I apologize if this has been covered before. I was thinking about a report I heard some years ago on public radio when Youtube was just starting up. I thought, eh, that's interesting but I didn't think anything would really come of it. Home movies were about the most borning thing I could imagine, one step up from vacation slides... if someone wasn't getting hit in the nards by a whiffleball bat, the entertainment value of any given home movie was about zero.

Years go by and as will so often happen, I am proven wrong. Youtube is vastly popular, lots of people seem to have nothing better to do than vid things and show them to people, and some of the stuff is pretty good. It seems to run the gamut from tedious to mildly amusing, with rare flashes of brilliance. I don't acutally watch video blogs, because I'm pretty busy trying to tolerate the people I actually know, but I know they exist.

And that makes me think about reality tv, especially with the writers strike and the threat of no new scripted tv for awhile. The only tv shows I watch are things I catch in syndication, typically when I'm at work, so I'm not sure why I care. But I have made time to catch A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila, a show which seems to be devoted to answering the question, "How long can a jacuzzi operate before it becomes clogged with self-tanning lotion, body glitter and hair extensions?" From any standpoint besides the most base, the show is indefensible, although I must say when that stripper from New Jersey tackled the Morgage Consultant from Costa Mesa, it made for some compelling television. (It even topped a previous episode where the rejected elementary school teacher stood outside the house smashing potted palms and screaming "Tiiiiiiiillllllllllllaaaaaaaa!!!" into the night.)

What I take from this is that people don't mind making asses of themselves on television, and that people are also willing to record some of their most intimate, unguarded thoughts and feelings and post them on the internet for no good reason other than perhaps a desire to be known by someone, somewhere, even if you never meet them.

But I am wandering far afield of my point here. Thinking about this made me think that by 2070 (or 2060, or 2050), this will be old news. Right now, entertainment companies seem to have no idea what to do with Youtube, but at some point someone is going to figure out how to make money off of user-generated content. (And by someone, I mean someone in entertainment. Youtube itself is doing pretty good as I understand it.) At some point, the user-generated content will become as sophisticated (if that's the word I want) as the "unscripted" shows that make it on tv right now. The primary difference between A Shot at Love and security camera footage from any airport-adjacent strip club anywhere in America is editing.

Which makes me think of Simsense. In Shadowrun, not only can you watch people create emotional trainwrecks for your enjoyment, you can actually experience it for yourself. Simsense stars probably have less in common with the actors of today and more in common with the "stars" of reality television, people whose main "talent" (I really need to start buying these quotation marks in bulk) is being themselves, preferably in the most disastrous way possible. A talented actor may make you believe anything while you're watching them, but on Simsense it might come off as white noise. Method actors might have an edge here, but how much effort does it take them to get to a point that would be useful for Simsense, to really believe in the character? And ultimately, they're still just pretending. Simsense, recording the raw human emotion for playback, would seem to benefit from being used on people who aren't self-aware enough act or who aren't self-aware enough to know they're acting; who simply are. The primary talent of a Simsense star-- like a reality television star-- is to be.

Which brought me the long way round to Simsense Blogs. Instead of just watching something someone has vidded ("Leave Britney Alone" indeed), people could in SR record snippets of their emotional day and put them up for other people to experience. My first thought is, "Who the hell would want to?", but if the Youtube thing has taught me anything, its that my finger is not on the pulse of humanity.

Still thinking about Simsense, I dusted off Strange Days and watched it. This movie always makes me wonder why Simsense is generally relegated to a background/fluff thing in SR. I mean, the plot hooks seem endless, and those are just the ones in the movie, nevermind whatever dark directions our imaginations can take it. But typically, most of the time it comes up is just as a stand in for movied (simsense) or drugs (BTLs). Really, the implications of the technology don't factor in that much-- you can switch out simsense stars for movie stars and hard drugs for BTLS and nothing much changes.

However else it succeeds or fails, Strange Days is a primer on how to use Simsense in game. As Lenny explains early on in the film, as much to the viewer as to the suit he's hustling, "Look, I want you to know what we're talking about here. This isn't like TV only better. This is life. It's a piece of somebody's life. Pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex. You're there. You're doing it, seeing it, hearing it... feeling it."

Star quality in an actor is a mixture of presence, attractiveness and ability-- all relatively useless in Simsense. The attraction to an actor is all about being on the outside and looking in, in Simsense you're on the inside looking (and hearing, and feeling) out. Let's use pornography as an example, since that's a pretty popular subset of Simsense. A porn star may be a lot of fun to look at while he or she is getting nailed, but if they're not feeling it, in Simsense, its a dud. There's no faking it in Simsense. A person with a diminished fear response (saw it on a episode of Law & Order: CI, starring Vincent D'Onofrio, who was in Strange Days) would be useless in Simsense; if you don't feel the rush of adrenalin, the end user isn't going to either. Now granted, reality television is pretty fake, but I think it still makes a closer analogue for Simsense than movies. This is probably a pretty good justification as to why more runners aren't Simsense stars, having mainlined adrenalin for years running just doesn't have the kick the end user would expect. (There are plenty of other reasons why runners wouldn't be recording simsense, like that it would implicate them in crimes, people wouldn't deal with people who were recording things, and so on, but if the end result was a valuable sim-- say, movie-like profits-- someone would be trying it.)

Simsense stars would most likely be hyper-emotional people. Picture the girl in your office who has a little to drink at the Christmas party and ends up weeping in the copy room. That's who I'd pick as a Simsense star. Those people who always seem swept up in the grand drama that is their life. The physical stuff in Simsense-- the sensations-- is pretty easy to replicate, most things feel similar enough to different people. Its the emotional content that can't be easily contrived.

The Observer Effect is also at work here. By recording your emotions, you're changing them, if for no other reason that you know you're being recorded. This makes feeling the raw, human emotions more difficult. This raises some interesting points about Simsense recordings. We can assume Sim Stars are the people that can repress that difficulty and let the raw stuff through, or who can manipulate themselves to a certain degree. Simsense might also record for long periods of time in order to get the few minutes when the subject isn't really thinking about it and is operating instinctually. But there are other, more insidious options. You could record unaware people or manufacture the situations. To take it in a bleak direction, torturing someone you had hooked up to a simrig (cyber is required for full-X, but that dates back to Shadowbeat, so the tech may have been updated sense then), you'd probably get pretty authentic emotions. (I think the module Queen Euphoria used a gimmick like this, but its been years since I played it and I don't know how much my GM modded it.)

Another use for Simsense would be to allow people to feel what other people are feeling. Think how useful that would be in Medicine, where a doctor's diagnosis often has to contend with the patient's subjective interpretation of the symptoms. Not every condition will express itself identically from patient to patient, and people tend to feel things differently, but it still seems like it would give doctors a significant advantage in treating their patients. It would also make for an effective empathy training tool. (A male gynocologist could experience a cervical exam from the patient's perspective; husbands could synthlink to their wives during childbirth. Oh, the humanity.)

Three of our group's runners have simsense rigs from a movie gig. This post made me think about some possibilities I did not consider before yet.

If you haven't already, check out Strange Days. I'm trying to keep this spoiler-light, but as I mentioned above, it's a how-to manual for using Sim in a game.

I saw the movie on the big screen, back when it came out.

Well, here's a refresher on the movie. 20 Years of Cyber Cinema: Chapter 17: Calm Down Baby, This Is What I Do.

Really? Cool. I've read SSG, maybe that little bit has been bouncing around in my subconscious.

Pages 25-26, discussing "Performers".