone who isn’t playing can watch the replay on slo-mo as you pause, look up, and get a face full of ridiculous. Once again, it’s from your idiot friend. If we’re still playing for data points, so many witnesses just made you lose big time.

Now it’s revenge time. You know where this asshole likes to drink coffee everyday after work, so you bail from your cubicle early to tag it before he gets there. At the counter, you plant a proximity info-mine keyed to your nemesis. When he steps up to order, he is sandblasted by a shitstorm of chain-linked autospam porn ads featuring Godzilla bukake, the hottest lizard-on-lizard action, and the legendary Ghidra and the Seven Cocks of Doom. The Management permaban his stupid ass after a conservative mother complains that she could see writhing megalizard orgies on the contact lens displays on her six-year-old daughter’s bugged out eyes.

Now we’re having fun. Let’s see what else we can imagine.

Someone files a class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart for violations of the Privacy Protection Act of ‘0? after it is revealed that the megastore’s AR ads are feeding targeted commercials to customers based on info received from a deal signed by Wal-Mart and a leading ARG to offer bonus points on all purchases made on infamous Black Friday, which allowed Wal-Mart to capture all purchase information for every consumer who participated in the game and took up the offer to acquire a few extra points after Thanksgiving. The debate still rages on, but Wal-Mart is steadily losing millions in lost revenue everyday.

A trial is set to begin this morning after the arrest of an ARG gamer who pulled a deadly prank on the highway. The young man stretched a virtual garrote three feet off the asphalt across the 405 southbound S-curves at approximately 6:00am Thursday morning. Drivers of large trucks and SUV’s hardly noticed a thing, but all other drivers were cut in half at the tits on the morning commute. The resulting 43 car pile-up resulted in numerous injuries and several deaths as the ARG drivers panicked at the virtual damage they sustained and subsequently lost control of their vehicles.

I’m sure you get the point.

‘Next-generation’ has been a bit of a buzzword in the video-game industry for many years now, but I think we are about to take next-gen to a whole new level as the technology finally arrives to make true ARG’s possible.

As the title implies, Ray Kurzweil happens to know a thing or two about the future.

According to his predictions, somewhere early in the 22nd century, the greater portion of the matter of our solar system will have been turned to use for computation. Dyson spheres, Matrioshka brains, the works. Even if we leave most of the Earth and sun alone, we’re still somewhere around 95%+ of the rest of the matter in the solar system being converted. At that point, we either consume the Earth, the sun, or start looking outwards.

Ray is confident that we will exploit certain loopholes in physics to broach the light speed barrier. I am not so confident. If we are unable to do so, then computation becomes a finite resource.

At first, people went to war over land. Later, it was money, commercial goods, and even oil, or so I’ve heard. Very soon, I expect people will go to war over information. However, when early 22nd century Solar System has been largely converted to computation, and that resource begins to become rapidly reserved, the wars of the future will be about who controls computation. And there will be those who believe that some people aren’t as deserving as others when it comes to who gets their daily ration of computational resource.

Hint: I am one of those people. This is my preemptive strike. Most of the people alive today aren’t worthy; why should I think they will somehow magically become so just by plugging in?

And the thought occurs to me that there is a way to overt war, if we plan ahead.

Consider Microsoft Windows. It has a built-in function called Task Manager with which I’m sure many of you are familiar, one which allows the user to monitor the various processes of which the computer is currently keeping track. Imagine if you will a new process which you may launch to run in the background, where it will work silently while you remain blissfully unconcerned with its performance. Now imagine that the purpose of this process is to rate the efficiency of the other processes at work. Call such a rating the Minimum Computational Efficiency rating. The purpose of this new process will be to terminate any process which does not meet certain standards in the Minimum Computational Efficiency ratings.

I imagine it sort of like this: every process being computed is assigned an MCE rating. The watcher process monitors these ratings. If at any point the MCE rating of a process falls below a certain level, the process is flagged for termination. Some number of computational cycles later, if the process has not improved its MCE rating above the critical threshold, it is summarily terminated.

Now we skip forward one hundred years, and implement the watcher process and the corollary inefficiency terminations. Only in this case, because people will largely at this point be nonbiological computational processes themselves, we will be terminating inefficient people. Success! War is averted! With computational resources only allowed for those processes/people able to make efficient use of them, we never worry about wasting computation on the unwashed masses. Of course, you only get resource if you earn it, so you qua process must keep yourself as efficient as possible - think of this as digital exercise. If you don’t stay in shape, you get a warning. Like a heart attack, only less dramatic. You have a certain limited amount of time to take a very vested interest in improving your efficiency. If you fail, you die, and your resource gets reallocated among the survivors.

By setting the MCE threshold sufficiently high, no person will have to worry about running out of computations so long as they keep themselves at the peak of efficiency.

I like to think of this as elitism at its finest, and with hard work, I will be able to implement the MCE rating when the time comes. The future is looking bright indeed.