Workshop Episode 19 (Guest Host: Seth Harwood)

Not to rain on Mr. Sobkowiak’s parade, but this is perhaps one of the most standard video game setups ever. So common, in fact, it has it’s own page on TV Tropes.

This doesn’t mean it can’t be turned into an interesting story, but it won’t be one the audience doesn’t have some experience with. In fact one of my very favorite anime movies uses a plot very similar to yours and turns it into an incredible dissertation on life and the struggle against death.

In your case, I strongly advise thinking things through more carefully and making the world reflect the main character. It should be a mirror of him in some way, and represent a challenge he needs to overcome.

It’s too bad you don’t like the idea of the other scientists being in there with him, because the idea of the priests being the other scientists was one of the most interesting one of the discussion. After all, what do the clerics want? Order. They represent the system which is becoming corrupted trying to keep control and not letting everything slide into chaos.

Actually, another (completely possible bullsh*t) take on things would be to flip things around. The citizens of the town are dying/turning into monsters (a representation of the degredation) and the hero Issac has to work with the Clerics to fine a “cure”, which in reality is the cure the computer needs to save the system. Or perhaps he refuses to work with them, because they want to “cleanse the infected” and he seeks to find a more humane cure to this mysterious plague.

Just a thought.

As long as everything works towards a goal, it can be a good story.

Rob

Wooo, responding a REALLY long time after this post was made! I just recently discovered this podcast, and now I’m trying to catch up. Anyway, I just wanted to relate a semi-eerie experience I had while listening to this episode.

Specifically, I thought of a bunch of ideas for the story within the first 5 minutes of the brainstorming session, and then, slowly, over the course of the hour, nearly all of them were brought up by Brion and Dave (Robison).

I doubt anyone will see this post, but I feel the need to throw in my two cents for posterity:

A lot of these ideas were brought up by Brion and Dave in the episode, but I felt like they needed to be put together and taken further.

The protagonist wakes up in this surreal, isolated western town. The other scientists are in the same town, all in the roles of the other important characters in the story, one is the nurse who aids the protagonist, one is the sheriff, one is Jacob, the leader of the priests, one is an insane town drunk, the last one could be the barkeep, or another of the priests, or something like that.

The reason for Issac’s memory loss is that because the A.I. is losing power, it has begun resetting the system at regular, increasingly more frequent intervals in an attempt to reclaim memory and extend its life, and by extension those of the scientists.

Originally, the world they were in was a whole city, in which they had a massive lab, which they used to run the experiments that they couldn’t run in the real world, for one reason or another. Every time the A.I. restarts the system, the world gets smaller as parts of it get deleted to free up resources. For a long time the most vital parts remained active, and the scientists all remained aware of what was happening, but eventually they stayed in the system too long (as Dave suggested) and began losing their memory during restarts.

Finally, the world has become so simple that it is meant only to give the scientists a place to subsist and survive until the next restart, but the A.I. has determined that it will not be able to continue to sustain all of them this time, and realizes that it needs to communicate directly with its creator(s) in order to decide what to do next. Unfortunately, Issac and the others are so entrenched in the construct world that the A.I. could not extract them without damaging their minds, so it sets up one last scenario and programs in an exit strategy for Issac, so that if he makes the right moves and remembers what is happening, he can be extracted without damage to his mind.

The deterioration of the world mirrors the deterioration of the A.I. and of the minds of the scientists themselves. There should be a broken down lab in the basement of Issac’s house in town, with dusty and shattered tubing and equipment, a stained lab table, jars of strange chemicals with eroded labels, etc. This is all that remains of the original virtual lab the scientists used to use for their research.

The A.I. has left little clues around town for Issac to pick up, each one giving him back part of the knowledge of the real situation, and each clue he obtains makes the town a more surreal, more frightening place. The final clue is on the person of the high priest, Jacob, who was the scientist that Issac clashed with the most in real life. When the final showdown happens, and Issac kills or disables Jacob, he gains the final clue, and everything comes rushing back in a data dump that his mind is finally ready to handle, he awakes in the real world and the A.I. lays out the crisis for him.

He decides to sacrifice himself to buy his fellow scientists more time, and renewed memory and tools within the virtual world.

Incidentally, I tend to agree with Dave and Brion when they say that Issac should probably be kind of an asshole at the start of the book. It makes sense for him to change his spots somewhat as he regains memory/identity and learns from the characters around him. Also, making him more of an asshole gives him some of the necessary drive to actively seek out the clues and his own identity rather than being dragged along by circumstance.

Anyway, even though a lot of this stuff has been done before, I still think it’s a great story idea and has a lot of interesting potential. I would totally read it (if I had time! SOOO many books to read… Sooo little time.)

Great podcast guys, keep up the good work!

–Nathan