[FRIAM] quickening

[Jon Zingale]

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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