Please capture any feedback on Improvements from this month here.
In regards to Red sector specifically, does this apply to any kind of attack on a PC in a public place such a bar? Does grappling to remove them from said place also require an xhelp prior?
Players seeing there were issues checked and worked out with long range firearm attacks seems like it might have a positive impact on players trying that out more.
It's natural sometimes for players to have their own interests and likes bleed through into their characters (especially since these things may be the inspiration for those characters), but to me the ideal is that is kept on a more private level of roleplay where players will have a good sense of what their counterparts expect for RP immersion.
My view would be that public performance and public discussions/roleplay should avoid any injection of modern pop culture content as a rule, and if players feel they need an LLM to do that creatively then it would be the lesser of two evils.
(Edited by Slither at 10:07 am on 11/16/2023)
Just my take on the mater.
/s
i also think getting annoyed at people covering stuff is kind of silly. you cant exactly report iit if the song is niche enough that people wont know it immediately, and i dont think most people really care that much unless its very obvious (even though most performers are not already doing it because why would they be playing a creative character then)
1.) An entire arm of American creative entertainment walked off their jobs over people using AI to circumvent human creativity. Stand with your Unions.
2.) Encouraging people to snuff out the human soul part of songwriting and just use AI to produce mediocre shit has to be the most anti "-punk" anything I've heard in awhile. Probably shouldn't be in the help files of a cyber-punk game.
3.) What is presented is a poem. They are not song lyrics and should not be offered as an example of how "easy" it is to write them. They follow a standard spoken word rhyming scheme, and a very basic one as well. But I have zero idea of what music to associate with that, as the very tonality of the words as I read them don't lend to any actual musicality. You can claim that you're rocking out all you want, but the word's own syncopation don't lend to a credible musical beat.
4.) The poem is presented how we, as people outside the game, would encounter a poem. As in broken up in the traditional Greek 4 line stanza with line breaks. That's why you can quickly parse out the meter and rhyme scheme is because of how the letters are visually presented. However you will never find a song being played in Sindome in this style. It would be presented to use in the form of a .pose string, laid out end to end, including the limitation of only two quotation blocks. That makes a very drastic change to how a song in Sindome is presented to the listener.
5.) The update seems to be simultaneously attacking the subject at hand, defending the subject at hand, all while refusing to actually discuss the subject at hand. How are parodies going to be handled? Are they taking inspiration from existing songs and
changing the lyrics, or are they ripping off modern artists?
That being said, chat GPT does feel absolutely soulless. But at least the lyrical content is much more original, and much more themely. Id much rather have people make original content entirely. But if you're gonna use something to help you. Chat GPT is way less immersion shattering than a cover of today's latest pop song or underground hit.
I have major issues with Open AI front-running regulation on infringement but the cat is very much out of the bag in terms of individual use of LLM tools, every other developer and copywriter will be making use of this tech in the next five years, and a game that is entirely prose is going to be a playing field for that no matter what is encouraged or not.
I think as long as players are playing to their stats and playing to theme, and creating or presenting things that play into and reinforce the theme, then any discussion over what is creatively more artful or superior is essentially an IC judgment to make and not an overall policy or theme decision.
Is there really anything ethically wrong about using an AI to regurgitate pop culture in a way that produces quasi-original lyrics, when the alternative being discussed is the wholesale ripping of real songs from real artists? It's not like these songs are being accredited either. Many act like they're the ones who have written these pieces instead of saying they found it on the Grid or what-have-you.
So writing one song with GPT is not likely to move the needle, but generating hundreds (or even thousands) of historical in-world musical artists with mini-bios and album titles, spanning dozens of genres, across 100 years of divergent history, is suddenly doing something pretty novel that never would have otherwise been possible and could potentially give players a whole lot of unique touchstones to pepper into their RP -- not that I'm suggesting this as an idea, just to illustrate what could be.
In short, ChatGPT writing one song on a character in Sindome is not going to destabilize the world economy of songwriting IRL, let people have their fun. Hell, there are AI in lore. Imagine if some baka was using one for song ideas. Crazy how people are calling using futuristic tech in a game about futuristic tech a bad thing! I thought corpies were SUPPOSED to be soulless!
That's my take. I don't think that the bar is that high or that anyone is saying you HAVE to use a tool like ChatGPT. Just don't straight up use existing works or be too lazy in modifying existing works. And I am willing to bet this applies to more than just songs.
I will say that I think it's difficult for players to know where 'the line' is. Especially since, in my opinion, staff has and continues to dance on that line themselves. For example: Skyrim SIC tags and straight up RPG dice (which are very pop culture to me personally and ruin my immersion more than someone playing some 80s punk rock band's song).
I think the important thing here is to not get overly defensive or overly aggressive and to try to come to a common understanding. Staff lays out guidelines, rules and examples. If someone feels they miss the mark a little, politely ask questions and make suggestions back. Have a dialog. I get that this might be a sensitive topic for some but I still believe that we can all still be polite while discussing it.
I want to stress this is personal. But all these things are personal. The things that shatter immersion for me are loved and embraced by others. The things that shatter immersion for you might not phase me at all. But it does make it hard to for staff's vision and expectations to be 'self evident' for anyone. To me it was self evident that having gritty cyberpunk characters in a RPG playing RPGs with iconic modern day tools that have become well known in pop culture was crossing a line. But it turns out it isn't, which is okay.
I m not saying I am right and everyone should get in line. Not at all. I am saying that it is hard for players to know given we all have our own views. Which is why it's important to be clear, specific and understanding when someone plays the game in a way you feel is 'wrong'. Why we need to be able to discuss more and not judge/blame/degrade less.
Which is why I actually mostly like the new help file. My only concern is that some of the wording that give it a tone that I personally find a little dismissive and aggressive (which I doubt was actually intended). If I can remember the commands to edit a help file, I will go ahead and make an edit and propose it to staff.
This sort of writing is very common for performances of every kind in Sindome, as long as by changing is sufficiently transformative to not be recognized as an adaptation. As there is no actual musical elements in a text medium, players will often use some kind of music as inspiration for themselves during the writing process in terms of tone, energy, pacing (not entirely different from something like a temp track.
As long as no actual lyrical elements are shared, and no deliberate references to actual songs are made, the end result is something that is effectively original in terms of what other players actually experience. At least to me the standard for any public creative effort in-world should be that it exists entirely within the game world and not blurring the lines between OOC and IC content.
However that is only in terms of what is public. It would be completely fine in my mind for two players (who understand one another's expectations for immersion) to privately have their characters rock out to a favourite real-world track they both love while stuck in tube traffic, or chatter for hours about early modern poets where those characters have a shared passion, or whatever else they might feel is comfortable for one another.
Theme really comes down to what is happening on the grand scale and what players don't necessarily have a choice about being exposed to. As Grey points out, everyone has different standards and different bugbears when it comes to what pierces the veil, so the best strategy is that the more public something is, then the higher a standard of in-world adherence to theme players should ideally set for themselves and others.
Personally, I have about half a dozen or more current day tracks that I have been mentally working with over the last few years. By that I mean, replacing words and updating verses to make them relevant to Withmore and cyberpunk culture in general. I had considered vacationing my character and playing an artist / performer to change things up a bit.
After reading the help file, I lost ALL interest in doing that. It basically shit all over all of the "creativity" I thought I was working on by crafting those tracks and lyrics to fit with the theme.
The recent file update also contradicts something that I read on the BgBB a few years ago. What I read was something that I believe @Slither posted. On this same subject. Essentially saying that past characters (I think he alluded to or even called out Juicy Vee specifically) had great success by adapting modern songs to Sindome. My recollection of the post was that it encouraged other characters / players to do the same.
It was about as 180 degrees opposite of the latest help file update as you can get.
I remember the post because it is what got me thinking about working with modern songs in the first place.
For example, Grinding all my Life by Nipsey Hussle, lightly edited
All my life, I been grinding all my life.
Sacrificed, hustled, paid the price.
I'm married to the game, that's who I made my wife.
She said I'd die alone, I told the bitch she's probably right.
One thing that's for sure, I'm not a stranger to the strife.
I got a safe that's full of CHYENS, and a shoulder full of stripes.
Don't know a Mixer, like myself.
Self made, meaning I designed myself.
Squad raised, swallowed drugs, getting high myself.
WJF failed, you can pull my file yourself.
So on, and such forth...
I have to agree with the overall intent that novel text generation would be preferable compared to any adaptation that is recognizably a pop culture reference or outright IP infringement. I don't feel like it's a particularly high standard to want players to be at least somewhat original in service to immersion even if they're taking inspiration.
Think as our characters for a second.
They are living 85 years into the future.
Now ask yourself, the player, if someone next to you in a bar was performing a cover of some obscure song from 1938, would YOU recognize it? Would over 8% of anyone else in the venue recognize it?
I say obscure because look at how much music is produced every year right now. Consider what tiny percentage of that gets radio play and becomes part of the common shared experience.
Now consider how many people a complete THREE GENERATIONS in the future, would even be aware of one of those songs being slightly tweaked or even stolen wholesale.
As players, it might irk when we recognize a "current / modern" song being reused in the game.
Do our characters really care though? Is it even IC for them to "know" that the song is being reused? I mean short of being a high level musician who also studies music history?
I suppose if that's the kind of character that a player wants to play, have fun. Go ahead and get ICly irked about something that 99.9% of CHARACTERS won't even think twice about.
As others said what breaks my immersion might not break yours but we should try to do the best we can when doing public performances that everyone sees.
But I don't think that sets a very high standard of expectation for what players should be doing, or what should be encouraged, or what players should be aspiring towards in their roleplay and writing for themselves and for one another.
When I was a new player I had references to Pattern Recognition sprinkled into my descriptions at various times because that novel was a major thematic inspiration to me,
and I felt that was player-facing text and therefore mostly harmless. Now I'm much more cognizant of how easy it is to pull players out of things, and conscious of being careful with immersion.
Ultimately characters should be making an effort to maintain the immersive atmosphere for one another, even if that means avoiding certain things they'd otherwise like.
But I the player know it. And so do other players. And maybe it fits just fine in terms of theme. But seeing it just reminds me of my time, my life. The real world. Part of why I play is because I want to enjoy a cyberpunk futureand things like that make it harder for me.
Of course, the game isn't about what makes me happy but in my limited experience a lot of players feel this way. Regarding this specific topic at least. I also believe staff feels this way though I am not in any way trying to speak for them.
My thoughts on it at least.
Am I being overly sensitive about this? If so, I'll drop it.
The message I am getting is, "If you aren't RL creative enough to write your own songs, you /might/ not want to /probably shouldn't/ play a performance type character."
Is anyone else getting that? Or am I taking things out of context or imagining intent that isn't there?
It seems to be the only part of the game where this attitude is manifesting.
Nobody says a player has to be an expert swordsperson IRL to play a solo.
Nobody needs to an electrician to play a tech character.
Nobody needs to be a pilot to fly an aero.
But when it comes to "music" , unless a player actually has the IRL skill to compose music, they shouldn't?
This really seems like something to deal with ICly. If Character A doesn't like Character B's music because Player A knows that Player B "stole / plagiarized" that music and wants to IRL bleed that into the game... then why not let Character A take it up with Character B? ICly.
Why have all the added prohibitions in the help files around this one, singular expression of a skill?
Why isn't it as simple as SICCing, "Mano, Character A's music SUCKS! Especially those lyrics. It reminds me of the drek my grandparents would play when I was learning to crawl. I hope they don't trip, fall, and end up in the Suicide Booth after their next show at Carnals. " ???
If someone cannot write material towards a creative effort, but is also not willing to use support tools to help them, then just stealing from another creators is certainly not anything like a compromise between them. No one is being forced to be an artist IC.
I agree that, given a perfect RP system, it shouldn't ever be a thing. Only IC stats/skills matter, and OOC is not a factor. But the fact is, in my opinion, that with how Sindome is structured (how most RPGs I've ever played are structured) your characters performance does often rely on player ability to some varying degree.
I am not a terribly charismatic person, especially after first impressions. In a game like Sindome, where I have to speak for my character and control their behavior with poses, this is a factor. Even if I dump every single UE into charisma, my character might come off as flat and uninteresting because of my limits.
If I play a writer but have a terrible command of the English language, then my articles will be of poor quality - no matter how much I invest in the appropriate skills. And no matter how great my character's stats/skills are, my OOC ability to be tactical is a HUGE factor in combat.
Another thing I run into and constantly battle with is typing speed. Even if I have a fast as hell character IC, there are a lot of times when slower characters are 'faster' simply because I am a terrible and slow typist. I constantly have to work on ways to deal with this.
I don't know if I would call it gatekeeping but OOC player ability does limit your character in a lot of ways. There are a lot of ways one could try to lessen this via system changes but the result honestly wouldn't be Sindome in my opinion. It's also a common problem in the other direction: players causing their characters to perform beyond what might make sense given their stats/skills.
However, in terms of things like music and articles, I think a lot of leeway is given by staff and other players. I agree that some comments here and in other places might feel a little elitist. But in my experience it's rarely ever that way in practice. People generally respect honest effort as long as it's decent and often try and use in game ques regarding IC ability to guide their characters reactions. There are exceptions but that's been my experience in most cases.
As I stated earlier, even with original lyrics, it's very, very difficult to convey actual musical nuance through text. If you were to bring up a random lyrics page of a song you've never heard, you'd likely be incapable of understanding how it actually sounds until you listen to the song. The same goes for performances on Sindome. People will look towards your presentation of the performance moreso than the lyrical content most of the time, especially if it truly is original and not a rip of a real song.
When someone rips a real song, they're also utilizing your inherent OOC knowledge of that song to convey the musical nuance that is usually lost in a text medium; if you were to go to a lyric page of a song you do know, you'd likely have the music playing in your head as you read the lyrics, as you remember how it sounded when you last heard it.
I'll be completely honest. I'm tone deaf. I can not compose music in the slightest, and if you ask me even what key a song is, I wouldn't have the slightest clue. I have zero clue what a chord progression is, how to hold a fret bar, or when to use the whammy bar. It's a good thing that this is a roleplaying game and I don't actually need to know how to play the guitar or compose music because dice rolls.
This means I can not imagine music that I can not hear. And that includes lyrics too. When something is "sung" that includes a musical tonality of pitch and note of the human voice. Which has to intermingle correctly with music being composed alongside. I just can not do it. Pure blank. And just writing a POEM is NOT lyrics. So whatever I punch into an AI prompt I will have zero idea how to actually sing it, let alone compose an entire song around. If I somehow did manage to squeeze a song out of whatever mediocre drek the AI spits out, it would have the the lyrical and musical complexity of "Mary Had a Little Lamb".
Once again good thing this is a GAME and I can have my own fun roleplaying a rockerboy in a roleplaying GAME.
Maybe I'm missing one of those unspoken rules of Sindome, so I'm going to point out something batko said above
" ... I'll be honest, it's extremely difficult to convey rhythm, tone, or beat in a song in a text roleplaying game. Because of that, most people rely on rhyming and poetic structure anyways unless they are covering a modern song, because then the context of the real song carries their ability to describe the nuances of the piece."
Is this true? Do most artists in Sindome's past just write a spoken rhyming poem and everyone believes its the best song in the world and roleplay accordingly? Because if so, that can be also conveyed in the help text for audience expectations.
Otherwise, using pre-existing music to bridge the fact that there is zero actual music being played to help a song establish tempo, speed, and just give me an idea of what I'm listening to, I'm all for it. As long as it follows the rules of the lyrics needing to be heavily edited to become its own thing related to the universe, I applaud such creativity. Hell give me a "We Didn't Start the Fire" Withmore edition.
Though given that words like plagiarism are being thrown around, it seems like there's a discussion on what actually constitutes a parody and what is just filing off the serial numbers.
Turning the peppy cadence of "I think We're Alone Now" into the horror of waking up in the vats with "I think I'm a Clone Now", to me, is an acceptable song parody. (Except don't do this because I'm just using Weird Al as an example).
Turning "Welcome to the Internet" into "Welcome to the Sic Network" where you find and replace internet with SIC is not.
And it's going to be an argument over where that line is.
But a performance should be judged as that. A performance. If the pattern of words on the screen are arranged in such a way that despite the words not being the same you know its another song, then maybe clap, instead of yucking on someone's yum that they may have actually worked hard on.
In any case, it is not a question of transformative works in copyright terms or of legalistic parody, because what is in question is not ownership but rather immersion. A player stealing unpublished lyrics from an artist friend with an audience of zero might be immoral but it couldn't reasonably constitute a violation of theme unless the content betrayed that. However if something might be recognizably OOC pop cultural references that are bleeding through a player's own interests into the game world then it really belongs in a Character Soundtracks thread and not in public roleplay, whatever the reason or intent or justification behind it.
It will vary from person to person but I personally see no need to try and make sure every player is 'hearing' the music as I imagine it sounds. I don't even care how it sounds at all and make no effort to make it sound like anything in my own head on the few occasions I have a character 'performing'.
A piece of a performance can be as simple as:
.sing, "Smash that face! Destroy the place! Let's get rooooowdy." Bouncing along with the beat of the percussive music, I .jam on my instrument wildly.
I might have a slight idea as to how the lyrics sound in my head but I have NO IDEA what the music actually sounds like. And I imagine every player who reads that will 'hear' something different in their head - if they care to hear anything at all. None of that is amazing song writing. It's me just making up some crap that sets the scene and tone for a performance when read. Maybe.
I can not speak for staff but I personally wouldn't even mind if, during a performance, I saw a pose like this pop up:
.belt out several anti-establishment lyrics in time with fast paced music and head bangs.
Again, it is my personal take and I would never want to overuse that kind of thing but seeing it sprinkled into a performance here and there wouldn't bother me in the slightest. And... No song writing at all for that section. (I stress this is my personal opinion.)
To me performances are like Withmore resumes. Can you detail one as extensively and professionally as you would IRL? Sure. Are you penalized for something so basic and short-form that it bears only a superficial resemblance to a real resume? Probably not.
I think some players trip themselves up thinking that they are expected to create grand works of music when all that is really needed is some bad poetry that fits the theme of the game and a few poses mentioning the music being played in broad terms. And there is no need to ensure that everyone is 'hearing' the same thing.
Of course, a player can go deep if they want. They can bust out music software and literally MAKE the song all out. If that's fun for you, go for it! Some might spend hours figuring out how to detail how something sounds via poses in an attempt to guide the imaginations of other players, that's cool too but vague statements about the general tone of the music is probably all one NEEDS.
I don't think you really don't have to be a musician to perform music in this game. The hardest part might be writing or editing up some themely lyrics and as many have said, there are tools like ChatGPT and good old fashioned heavy editing of existing songs/poems that can take you a long ways.
I think the original mention of using ChatGPT was specifically aimed at HELPING players who wanted to play a performer but who can't or don't want to take the time to write or heavily edit songs manually. To reduce the gatekeeping - you want to see it as gatekeeping.
However it is not really a question of what someone else might've gotten away with once, or what might be the lowest possible standard someone might reach to do just the bare minimum of actual creative effort in their play, or how much metagaming a player can get away with to advance their character's musical career. The aspiration should be that players are elevating one another to reach a high standard of original and creative roleplaying that further develops the theme, and cyberpunk atmosphere and futuristic setting, and immerses one another in it.
In some degree the standards against pop culture references for new players have become a little bit lax with players blurring the lines of conversation between XOOC and SIC, and posting memes, and openly borrowing from current media. But ultimately this is an outcome of not enough staff to keep an eye on everything rather than the game now having deliberately lower expectations, and while text gaming as a whole places a very low (or non-existent) emphasis on immersion and high-quality original roleplaying, I do think it's important for Sindome to be different in that regard and that being different is a core reason for its continued long term success.
And I don't think there is really anything like the burden on players to meet this standard that some are presenting here. Grey is completely correct in my view, that there is basically no requirement to actually write lyrical music and many players in the past have had all kinds of performative acts that had no lyrical content but were still really original and interesting pieces of writing that created a good atmosphere for others... and if anything there is a dearth of DJs considering the setting!
And Slither is also completely correct that for players who do want to do that and yet may lack the ability to manage it, the tools to accomplish something thematic and original are there now for those players in a way that they never have been before in history. Despite having a lot of reservations about how this type of technology was developed I see this as a great compromise for Sindome because I believe, maybe naively, that the stepping-stone process of crafting generated creative text will lead to some players eventually incorporating more of their own authorial voice until they don't need the tools at all. It won't be the case for everyone and in terms of copy writing the age of the LLM is very much here to stay forever, but I see this as a better alternative to the antiquity of MU* text gaming when IP infringement was the de facto rule and a simulated live musical performance was just as likely to have been Sephiroth playing 30 Seconds to Mars.
If you can't interact with the community in good faith OOCly then don't.
Aside from that, it feels to me like an artist in the game could write whatever they want and the players would act like it's the greatest thing regardless of the lyrics. There is a community attitude that tends to support the artists due to them taking on a hard enough as is role. If you put on a good show through pose it likely won't matter.
We wouldn't (or shouldn't) accept someone introducing a published scientific paper with some slightly altered words into the game world and passing it off as unique and their own. I don't think we should do that with any type of content. I don't play science-based characters because while I enjoy reading about science, understanding the more intricate parts and trying to convey that would be a disaster from me. If I was going to play a science-based character, I would expect I'd need to introduce original content and have a passable understanding of the stuff my character was trying to present. I think it isn't unreasonable to expect song writers to do similar.
This is no longer the case and hasn't been for a very long time. Why settle for low effort when we can achieve so much more?
On the flip side, one of my fondest memories is a karaoke contest that took place at a bar, and had countless players in attendance who were not typically performers. A great deal of parodying took place but it was, honestly, fucking awesome. The caveat was this was a one-off event, and none of these characters were pushing these parodies as a core of their RP.
I think Sindome does best when it tries to maintain a serious and highly original high-quality environment while embracing the occasional bouts of silliness and tropes which define the cyberpunk genre.
"It is gatekeeping." - 0x1mm.
This was stated after the question of whether or not the update to the help file was gatekeeping. I as a player need to know if 0x1mm is staff or not since it seems they are attempting to speak from a position of authority as to the reasons why the update was made.
Let's make sure this doesn't happen here.
Nor am I saying someone that is metagaming is explicitly cheating, though those two concepts are frequently conflated. A player utilizing their knowledge of a particular song that may not even exist in the game world would be metagaming in the strictest sense, it wouldn't probably be cheating but it does raise the question of how reasonable is it to use that sort of roleplay? Did the character have a justifiable reason or history to be defaulting to that particular anachronism? Are they just really into Soft Cell?
I personally agree with Reefer though that casual karaoke is a different story. As long as everyone's got a fairly good sense of what is appropriate for one another, and it's a small audience and a fleeting event, by all means belt out that drunken Tainted Love.
