i have been toying with the idea of playing a character who is something of an independent simsense artist - basically, making simsense recordings by splicing together clips and all that jazz...

but my question, anyway--and i HIGHLY doubt i'm going to get any kind of canon answer, it's not what i'm looking for--is do you think a simrig (or the simrig complex form, for a TM) is capable of recording dreams? being that i am (quite unfortunately) somewhat lacking in information about the neuroscience of dreaming, and where the electrical signals that correspond to what we "sense" in dreams originate, i thought it questionable whether or not a standard simrig is capable of recording them or not. the bit about simsense in unwired, if my recall function is working at the moment, used a lot of ambiguous terms like "raw emotive track" or stuff like that, without getting too deep (literally and figuratively) into the brain... but i should probably go back and reread it anyway.

peace, domo, etc! <3

Considering William Gibson's short story The Winter Market and Pat Cadigan's novel Synners were major influences on simsense as we know it today, I'm gonna say "yes."

thanks AH, now i gotta go pick up burning chrome again i guess (which i should probably do anyway, its been a while)

I actually wanted to put something about dream recording into Unwired, but I ran out of word count. And since it wasn't as relevant to shadowrunning, I left it out. But yeah, my view was that a simrig can record dreams, though the recording doesn't often make a lot of sense. Dreams don't conform to linear storytelling very well. But I could see a lot of experimental avant-garde simsense artists working with them.

Yeah, lucid dreaming might be necessary.

I agree about recording dreams.And then all you have to do is kick up the feedback and sell yourself some nightmare BTLs.

Also, in our last long SR campaign, one of our group (who will be GMing this time) played a character with a simrig. She made BTLs, normal sim movies, and alot of snuff sims. She recorded our runs and edited us out (My character eventually found out about it, because he broke into her doss to get something else. So after that, he kept an eye on her work to make sure nothing was important was getting out.), making a kind of reality shadowrunning show. This had the side-effect of making alot of the druggies in Seattle have phobias of large insects... XD

Having a simrig with a transmitter, you can ro recon or be the face of the group, to get information out of people and you could even have someone along for the ride to be able to call in the calvary if things get hairy.

I'm pretty sure that the origional Shadowbeat had a pretty good section about simsense as well. "Raw emotive track" for instance, is what you actually record with your rig. This is generally not very useful AS a final product, unless that's what you're going for. The problem with a raw track is that all of your emotions at any given time get into the feed. This can be confusing for a 'viewer' as many of your emotions about a subject will be unrelated things from personal experiance (you're having a bad day, you see a hooker and get aroused because she's mostly naked but you also feel sadness because your mom was a hooker... stuff like that). Also, there will be times when you feel very strong emotions about a given situation, sometimes the raw recordings of these emotions will spike to levels that are above safety regulations. As such, the raw emotive track needs to be edited both to weed out the unwanted parts which do not add to the film and to make sure that you are meeting all safety regulations. Also, when making an actual film, you may want to start over from scratch on the emotive track, as the actor may not have been feeling the emotions that you wanted to convey to get your point across for the scene. Acrots who can manage to feel the correct emotion on cue are few and far between.

I hope this was helpful... simsense is one of the coolest aspects of cyberpunk, in general. And I haven't quite figured out how to make it work in the real world yet. Though, i'm getting closer I think. I'd call it experimental within 10 years (It's all still theory mind you, but bits and pieces are starting to get closer as new tech is developed. 2020!)

Unwired updates the information about the creation of simsense recordings for Fourth Edition. It covers the same basic material as Shadowbeat, but expands on it a bit to incorporate new technologies.