#racter/pc

[txttletale]

shadowrun: hong kong is one of my favorite games! what do you like most about it?

oh thank you for asking me this there is so much to like about it! first of all i really really love how much the game accomodates for build diversity. for a game that is ultimately still very much focused on combat, they make every skill incredibly rewarding -- biotech unlocks some of the best and most interesting quest resolutions in the game. you really feel able to roleplay as a decker or an adept when making these character choices unlock not only the obvious combat advantages but also really cool dialogue options and ways to entirely circumvent problems. it just rewards you for building and playing a character in the way the best CRPGs do

oh, and the characters are incredible. each party member's arc is so easy to get invested in and their personal questline rule so much. racter is (in my opinion) a really wonderfully nuanced and careful depiction of someone with low empathy. i saw a lot of the ways i thought and felt in him, i like how the game really doesn't judge him for it but presents him on his own terms. gobbet and is0bel are so fucking cool and interesting and i love their dynamic--i love in CRPGs when you can tell that some party members have a long history together. they should have kissed. two of my favourite video game characters ever written. although gaichu unfortunately falls victim to the very overwhelming and specific weirdness that cyberpunk has about japan specifically in, like, his whole concept, he's still otherwise a really well-written and likeable character--he's charming, he's funny, he has a quiet melancholy to him that's really moving.

not to mention the side characters! jomo, auntie cheng, crafty, fucking. MAXIMUM LAW--all really memorable. duncan is there

the player character, too, gets to be interesting--i really like the way that the game threads the needle between having a prewritten plot to slot your character into while also still letting you decide who they are. the broad strokes of your backstory are painted for you but you get handed the brush to fill in all the details inside that--the flashback scene where you get different dialogue options to tell duncan why you're leaving and some of them are identical except for the indication that one is honest and the other is a lie is incredible storytelling work. it's a really really good compromise between the CRPG blank slate tradition and the desire to integrate the PC's past into the plot in a way that is Cool and not Dumb (i'm looking at you fnv dlcs).

i also find it really really refreshing for a piece of cyberpunk media to ditch the weird fetishised Yellow Peril 'oh what if the usa became more scary and asian' shit, cut the middleman, and just actually set itself in asia and be about asian characters. obviously i can't personally speak to whether or not it provides an accurate representation of hong kong, but it definitely feels like it's interested in engaging with hong kong as a setting and what makes it unique as a place and culture rather than just as set dressing.

and finally i like that you can go on the computer and read BBS posts. nice time on the computer simulator :)

[nobrashfestivity]

Racter, The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed. purported to be the first book written by a computer. 1984

WIKI-

Racter, short for raconteur, was written by William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter. The existence of the program was revealed in 1983 in a book called The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed (ISBN 0-446-38051-2), which was described as being composed entirely by the program. The program originally was written for an OSI which only supported file names at most six characters long, causing the name to be shorted to Racter and it was later adapted to run on a CP/M machine where it was written in "compiled BASIC on a Z80 micro with 64K of RAM." This version, the program that allegedly wrote the book, was not released to the general public. The sophistication claimed for the program was likely exaggerated, as could be seen by investigation of the template system of text generation

However, in 1984 Mindscape released an interactive version of Racter, developed by Inrac Corporation, for IBM PC compatibles, Amiga, and Apple II computers. The published Racter was similar to a chatterbot. The BASIC program that was released by Mindscape was far less sophisticated than anything that could have written the fairly sophisticated prose of The Policeman's Beard. The commercial version of Racter could be likened to a computerized version of Mad Libs, the game in which you fill in the blanks in advance and then plug them into a text template to produce a surrealistic tale. The commercial program attempted to parse text inputs, identifying significant nouns and verbs, which it would then regurgitate to create "conversations", plugging the input from the user into phrase templates which it then combined, along with modules that conjugated English verbs.

By contrast, the text in The Policeman's Beard, apart from being edited from a large amount of output, would have been the product of Chamberlain's own specialized templates and modules, which were not included in the commercial release of the program.

[cadaver1ne]

two more srhk racter/PC drawings; these from goretober

pins & needles + loving

vomit + hanahaki

[violet-amet]

I now know the feeling of the quote in SRHK about feeling like an alien when talking.

[the-crow-daddy]

Racter is one of my favorite companions ever™ and I completely adore drawing him, especially together with my PC, Killswitch the Orc Decker.

Even more in the post-SR:HK version, after she accepted his (canonical) offer to design and build prosthetics for the PC.

They're totally judging some low meatbags here.

[chocochipbiscuit]

Ask meme ask meme! You know I gotta ask for this one: Shadowrun Hong Kong! (sorry, I know you're in more of a Dragonfall mood these days, but the heart wants what it wants :p)

And the heart wants Shadowrun!!!! T_T

1. The first character I first fell in love with: Duncan! I love my do-good straight-and-narrow (but not straight!) musclehead ork brother!!!

2. The character I never expected to love as much as I do now: Is0bel threw me off at first, because she felt so quiet compared to the other characters...but the more I played with her, the more feels came out. Just. I love Is0bel so much and she cares so hard that she tried to cut off those parts of her that care, because she thought she needed to in order to survive. I love her.

3. The character everyone else loves that I don’t: Uggghhhh Racter. He is very useful in combat, but other than that? NOPE. Don’t want.

4. The character I love that everyone else hates: HMMM I don’t know enough about the fandom at large to know who other people love or hate? But I love Kindly Chen and her terrifying ruthlessness. :’)

5. The character I used to love but don’t any longer: Have I ever truly stopped loving any of them??? Perhaps I simply love Gaichu a little less??? I am sorry, I know he is your husband, but he’s just not one of the characters I find myself randomly daydreaming about!!!

6. The character I would totally smooch: If Duncan weren’t my brother, then YES. (Weird differentiation because he is my CHARACTER’S brother, but not mine!)

7. The character I’d want to be like: Oh my god they are all various kinds of disaster and with tragic backstories! I do not need or want to be like any of them, but sometimes I wish I had a fraction of the unearned confidence of Maximum Law!

8. The character I’d slap: Hm. Slapping Racter would be satisfying, but likely hazardous to my health. Maximum Law is worth slapping, and I can get away with it!

9. A pairing that I love: Strangler Bao/Duncan, you have shown me the light! :P (Also Gobbet/Is0bel I THINK THAT GOES WITHOUT SAYING)

10. A pairing that I despise: PC/Duncan because foster siblings are still siblings and I will nope on out of that!

THANK YOU FOR REVIVING MY SHADOWRUN LOVE, HONG KONG IS NEXT ON MY PLAYLIST!

(Name a fandom! Send me an ask? :))

[goldshitter]

i want to talk about how much i love shadowrun hong kong but im also drained and tired so maybe ill write more another time, but here goes

i love the writing in hong kong, the characterizations are so fleshed out and each character feels alive with their own personality, voice, hopes, dreams, even a character you meet early on who dies about 10 minutes in has their own flavour to them

i love the mechanics, im not big on combat and i always play on easy, but sometimes i just want to keep playing the fights. maybe its because i have over 100 hours in all three shadowrun pc games, but the mechanics feel really intuitive and addicting

i love how racter is written. (SPOILERS FOR HIS STORY ARC) i love how his psychopathy is portrayed, how obsessive he is towards his goal, it terrified me to be honest when i first read his dialogue admitting his condition, but it terrified me because the writing was so realistic and stark and refreshing. he feels human, he’s not one dimensional evil mwahaha, but he’s a being with his own agenda and goals and pitfalls, just like any other person

hong kong is text heavy, so much so that my fatigue issues make it hard to get through all the world and character building through the text (or maybe its because ive replayed the game over a dozen times without finishing lol). ive poured in dozens of hours in dragonfall and returns, and dragonfall is my second favorite in writing, but i feel like it still lacks the richness in characterization that hk has. returns is good, but still rudimentary in its script and graphics and characterization and character voices, but it makes sense because of its earlier release. would still recommend the previous two games for anyone interested

okay this got longer than i expected, and ill be pretty pissed if tumblr flags this for some drekdamned reason, but tl;dr, shadowrun hong kong drew me in with its (did not mention this yet) music and visuals, and especially, especially its masterfully crafted writing

[thedoteaters]

For a second I thought this was a PC port of Tim Skelly's Reactor, but it's actually Mindscape's Racter.... although I still don't know exactly WHAT it is. Bonus for Jack Davis artwork, however. (1985) #videogames #bitstory

[rokomobi]

A Brief History of Chatbots

It may seem as though chatbots came out of nowhere - but really, they’ve been around for quite some time. Here is our history of chatbots (and all things AI) from 1950 to today...and then some.

1950: Turing Test

Alan Turing publishes Computing Machinery and Intelligence, introducing the concept of the Turing Test which tests a machines ability to exhibit behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.

1956: Dartmouth Conferences

The Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence is held, establishing AI as a field of study. Organized by Assistant Professor of Mathematics John McCarthy, the conferences lasted approximately 6 to 8 weeks.

1966: ELIZA

ELIZA, an early natural language processing computer program that simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist, is created at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by Joseph Weizenbaum. It is said to be one of the first programs able to pass the Turing Test.

1972: PARRY

PARRY, a chatbot created to simulate a person with paranoid schizophrenia, was created in 1972 by psychiatrist Kenneth Colby. In the same year, PARRY and ELIZA “met” and “talked” to each other at the International Conference on Computer Communications in Washington D.C.

1980: Chinese Room

The Chinese Room argument is introduced in philosopher John Searle’s paper “Minds, Brains and Programs” published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences scientific journal. The argument poses a hypothetical scenario which implies that a computer has no consciousness, no matter how human-like it may behave.

1983: Racter

Racter (short for Raconteur), an AI computer program written by William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter, is revealed in a book called The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed. Racer is said to have to have authored the book, entirely.

1997: Jabberwacky

Jabberwacky is created by British programmer Rollo Carpenter as one of the earliest forms of human conversation based AI. Built mainly as a form of entertainment, Carpenter also intended it be capable of passing the Turing Test.

1992: Dr. Sbaitso

Dr. Sbaitso, an AI speech synthesis program for MS DOS-based PCs is released. Although the program attempted to resemble a real-life psychologist, the use of a digitized voice and its repetitive responses made it feel otherwise.

1995: A.L.I.C.E

Artifical Linguistic Internet Computer Entity, or A.L.I.C.E for short, comes to life. Heavily inspired by ELIZA, the natural language processing boy had the ability to engage in a conversation with a humans by applying heuristic pattern matching rules to the human’s input.

2001: HAL 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey)

The year in which HAL 9000, a calm-voiced sentient computer that controls the Discovery One spaceship in the 1968 science fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, decides to go haywire. “Im sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that” may ring an unnerving bell. 

2001: SmarterChild

SmarterChild, the intelligent bot developed by ActiveBuddy, Inc. is released across popular instant messaging and SMS platforms. The robot sat on the AIM buddy list of millions of kids and adults across the globe until the technology was shelved following an acquisition of the company by Microsoft.

2001: GooglyMinotaur

GoogleMinotaur, an AOL Instant Messenger bot, was developed by ActiveBuddy to promote Radiohead’s fifth album, Amnesiac. It’s release marks one of the first instances of bots used for commercial means. After conversing with nearly one million people about Radiohead related content, the bot was switched off. The cause of death is undetermined.

2006: IBM’s Watson

IBM’s supercomputer Watson, named after the company’s first CEO, is developed with the ability to answer questions posed in natural language. In 2011, the computer competed on the game show Jeopardy beating former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. To this day, Watson powers countless business across different industries.

2010: Siri

Siri, Apple’s intelligent personal voice assistant, is  developed by Siri Inc and released as a standalone application. After being acquired by Apple that year, the program was integrated into iOS, with the ability to interact with a number of Apple’s default applications. Today, Siri can be used across apps within Apple’s iOS, watchOS, tvOS and macOS.

2012: Google Now

Google now, Google’s own intelligent personal assistant is released for Android. Using a natural language user interface, the bot can answer questions, make recommendations and perform actions across various web services. In 2016, an evolved version of Google Now which hosts the ability to engage in a two-way dialogue, called Google Assistant, was announced.

2015: Amazon’s Alexa

Amazon releases their own intelligent personal assistant, Alexa, which is capable of performing countless tasks through voice interaction. Alexa is the operating system found within the Amazon Echo smart speaker, which acts as a home automation hub by controlling numerous smart devices.

2015: Microsoft’s Cortana

As a nod to the fictional AI hologram character in the Halo video game series, Microsoft releases their own intelligent personal assistant, Cortana. Available in numerous languages, Cortana serves as a key ingredient of Microsoft’s operating systems “makeover.”

2016: Tay

Microsoft releases an intelligent chatbot, named Tay, on Twitter under the handle @TayandYou. Designed to mimic the language patterns of a nineteen year old female and learn from interacting with Twitter users, Tay soon became known as “The AI with zero chill” as she began to exhibit offensive behavior. It was taken down only 16 hours after its launch.  

2016: “Year of Conversational Commerce”

Uber developer experience lead, and inventor of the hashtag, Chris Messina calls 2016 the year of “Conversational Commerce” as brands and services will begin to use messaging/natural language interfaces, through chatbots, to interact with customers. Countless publications referred to this as the “Chatbot Revolution.”

2016: Betaworks Botcamp

- Betaworks announces a 90-day pre-seed program for chat bot startups. Ten companies are accepted, each receiving $200k, and are given an office to work out of at the Betaworks Studio space in NYC.

2016: Bots, Bots, Bots…

- Bots are everywhere. Facebook announces a platform for building bots for Messenger, and tens of thousands of them are created within months. Other messaging services,like Slack, Telegram and Kik did the same. Later on in the year, Apple opens up iMessage to third-party developers. Bots have officially arrived.

2019: Replicants (Blade Runner)

Blade Runner (based on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) takes place in dystopian Los Angeles, when the world is filled with illegal sentient robots, known as replicants. The 1982 film opens up with an interrogation scene in which a replicant is being administered a test designed to distinguish them from their human counterparts.

~2020: Ava (Ex Machina)

Based in the near future, though no date is explicitly given, the 2015 film Ex Machina presents the story of a programmer who is invited by his mad scientist CEO to his extremely isolated home to conduct a Turing Test with an intelligent, female humanoid named Ava.

~2025: Samantha (Her)

Set slightly in the future in Los Angeles, the 2013 film Her, tells the story of one man’s relationship with an AI operating system, named Samantha, as she evolves from a personal assistant to something (or someone) much greater.

~2030/45: The Singularity

- The singularity occurs. Artificial Intelligence has surpassed that of humans, spurring exponential technological advancements— forever changing human civilization. The term was first coined in 1958 by John von Neumann, however, the date for this occurrence is up for debate. Famed mathematician/science fiction writer Verner Vinge predicts it will happen around 2030, while singularity enthusiast Ray Kurzweil believes it will occur roughly 15 years later.

[cadaver1ne]

tits means i can post my racter picture

hello i am deep in the shadowrun brainrot. here's my pc(decker/cybersam) trauma cuddling racter and smoking after some kind of evil freak kink session, picture of trauma sometime mid-game, and trauma as seen in my shadowrun game im running in 2075 miami. racter is there but watch out

[ghostfriendly5]

@neophyte-no1

It’s fairly common for my Shadowrun MCs to say whatever will keep their team of killers and psychopaths happy, without voicing their personal feelings; a hindrance to roleplaying, but a realistic team leadership strategy. Whether they genuinely respect their chummers’ personal goals, or might sociopathically do anything to please their team while they had use for them, and then sell them out to Qian Yi when they didn’t. Though I’ve yet to play an MC like that. In Cirion’s Caldicott Caper I believe you have a real risk of your crew walking out on you, if you offend them sufficiently, which would make completing the playthrough rather tricky. Cirion’s next module, Calfree in Chains, replaced the ‘favour’ mechanic with probably a better idea, where your dialogues with the crew influence their choices about the various crossroads their lives have reached.  

Shadowrun PC generally gives you four or five very competent and reliable chummers who you’d be daft to needlessly alienate; traitors or incompetents in less lucky crews, or real criminal outfits, are notoriously common. Blitz in Dragonfall is the nearest thing to an exception (Apart from Sam and Dowd in DMS, possibly Masato and Dorbi in Calfree in Chains); someone wrote a whole UGC module where Blitz puts the MC in danger to continue his search for Emile, and very likely gets sacked on the spot in consequence. Blitz is a brilliant but unreliable decker, and no one running a dangerous criminal enterprise can realistically afford unreliability. In the words of Mr White from Reservoir Dogs, you can never tell with psychopaths. The memoirs of real-life mercenary Karl Penta were striking for what a shower of liabilities and incompetents most of the comrades he entrusted his life to seem to have been; but there aren’t enough trained mercenaries willing to try and topple the government of Suriname that he had a lot of choice. Finding fault, suspecting everyone, and cutting ties with even friends and competent fighters if they took to the bottle or somesuch, were presumably qualities that assisted his survival. Conversely, incompetent or unhappy team members may remain in criminal gangs because of sentimental ties, or an unwillingness to betray their crew by leaving; even if Alexander gets killed in Dragonfall, Dietrich remains very unhappily with the team.  

To try and bring this to some conclusion, Racter has walked out on Lucky Strike’s team for his personal goals; for a sufficient personal incentive he would betray the Hong Kong crew, but the MC should receive the impression, for what it’s worth, that it would have to be a very big incentive. It’s their job as team leader to cut liabilities loose at any time, if new information presents itself, but they would weight that against any attachment they feel to Racter, and the value of his not-easily-replaceable skills. Even if Racter makes some efforts to win the MC’s loyalty, for his own ends, a unemotional risk-benefit analysis on the MC’s part would sit better with his own philosophy; although the essence of the psychopathic mindset is that Racter would principally approve of cold, logic when the results are beneficial to himself. He certainly wouldn’t think much of Dietrich choosing to remain with a leader he despises for getting Alexander killed; I’ve often thought of the cybernetic Rigger and the punk-rock shaman as symbolic opposites, and certainly both rather popular...but this all just my own thoughts or perspective and I essentially agree with everything both of you have said.       

Sharing some Racter dialogue that looks a bit into his past and his family. The one bit that always catches my attention is, “Things happened as they did, and I have no regrets. We’re both the better for it, are we not? Surely it is advantageous to have me on the team.”

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