Our own little Truman Show...

Martin Heidegger's final words on the subject of The Question Concerning Technology put me in mind of a few things, but none so much as the 1998 movie The Truman Show. In that movie, Truman Burbank lived his entire life within the confines of a world created for and around him, unknowing of his situation and manipulated by a mysterious director to please the masses with 24 hour reality television. Quite a few of Heidegger's ideas on technology and man's relationship with it can be seen on display here.

ENFRAMING

The whole premise of the movie is based around the concept of Enframing. Heidegger proposes that in nature, revelation is brought about by an almost symbiotic relationship with the seeker of knowledge and the propensity for knowledge to reveal itself. The seeker awaits revelation and then uses that gained knowledge to inform himself where to look for the next revelation. There is no force, there is no definition, there only is what is as it happens. In other words: Experience.

Technology, however, uses force to wrest that information from nature and then frames it in a way that can be 'used' to force other revelations from nature and generate power from these discoveries. It seeks not to experience nature and work with it, but to control it and keep it bound to the will of man, to be used at his whim.

In the example of the Truman Show, the Director wants to create an interesting fiction, but he wants natural results from his fiction so he creates an artificial world over which he has complete control to enframe another human from birth. The artifice of Truman's world was such that every event in his life was under complete control of the this director, who believed that only by removing all traces of artifice could he get true human response, the essence of human experience, out of Truman.

STANDING RESERVE

Watching the normal human experience unfold naturally is not good Drama, however, so the Director must be able to control the flow of Truman's life in order to make sure that his highs and lows are timed appropriately for the benefit of an audience and ratings. He does this by controlling the weather, the temperature, the behavior of the people Truman interacts with, everything and anything to keep The Truman Show entertaining for the audience. As such, Truman is an object, not a human, and exists solely as a Standing Reserve, as described by Heidegger. A resource to be tapped when needed.

THE BIG PICTURE

The Director may seem to be in control, and sees himself as the creator. A god of sorts. He sits in his heaven on the moon, removed from everyone, observing and interfering as he sees fit and even 'appearing' to Truman at the end of the movie in an effort to keep him from leaving the 'Garden of Eden' and gaining true knowledge. The truth of that matter is one that even he cannot see due to the effects of Enframing.

The demands of the audience through ratings, the need to introduce surreal and unnatural events into Truman's life for corporate purposes (like the unnatural use of Product Placement), and the need to have complete and total control of the environment show that even the 'creator' is only creating at the behest of forces even greater than he. He may sit behind the camera, but the camera is not the true Enframing device, and the Director is as much a slave to the show as Truman is. So is the audience, who hang on ever image. And the corporation, whose lifeblood depends on the show's success. The big picture is very big indeed. Far bigger than Truman's Dome.

THE HEISENBERG IRONY

By exerting such enormous control over one man's life in order to elicit the most pure example of human experience, the Director cannot get a natural response. The very act of interfering changes the way Truman behaves. The very act of the Audience watching changes the way The Director behaves. The Corporation using product placement changes the way the Audience behaves, etc. There can be no natural result from all of these technological machinations, only artifice.

THE REAL WORLD ∞

In our own world we have Reality Television, but although the player's all know that they are on camera, unlike poor Truman, the results are largely the same. The camera itself, the very act of Enframing, encourages the players to act in whatever way gains them the most fame or notoriety. Would Snooki be a drunken slattern if there weren't cameras following her around 24/7? Maybe, but the fact is that her behaviors would have very different results and consequences. The exposure ( in the camera sense) incentivizes her behavior.

And Snooki's antics affect her viewers. Her behavior, which would be considered far outside the norm to the average person, becomes normalized in the minds of the viewers who see her fame and money and want the same. Youtube is replete with folks who use the example of Snooki or Johnny Knoxville as the pattern for seeking their 15 minutes of fame by defiling or injuring themselves on camera (the number of videos where young men injure their testicles alone is an omen that doesn't bode well for future population growth) and posting their humiliation for the whole world to see. It's causing a huge cultural shift at the moment.

And as go the viewers, so go the corporations. Reality Television may or may not be good television, but it sure gathers the ratings so you can bet that broadcast entities will be stocking a great deal of their line-up with it. Which means that there will be less non-reality programming to watch. Which means that it will get higher ratings. Which means more Reality Programming will be produced, etc., etc., ad infinitum. Sort of like crossing a Reality Show Event Horizon into a cultural black hole.

Heidegger would have laughed...

The New Table-Top RPG Paradigm...

I got a comment on a thread about my Playbook app over on RPG.Net, and as grad school has given me some new tools for thinking on the subject, I thought I'd post up the comment and my reply (which is a more direct and precise statement of what I'm trying to achieve and why than the OP) here.

THE COMMENT

A friend pointed me towards your thread after a blog post I'd made wondering why there weren't games like this being made. Clearly there are. =)

There are two things I'm curious about regarding your approach to the product:

- The first is: Why did you opt to design it so that multiple devices would be needed?

- The second is: Why did you feel it important for it to feel like it was just like a tabletop game?

Part of what sparked my blog post was the number of other games that have play-and-pass modes for the iPhone, like Settlers of Catan. My thought was that you could have one game that you could play at any time anywhere you like. With the GM being the primary controller of the device, then passing it onto players when they need to take action.

From you description it seems like you are targeting a narrow margin of players who (a) want to maintain the feel of the standard TTRPG and (b) play with people that have multiple devices of the same format. When it seems like this is something you could approach from a new direction and bring new people into the hobby.

THE REPLY

You don't need to have multiple devices. You could easily just let the GM use the tablet to keep track of everything himself, use a combination of the tablet and traditional paraphernalia, like dice and paper record sheets for players, etc. It's just designed to work that way as the full realization of a shift in play style from the pen and paper of old to the digital play-style that future portable computing devices offer.

As far as the importance of the TTRPG paradigm, I spoke to that in the OP, but I'll reiterate the thought process here with a more personal reason behind the design. Basically, it boils down to the areas in which a TTRPG is different from a CRPG that make it a viable and interesting form of entertainment in the modern age:

1. TTRPGs allow more freeform story-telling than CRPGs with much less work and in a much more flexible setting.

2. TTRPGs are primarily a face to face social form of game play more in line with board games than CRPGs.

3. TTRPGs are, for the most part, more portable and can be played in a wider variety of real world settings (from the dining room table to a pub to the park) than a CRPG.

4. TTRPGs (and this is going to get a bit academic, here) exist in a more immediate acoustic form of space than the strict visual space of the hyper-mediated CRPG, which is a very different play experience.

And then there are the very practical reasons:

5. Print is becoming increasingly impractical as medium of distribution for independent designers. PDFs, which are simply print in a digital format, are very passive and still require the GM and players to utilize extensive external paraphernalia. Modern digital tools are very generic and require you to already have the game and then you (or somebody else) must program its parameters into the system, and most aren't very portable and take little advantage of the current technology, like the ability to 'flip' information (in our case secret messages, dice results, or even wounds) from one device user to another using simple wi-fi.

6. Humans, themselves, are quickly adapting mentally to incorporate the presence of smart-phones, tablets, social media and other forms of instant communication not as simple tools but as literal extensions of their bodies and identities. To not adapt a pre-digital art form to this new paradigm and take full advantage of it is to, IMO, relegate it to the dustbin of history.

And now for the very personal reasons. Basically, I find the TTRPG experience to be superior to the CRPG in a number of ways. The way they encourage spending time with my friends and family in a positive social environment, the way I can choose the people I want to share that environment with, the way they stimulate my imagination and don't limit it, the way they encourage me to tell my own stories, and the way I can leave the house on a nice day, go down to the park and sit around on the grass and play games with my buddies while watching my kid play football and generally interact with the world outside instead of sitting around in front of a computer screen and shutting myself off from it.

In all I am passionate about what is a historically unique hobby that is, by my reckoning and by the reckoning of others in the industry, slowly aging and failing to truly keep up with the ever-changing face of human-technology interaction. I want to see it thrive and survive, to evolve into a form that will give it a whole new appeal for future generations right up until the time they finally create the SquID or holodeck, either one of which will probably kill every other form of media interaction stone-dead.

To do this I'm taking the basic strengths of TTRPGs and:

1. Digitizing everything necessary to play in order to free the GM and player up from having to carry around anything but a very portable smart-device.

2. Automating as many of the basic rules as possible so that the need to flip through books, mark changes, or do math or any form of number crunching and accounting is eliminated as a distraction from game-play and allow the users to exist in a much more immediate, acoustic brain-space.

3. And finally, putting it all in a single package that resembles the boxed sets of old, but in a format that takes into account the new human-technology paradigm.

Long post, but I hope that answers your question... 

A Future Benjamin and Nichols Could Not Forsee...

After reading Benjamin and Nichols, all the talk of property and copyright brought to mind another (much more amusing) article I read last year that talked about the ultimate result of technological automation on the concept of commerce and capitalism: Forced Artificial Scarcity.

In simple terms , when intellectual property becomes digital, it becomes that much easier to reproduce and redistribute, devaluing the actual worth of the product. At that point, any value attached to an object of art or creative effort is, in reality, nothing outside of what you can make people believe it has. As a result, marketing  becomes more valuable than ever and more money may be spent on that than on the actual product itself. Well, that and trying to clamp down on resources, like the internet, to introduce scarcity in a post-scarcity environment.

We have some great examples of some of the principles talked about there, but here are three of the wider social ramifications of post-scarcity technology that come to my mind.

OWNERSHIP IS DEAD

While the ability to pirate material makes intellectual property worth pretty much nothing and makes a mockery out of copyright laws, it is also forcing companies to switch to a non-ownership model for software. There was a battle in the courts between Adobe and software resellers that centers around 'first sale rights,' the concept that Adobe is only selling the license to use their software, and the physical package does not actually constitute any form of personal property on the part of the consumer. Therefore, selling your old copies to a used bookstore is a form of copyright infringement / software piracy.

While this argument hasn't really hasn't had any traction with the courts, it has started manufacturers thinking about the way they provide software in the age of 'cracked' copies. With the near ubiquity of  high speed internet access, the concept of 'leased' software that exists entirely online could put an end to personally owned software. The Nook already has a similar licensing scheme in place.

Benjamin and Nichols argue that the rise of mechanical and cybernetic technology 'frees' the 'proletariat' from the 'fascism' that can only be held through 'property.' This new development seems to show the opposite, however, in that new technology has is being used to take the means of production, the property if you will, out of the workers hands completely.

THE POST-SCARCITY VILLAGE

If you can get everything you need from your computer, why go out and interact with your neighbors or society at large? This can have a detrimental effect on societal structure as the close bonds and sense of community that existed by way of necessity dissolve away and the individual becomes a lone island in a sea of indifference.

This has particular ramifications for crime prevention. The safety of many neighborhoods is centered around the individual homeowners knowing who their neighbors were, who belonged in the neighborhood, who didn't and by communication between members of the neighborhood watch or similar group. With people becoming more insular, due to the presence of a computer with internet access in every home and every need provided online, there is little incentive to get involved in the community structure personally or even to look out of the window on occasion to see what's going on.

This is a godsend for criminals, who depend on ambivalence and inattention to operate effectively. The most potent crime deterrent is nosy neighbors who are looking out for you, but  in most modern settings, folks are hard-pressed to tell you anything about the person living next door, much less two or more doors down and any strange noises that emanate from outside their personal sphere of existence is 'somebody else's problem.'

ART IS HARD TO DEFINE AND EVEN HARDER TO LIVE OFF OF

There are two real problems with the way IP is so freely reproduced and distributed across the internet. The first is that I sympathize with Lars Ulrich. As a writer of game books, I can expect to sell about 300 - 400 copies of an e-book before my sales tank thanks to the material being reproduced and downloaded thousands of times on Bittorrent. This of course, means that I'm actually only making a fraction of the amount I should have earned on material that people obviously enjoy, but don't want to pay me for.

On top of that problem, due to the fact that everyone and their dog can self-publish today, the torrent of material available in an already niche industry means that many good quality projects are lost in a sea of chaff. Mechanical reproduction may bring art to the masses, but it also brings a lot of dross as well and the desperation to make a living out of your art can lead to a 'lowest common' denominator kind of production where quick, cheap 'spam' is the order of the day.

The concept of the 'Starving Artist' is alive and well in the 21st century...

THE FUTURE OF FArtS

Ostensibly, the Cracked article is a comedy one, but there are real  ramifications in the concept that technology is doing even more to change society than either Benjamin or Nichols could have forseen from their respective places in the 30's and the 80's. Indeed, many of the things they hoped to see eliminated, like the 'male gaze' that 'objectifies' women (which is totally cemented into place by the ubiquity of internet porn), and the freedom of the 'proletariat' from 'capitalist fascism' (which is actually creating an environment where corporations must become even more creative in their methods of chaining their customers to them out of the need for economic survival in the face of unfettered piracy) are actually being reinforced via the freedom provided by mechanical and cybernetic reproduction.

Beyond Immedacy: Devolution...?

After last week's discussion, the concept of the Holodeck was proffered as the ultimate expression of Immediacy, by which I mean the ability to be totally and completely immersed in a fictional or virtual reality where any technological apparatus is completely and utterly hidden from the participant's perception.

I occurred to me that Immediacy doesn't end there, however. 'Being There' has never been enough for humanity and almost every individual, consciously or unconsciously, places their own 'spin' or personality on the subject material no matter what the medium. When reading a book, we put faces on the characters and dress them in our mind's eye as we would like to see them (sometimes even in the face of a complete description given directly in the text), we interpret their motives as good or bad and we often try to imagine what we, ourselves might do differently in certain situations.

This desire remains even when watching a film, which may show us directly what a character looks like and even what their motives and outlook are by the exaggerated body language of the actor, but restricts exploration of the fictional world to those areas where the director decides to place his camera and often leaves us with a lack of closure at the end of the film as to the further lives and experiences of the characters. At times, the feeling of helplessness as you watch a specific character do something incredibly stupid can be intense as you place yourself in their shoes and think 'all of this could have been avoided if I were that character' and 'no way would I go down in a basement, by myself, with no lights with a serial killer on the loose.'

Computer games give in to this impulse, in a limited fashion, allowing you to do what you want within the restrictions of the programming. Table-top Role Playing Games give even more freedom, the story being almost entirely free-form and unrestricted by anything but the imagination and the need to 'step-out' of the story to consult rules or roll dice, but lack the immediacy of a 3D rendered environment and automated rules handling by the computer.

Our theoretical 'Holodeck' is the ultimate form of immediacy, of course. You are 'there' for all intents and purposes and your actions are only restricted by what the virtual reality environment around you restricts you to in much the same manner as 'real' reality. What's more important about it, however, is not the level of reality it can recreate, but the level of 'unreality' it allows the user to indulge in. Here is an environment in which all your personal feelings, frustrations and peccadilloes can be set free to roam about in a world entirely of your own creation. And you can live there.

This can be entertaining, to be sure, and when you watch Star Trek the Next Generation, you see a bunch of enlightened folks doing proper things like reliving a Sherlock Holmes mystery or indulging their musical interests and then politely unplugging themselves when reality needs attending to. All very nice and orderly, but considering the main uses film, games and internet are put to today, this idealized idea of what the Holodeck would be used for in the future seems fairly naive.

What about those base aspects of humanity that are only given free reign through some sort of virtual reality?
Think all minorities are inferior beings and want to indulge your whip-wielding domination fantasies on them? Want a world of women (or men, or animals or zombies, whatever) who are debased before you in every manner you can think of and are devoted only to your pleasure? Want a world where Christians are hung up on crosses with their heads lit on fire like human torches while you fiddle in your coliseum, lord over all you can lay waste too? Want to be God? Or the Devil?

You can do these things today through film, video games or the internet and one might argue it has coarsened the human condition considerably as is, even within these Hyper-mediated mediums where reality can tug at your sleeve to remind you that it's 'all a game.' Imagine the effects on the mind of a person who can completely immerse themselves in their base desires with no interruption from reality, living in a world of the Id, in which the thoughts and desires of other human beings are completely subservient to their own. Nietzche' greatest dream and fear come true in one fell swoop.

Imagine a world of such people. All the millenniums of cultural evolution, all the lessons of morality and need for social norms, all of that gone out the window as our brains are restructured not only by technology (as many of the books I've been reading suggest) but by the reality we choose to live in. What kind of people come out of the other end of that?

So, the question is an age old one of 'just because we can do a thing, should we do it?' We have seen so many instances in history, particularly the last 100 years, where mankind's ability to create technology far outpaces his ability to understand its ramifications and responsibly use it. This is even truer today, when technological innovation comes at an exponential pace but our society is even more fractured and divided than ever before. And given the ability of technology to shape our thoughts and behavior, shouldn't we stop and try to understand that process a little better and try to predict the ultimate results before jumping feet first into the 'latest thing' to come down the technological pike and just 'see where it takes us?'

Another age old question, this time on morality and values, is brought to mind as I think about this. There is a strong movement in western civilization towards perspectivism and moral equivalency, basically 'there are no useful morals, no justifiable judgments, no need for values, just a need to be free to do whatever feels good to the individual.' This is considered by the secular progressive movement to be the only way to world peace and human enlightenment. But in the face of such transformative technology, where one's own desires are God, isn't a strong set of values and morals to guide the user absolutely imperative before entering such a world?

How can one fight the Id if there is no Superego to balance it out? And how does a person without a basic set of societal values interact with the rest of the world of the real, when the world of the unreal reinforces their most base instincts? And will they want to live in that world at all or just lose themselves in 'The Id Universe, where [Fill in the Blank]s want him (in the most perverse ways) and [Fill in the Blank]s want to be him, except for those [Fill in the Blank]s who serve him and never revolt at his violent abuse because they know their place.'

Things to consider as we move into a new age where the lines between humanity and technology are rapidly blurring...

Analyzing the Playbook Concept using the lens of Remediation...

Continuing on from my previous post, in which I applied precepts from my class reading to a better understanding of the strength's and weaknesses of my Playbook concept, I will now analyze it through the lenses of Immediacy, Hyper-immediacy and Remediation (based upon the theories of Bolter and Gruslin in Remediation: Understanding New Media). If you're not in my EMAC class and have no idea what I'm talking about, here is a definition of those terms along with some of the ways in which they are applied and the occasional personal commentary on the implications from yours truly.

IMMEDIACY

When you are experiencing a 'virtual reality,' whether a story in a book, a movie or a video game, most mediums attempt to give you a sense of 'immediacy,' or in other words, they try to make you feel as though 'you're there' in whatever ways are possible within the limitations of that medium. The main way of achieving this goal is to make the source of mediation, the technology being applied to bring you into this alternate reality, fade into the background and achieve transparency so that you don't notice it at all.

The goal of most painting, particularly the work of the Great Masters, for example, is to provide you with a window into another place or time. Films give you an active picture into that world and video games give an interactive experience that goes beyond film. Even these mediums, however, must provide extremely moving or immersive experiences in order to distract you from the tech behind them, and only a true VR device, like the Subquantum Interference Device (SquID) seen in the movie Strange Days, could even approach the true Holy Grail of Immediacy.

Personally, while I like the concept of 'being there,' the reality of a technology that can produce true immediacy has many social and psychological pitfalls that must be acknowledged before we plunge headlong into it as we have done with every other piece of technology that has come down the pike. A good example is the concept of the 'Nanobox' computer that has no video-screen. Instead of viewing the output of the computer from a small window, nanites in your body receive transmissions from the box and 'intercept' sensory signals going to your brain and 'edit' them to provide the appropriate feedback. True Immediacy is achieved as everything you see, hear, touch, taste or feel is indistinguishable from that which your normal senses provide you.

The dangers of such a technology are as plentiful as the benefits. The first and foremost is addiction to an unreal existence. Why leave the house, socialize, have children or act on any basic human impulse if everything you've every wanted, particularly sex, is available via 'the box,' with all the consequences and downsides edited out? We see this already with folks addicted to their internet connection and spending more time interfacing with their computers than real live human beings. Just imagine the world of inactive, anti-social lardbutts we could have with true VR.

And then there's the problem of hackers. Think of what they can do now and extrapolate that to actually hacking your senses. They could fool you into doing anything, like walking off a cliff, 'defending' yourself from an axe wielding maniac who is actually your wife asking you what you want for dinner, or trapping you in a VR world of Lovecraftian horrors.

Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I think I'll stick to a medium that keeps one foot in reality.

HYPER-MEDIACY

While the history of mediation is focused on fading into the background to convince you that you're actually 'there,' there are certain instances where a medium will actively work to keep you aware of everything that is going on around it and provide 'fulfillment' by satiating every sense you have with disparate data-streams. Rather than a structured experience, like watching a movie from beginning to end, Hyper-media seeks to provide a smorgasbord of possibilities for you to take in as you will.

The modern cable news is a perfect example of this, with the news anchor talking at you, video playing in a window over their shoulder and a ticker-tape of unrelated news running at the bottom of the screen, you can choose which bits of news you want to absorb without changing a channel. Computer desktops do the same, presenting you with multiple windows of information arranged in whatever fashion you feel is important.

Even the Rock Concert is an exercise in Hyper-immediacy, as the sights, sounds, smells and everything else that typically goes on there is actually part and parcel of the experience that goes beyond the music itself. If you've ever been to a Pink Floyd concert, you'll know exactly what I mean: listening to them and seeing them in concert are two entirely different experiences. the first is immediate and internal, the second is all about the external

Hyper-mediacy has the benefit of being more free-form, open to discontinuity and the mixing of data elements that can lead to 'aha!' moments. The problem with it, unfortunately, is that it is unfocused and can divide attention to a point where much is taken in but little is understood or internalized. In addition, in cases where all the elements are necessary to provide a certain experience, like a rock concert, missing one or two of those vital disparate elements can lead to a lack of fulfillment.

A personal example for me would include certain styles of eating establishments. When I go to El Chico to have a Tex-Mex dinner, one of the things I expect ( and the reason I've gone there for years) is an authentic 'eating experience.' I don't just want the food to be Mexican, I want the walls to look like stucco, the hangings and colors to be of the appropriate style and the music to be Tejano. There's been a push to modernize the palce in the last year, with shiny modern interiors, pop music, etc., that really makes the experience no different from On the Border, El Fenix or any other restaurant, now, so Angelina's ( a little independent place) has become my new El Chico. It may sound silly, but I don't want to hear Lady Gaga while I'm eating at a mexican restaurant. It makes me feel like I'm in a nightclub, not Mexico.

REMEDIATION

By the definition of the authors of Remediation: Understanding New Media, Remediation is three things:

1. The Mediation of Mediation: Basically, the recreation of one medium (whether immediate or hyper-mediate) through another. Making a movie out of a comic book, for instance. It doesn't improve on the comic book, necessarily, it just moves it to another medium.

2. The Inseparability of Mediation and Reality: In other words, no matter how Immediate a Mediator/technology is, there is no existing technology that can completely free you from the knowledge that what you are experiencing is not reality.

3. Reform: Using a previous form of mediation to 'fix' or improve upon an earlier form of mediation. Photography should precise images that couldn't be recreated as accurately by hand, Film shows that reality in motion, computer games allow you to interact with that imagery, etc. or social sites like Facebook are better than email because they are real-time, more visually interesting and easier to manage large groups with.

In a nutshell, Remediation is the process of taking an existing medium and 'updating' or 're-purposing' it for a new technology or medium. And this is where The Playbook comes in...

THE PLAYBOOK AS REMEDIATION THROUGH REFORM
Computer RPGs are Table Top Role-Playing Games as filtered  through the Remediation concept of Reform. Basically, they took the fantasy gaming aspect of D&D and other games of that medium and 'improved' upon them by giving them visuals and automating rules tasks to provide an improved sense of Immediacy.

The Playbook, by intent, is a Remediation by Reform of CRPGs and TTRPGs. It presumes the following weaknesses in both the parent and child formats:

1. TTRPGs are a Hyper-media experience that lacks intended Immediacy because external processes (like referencing rules) tend to take the players out of the story far too often. It also requires a great deal of external paraphenalia that one must be conscious of, like dice, miniatures, a playing surface, etc. that distract from the story and focus play on the Visual space and not the Acoustic.

2. CRPGs improve immediacy through rules automation but limit the Acoustic space of the TTRPG, which increases Hyper-Immediacy, by limiting player options to whatever the programmer managed to put into the program and focusing their attention on a new distraction in the form of status bars and info boxes.

3. Neither is truly at home in the others environment. You can play TTRPG's online through social media, but the Hyper-media experience is unfulfilling for many, lacking in various aesthetic considerations that are the appeal of TTRPG's, namely face to face social interaction (with all the banter and BSing that goes along with it), and the further reduction in Immediacy that the distraction of operating all the technology adds to the already present distraction of rules-books, minis and etc. CRPGs, on the other hand, limit player interaction with the environment and also suffer form the distractions of technology, including glitches, bugs and all the other that never affects the low-tech TTRPG.

The one thing the Playbook must do to address these points if to first realize that the TTRPG experience is, by nature a Hyper-media experience, no matter how badly the players try to create Immediacy during play. You must reference a character sheet, you must roll dice in some form, etc. in order to play the game. On the other hand, Immediacy is a big part of the 'experience' so anything that can reduce that Hyper-Immediacy to a minimum is a boon, and that mainly involves keeping players interacting face to face and making sure that their ability to shape the environment of the game, through the interaction of their characters with the game world in any way they choose and the game master permits, is un-compromised. Keeping that in mind, here is how we address the weaknesses mentioned above:

1. Automate as many game tasks as possible and make all information available in a single intuitive interface, so that attention can be as focused as much as possible on cooperative story-telling with the other players.

2. Remove the distraction of Visual Spacial elements and restrictions so that the players play in a more Acoustic Spacial zone. This will create a unique spacial experience for each player as opposed to the uniform experience provided by a pre-programmed game with pre-defined visuals.

3. By doing the above, you leverage the key aspects of both mediums into a unique functional hybrid that has all the advantages of the older medium, but is updated to take advantage of the new. Basically a complete game with infinite possibilities like the boxed RPGs of old, with the automation and UI improvements of digital technology.

That's the plan, at any rate. The question is this: can it attract enough new blood from the CRPG industry to renew the dying TTRPG industry and allow it to thrive as a form of entertainment and creative expression?