Thanks Steve! Playing in a D&D campaign with a small group of thoughtful individuals is a lot of fun. My upbringing tended to over-emphasize technical subjects at the expense of more humanistic and social fields. In many ways, this experience has been doing a lot to develop my inner theater kid.
One member of the group is playing an automata named ASHA. ASHA was created to be a laboratory assistant to a wizard, and when the wizard died, ASHA gained sentience. Much of ASHA's journey now is coming to understand what it could mean to be sentient. The different members of the party bring insights into this question through interactions with ASHA and together we develop a possible world. Some prefer to express all change through their character and character-party-world interactions. Others prefer to express change through `meta-gaming`, ie. talking about their characters. In the end, there are many opportunities for very different minds to cast light on a single collective fiction, and to build a consensus about what kind of world these characters inhabit. The practice has done a lot for helping me to identify less with the various roles I exact in my life, and to understand the social value of improv games like `yes and`. The most difficult task for me remains in the immersion. I often am looking for a sense of embodiment with my character, that there may be some way to build meaningful models of the character's world and to correctly hypothesize more easily. I remember reading that Hoffmann paper sometime ago, and while it seemed interesting I wasn't sure where I could go deeper with the theory. Off the top of my head, it struck me as offering up API as metaphor for perception and on the whole I may be too personally invested in something more like direct perception. idk.
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