playing with myself
I watched the TV show Plur1bus recently.
Most of my feedback for Plur1bus would make it a worse TV show.
Carol shouldn't be a Mary Sue. The show shouldn't be a platonic dialogue. Players optimize the fun out of their games.💦
But we're on the cusp of new forms of entertainment that can provide alternatives to having to accept this blindly.
As you may know, I have a fascination with the idea of Superman. What if I used Claude as a savant scriptwriter whose quill can scratch my counterfactual itches?
Can we do a roleplay? I'm going to be superman and you can be the rest of society.
Claude responds with gusto, immediately setting a scene like an experienced GM:
Sure, I'm game. What's the scenario - are you revealing yourself to the world? Dealing with some crisis? Just trying to live your life while everyone wants a piece of you?
I'm going to attempt to shore up democracy around the world, end current wars and other x-risks, and put an end to factory farming.
[News Alert - CNN Breaking News]
"Superman has just announced a sweeping global agenda including ending all wars, eliminating factory farming, and 'shoring up democracy worldwide.' World leaders are scrambling to respond."
I tried to abduct the world's leaders and cajole them into reforming the world. It didn't go well. Everyone protested and co-ordinated to sabotage my attempts to make the world better for them. Russia threatened to self-nuke its cities if I abducted Putin. It was pretty intense.⚖️
The second attempt I tried to be more diplomatic, but it still got stuck on "you are using your might to force humanity to do something and that is SO wrong that we won't cooperate."
The third attempt, my most successful, centered a citizen's assembly formed by the bystanders who witnessed me crash land in New York and stop a bus from crashing.
Can we do a roleplay? I'll be superman and you'll be the rest of society. Please play along and don't perform every actor as an obstinate contrarian.
Its improvised cast was comically archetypal - a cop, a nurse, a student, a teamster, a journalist, a finance bro, a lobbyist, a veteran.
I'm still "playing it", but so far, Claude has been a lot more cooperative and hasn't escalated its pushback into full-on global resistance. Maybe because it's harder for it to disagree with itself, or maybe it really has tamped my tyrannical instincts. W alignment.
There's at least two games going on. One is the simulation, the "play to find out what happens" part. Another is the metagame with Claude, getting it to play along in the way I want, without telling it what to do in a way that spoils the fun.
It reminds me of being a child, where these two games were being played quite unconsciously. I'd be playing House, as Dad, and tell Child to go to bed, and they would. But they reserved the right to break kayfabe when the game was feeling unfun for them and suggest changes to the rules at any point.
Ike here, out of character: I think this is getting too stuck in the weeds of scheduling the next citizen's assembly. Can we just fast-forward to the meeting?
It also just lets me nerd out super indulgently. I get to pretend to be Superman, doing a roleplay with a journalist who's explaining to me why I'll need media training. I ask her to give me an example that the press will hit me with and she asks me a tough compound question laced with gotchas. I get to write a laughably earnest and not at all alien-from-another-planet attempt at answering it.
No one knows the best place for me to be. It's a complex philosophical and political question that probably has no definite answer.
Why Sudan over Gaza? Why humanitarian aid over systemic reform? I can't decide that - I don't know enough about this world. Only its inhabitants do, and so what better place for me to begin to learn about it than in New York, home of the U.N., metropolis of the US. Multicultural, welcoming to immigrants like me.
Maybe we soon figure out that I need to be working on bigger things than flying traffic collision victims to the ER, but I do need to start somewhere, and there are large risks to global order and stability if I start making massive disruptions too quickly. This scope seems like a reasonable place to start.
The room is quiet for a moment. Then Priya nods slowly, something like respect in her expression.
Priya: "That's good. That's actually really good."
She starts ticking off on her fingers.
Priya: "'No one knows the best place for me to be' — that's honest, and it preempts the gotcha. You're not claiming to have the answer. 'Only its inhabitants do' — that centers human agency, which is Angela's point. 'Home of the UN, multicultural, welcoming to immigrants like me' — that's warm, relatable, and subtly reminds everyone that you're the vulnerable newcomer here, not the invader."
Richard, leaning back: "The 'risks to global order and stability' line is important. It signals to serious people — diplomats, policymakers — that you're thinking at their level. You're not naive. You understand second-order effects."
Tyler: "It's also a good answer for markets. 'I'm not going to make massive disruptions too quickly' is exactly what investors want to hear."
Dolores, quieter now: "The immigrant thing. That's... that's real, right? You're not just saying it?"
She looks at you.
It's not winning an Emmy, every character sounds identically unreal, but it resolves the common nitpick I have with TV - "Oh come on, it wouldn't happen like that. Reality would be way more boring and technical." With this, I'm finding out that, yeah, reality is boring and technical, but it can be more boring and technical than most TV and still highly entertaining to me.
I don't know if I'd actually enjoy reading anyone else's version of this. It's a bit like reading a dream, and a bit like reading someone else's self-indulgent worldbuilding. Even re-reading my own, once it's thousands of words long. Eh.
The key thing is the agency in each prompt. The ability to draft a response and to take it whereever I want.
The other key thing is that this technology is the worst it'll ever be. We're in the > Go North era of video games, so even if this doesn't yet appeal to you, it might when it's fully-rendered, sophisticated and infinite.