Meeting notice: The 02.July.16 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at 
the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner 
of Main St. and Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't recognize us, ask 
the manager. He'll probably know where we are.  More details below.


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Suggested topic: More on Uploading 

Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games -- MMORPHs -- make a 
ton of money for the few companies lucky enough to have a piece of the 
market -- subscription rates start at $10 a month (EverQuest) and run 
as high as $25 (Lineage) and subscriber levels from the hundreds of 
thousands to the millions.  But because the games as currently 
designed require a level of commitment -- maybe 20 hours a week --
that is out of the question for most people, the market seems 
circumscribed.  So the question for the industry at large is how to 
design a MMORPG such that someone playing only three or four hours a 
week is not overwhelmed by the dorks putting in thirty.

One idea under discussion is that of an autononous avatar -- an entity 
that will take on your identity while you were offline, discharging 
the responsibilities of your online role, including social 
responsibilities, as you would have had you been present, down to 
details of your personality and character.  If you are a peacemaker, 
or a firebrand, or an observer, or quick to anger, or loyal to a 
fault, or a calculator, so would be your online clone.  Whenever you 
log on, your avatar would brief you on everything it had done in your 
name and you would pick up from there.  Presumably these clones would 
be generated by some combination of explicit choices, based perhaps on 
a personality profiling tool  and a scripting tool that would extract 
rules from the record of your online performances.

One of the several questions the prospect of these viritual clones 
raise is what will happen when and as they develop to the point of 
being better than the player at his own ends. Better fighters or 
money-makers are acceptable, but how about better socializers?  Better 
at picking up sex partners?  Better with a comeback?  What will
happen when players notice that people seem to prefer dealing
with his clone, even in non-competitive interactions?


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Is it the case that false positives times false negatives equals a constant?  It
certainly seems that way.  Does this "law" have a name?

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In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon.

				-- Jules Verne, 1865

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Announcement Archive: 
http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.
	
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Legend:

"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group.  The Group meets on 
the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, 
which refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  

The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and 
little else.  If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps 
having received a sample via a forward) send the string 
'subscribe nsg'  to majordomo@world.std.com.  Unsubs follow the 
same model.  

Discussion should be sent to nsg- d@world.std.com, which must be 
subscribed to separately.  You must be subscribed to nsg-d to 
post to it and must post from the address from which you 
subscribed (An anti- spam thing).

Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: 
nsg@pobox.com.