Greets,

I was thinking between 1srt and 4th edition, and also thinking in parallel with something one of the set designers in Star Trek said. One of the biggest problems with doing the future is how fast technology becomes an accepted part of our lifestyle. 20 years ago Mobile phones were bricks, 10 years ago they no longer needed cars, now they are more mobile computers than telephones.

How do you perceive Shadowrun 10 years down the line when new applications of existing technology take form, and more importantly become ubiquitous?

Computers will continue to get smaller, I think in 10 years it's not unreasonable that Blackberries and whatnot become more and more like SR's Commlinks.

Will Shadowrun then have to update the technology in the universe to keep up? Are we talking nano-computers and even weirder stuff. For example, "telepresence" via the Matrix. You can alter reality around you as it is, why not also bring your friends along? Not just via glorified IM through AR interfaces but through a reality filter/projector. Shop with your friend who's at home sick or halfway across the planet, carry on a long distance relationship without ever leaving their side.

Okay perhaps that just increases the creepiness factor, but it's a step above an overlay.

Shadowrun will need some global stuff to define it beyond just technology. Good ol' fashioned wars should do it, say reconquering the NAN territories. Broaden the perspective a bit, show how war is waged in the 6th World.

Perhaps full-body cyborg replacement becomes even more advanced and perhaps culturally acceptable. For the moment, 'ware is something we're still in the very early stages of.

Building AR on RFID reference is pretty much SciFi - especially in a setting with unreliable GPS and where you can pinpoint a RF signal source with an accuracy of 50m at best...

RL AR is build on image reference, leading to stuff like Bokode.

Thing is, I don't think SR tech is any less futuristic just because we have various tech in the here in now. Sorta like how I can still think of the Fallout games as futuristic. I hope you know what I mean, like how does that one quote go "I don't know what weapons WWIII will be fought with, but I know WWIV will be fought with sticks and stones." With how SR's world balkanized, its a bit like they already went through WWIII thanks to magic, so even though its 2072, I don't mind if our world's present day prototypes and military are SR 2072 ubiquitous and commercial - sorta like how APRANET wasn't exactly everywhere the next day until about the 1990s where people started to put into terms like webpages and what not.

And even as our tech filters down to the lowest levels of the economically down trodden, say by what they find in the trash that the rich to non-existent middle class threw away or being so cheap to make that it can be sold at a price point that won't dig into food and shelter over much, so as to become ubiquitous through most of the infrastructure/culture - the tech still has to conform to how metahumanity uses it. Just because it gets smaller doesn't necissarily mean our metahuman fingers do, so either the physical buttons/toggles better be appropriate or the AR glove keyboard and mouse. Hope that makes some sense.

SR has this interesting mix of tech Utopia really being Dystopia, so in that way Star Trek can go screw itself.

There maybe a need for a new technological paradigm shift that needs to form and occur in the fantasy/science fiction fantasy genre like there was in the late 1980s with Gibson, Shadowrun, Cyberpunk, Steampunk etc.

A new creative team of thinkers, artists, writers, etc may need to emerge to come up with ideas which totally blow away the imaginations of the 2009. Chrysalis is right. In the 1980s, a lot of what we see in SR and Science Fiction was a pandora's box waiting to be opened. Now a days I would not be surprised if the military of the developing words have technology equal to what we imagine in Shadowrun.

New creators. New ideas. That's what is needed.

Some technology moves fast (computers) and some moves very, very slow (internal combustion engine vehicles). Are you asking what Shadowrun might look like if it was designed 10 years from now in 2019? I suspect it would have taken on even more transhumanist aspects than it has now. The promise of amazing body-altering technology was a twinkle on the edge of social discourse in 1980, and consequently made for a great RPG premise; nowadays that technology is mainstream, in concept if not yet in fact, so it's not considered so groundbreaking as a game anymore. Shadowrun would have to internalize some really out-there tech 10 years from now to present anything new or mindblowing the way the Matrix or Cyberware was in 1989. Tough act to follow, to put it simply.