Interactive entertainment Options

[Larme]

I was just thinking about a rocker character I made a while ago. I was wondering how to deal with the problem of her band members being NPCs, since contacts aren't your buddies who show up whenever you want and play rock concerts, and there isn't really a system to add NPC "friends" to your character. Then I thought, why not have the other band members be AR virtual people? You could position speakers around the stage, and have the AR avatars project their sound through them to give the experience of real live music.

And then I thought -- what about taking it beyond that? Like using AR to make the sky bleed, or have virtual bombs dropping, virtually blowing up nearby buildings and making peoples' heads virtually explode? Or you could make virtual piles of weapons appear, and part of the entertainment would be people virtually murdering each other with chainsaws and shotguns. It would be like a video game, but it would be a real-life venue combined with live music, too.

Do you guys think this kind of AR entertainment would be really popular and attact big crowds? After all, people could sit at home and experience pretty much the same thing using full VR. But while some people would prefer that, my gut tells me that Shadowrun with its punky origins would have to include lots of young people with funny haircuts gathering to enjoy rowdy concerts. These concerts could even start spontaneously, someone sets up their virtual band and starts playing, and within minutes the word has spread through the mesh network, and kids from miles around are showing up on mopeds, rollerskates, and Barrens-grade Mad Max mobiles.

Has there ever been a discussion of such things in the fluff? Would it be a plausible thing to infer, lacking such references?