First of all, thanks for your detailed and thorough input, villa!
"Every player would have a different perspective whether a QuickTerm can do things that a LiteTerm have and viceversa. This is why it's much better to keep it arcane and understand that what you see is what you get, nothing more, nothing less."
You've got a good point, but at the same time I don't see why a potential powergame outlet should be dealt with by not letting players who do use it wisely take the blame, especially when its something minor as powergaming your high-score in a game or something.
"If you want to listen to music, it'd make much more sense in our world, a world with its own technology, culture and politics, to go to the KMB and form a crowd, and roleplay the background music. There are even real, active characters in the game world that do live music shows, there are musical instruments, guitars, keyboards, etc. that will allow you to roleplay it LIVE instead of just pretending it is there in a QuickTerm, when it's really not."
Live concerts are great for RP, they really are, and I'd definitely prefer to go one over listening to a janky pirated copy of the same song on a battered QuickTerm. But how is a band supposed to sell their music if nobody has a device that they can listen to it on, you know? They could create their own Grid-node to stream their songs for a fee to other Grid users, and bootlegs could be spread on cheap data-drives. Just because there is no code in place for this, I'd love to see someone hawk illegal bootlegs of a band's songs just outside the venue. It'd definitely add to the RP.
"You want to play a game? There's new systems that allow you to play chess, strategery, pool, go, cards (allowing you to create your own rules). There's no need to roleplay an 'imaginary' game when you CAN go out and interact with real people and add those games as part of your RP, the RP that matters: conflict and interaction with other characters."
Chess, strategery, pool, go, cards are all great, and I appreciate that they're in the game, coded and all. It'd just be a lot of fun to see a couple of Mixers battling on the corner, playing a round of Pong or something. The way to determine a winner would be up to the RPers, as in if your character is good at video games, they'll probably win. Hell, you could even write up your own game and rules on the forums, maybe even produce it IC if you've got the fitting skills.
"I know with 'flavor RP' you meant just idle, generic emotes about you using your QuickTerm to play games and whatnot, but speaking about theme, I also think it would make sense for the corps to provide you the devices only to satisfy your most basic needs: communications, mail, news, a board, and whatnot (not to mention Cerberus said there's a pending revamp on the Grid). They don't want you to spend your time playing games or accessing mass entertainment mediums because they want YOU to be productive and make chyen for them."
What about mass-produced addictive games for the QuickTerm full of micro-transactions that allow you to progress? An NLM media-node that's Pay-to-View? A wageslave stereotype that drones all day long only to come home and blow it on addictive media-streaming sounds very themely to me.
