Liquid Crystal

A while ago I attended a philosophy seminar where the last presentation was about using science fiction as a tool for research. For researchers interested in culture and society, it may give invaluable possibilities. The idea is to use science fiction as a “what if”-scenario. Most of the elements of society can be kept constant (gender roles, economic structures) while some (ideologies, length of life span) are altered to see what the resulting societies look like. These scenarios are intuitively understandable, as long as they are close enough to our own conception of society. ...

Next weekend I’ll have chance to play Liquid Crystal again. It is a game in which players create and play robots with no personality to start with. The game is set in a utopian (or dystopian) future where most of the humanity is wiped out and the remainder try to build anew, starting with the city of New Olympus. The back story is largely unimportant, as it is not a game about exploration, unless that is defined very specifically to mean the psyche of the robot played. In another words, it is game of building personalities and seeing how they turn out. Very few games start with a blank character sheet that is completed based on the events of the game, and not the other way around. ...