Wednesday, March 4, 2009

"Sufficiently Advanced" - A RPG about Intellectual Property!


I read a review of "Sufficiently Advanced" and am blown away by the concept here. To quote:

"As the author explains, trade in physical items and forms of currency is long obsolete in the setting, given most civilizations’ ability to create and transmute all forms of matter from elementary particles. Ideas – what we today call “intellectual property” – remain the only universal source of value. For that reason, the one organization acknowledged by nearly all the far-flung descendants of humanity is the universal Patent Office. The default player character group in Sufficiently Advanced is a team of Patent Office Inspectors, special agents empowered to investigate suspected violations of the Office’s IP regulations. Since the Office’s most interesting cases tend to involve illegal reproduction of things like planet-cracking weaponry or mind-influencing subsonics, this is a more exciting job than it might at first appear.

Nor is the Patent Office simply an IP-enforcement organization. The power behind the Patent Office is that of the Transcendentals, short for Transcendental Artificial Intelligences. These vast beings, the very first sapient AIs created by humanity, are the source of much modern technology, including the physics-bending wormhole generators that permit instantaneous travel between distant galaxies. The most important property of the Transcendentals, shared at present with no other intelligent beings, is that their consciousnesses exist spread across time in such a way that they can receive messages from their own future selves."

The game itself is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 3.0 license. Its development blog has an amazing graphic showing the relationships among the various SA universe's factions. Wow.

1 comments:

Don Snabulus said...

I feel I should make a strident joke about RIAA or MPAA in the future, but I can't bring myself to do it.

I like the premises of the game. I wish them well.

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