Memory Book/Fractal Confusion (Kevin Breeman)

Okay I've looked over other people's histories here and I've decided I started off a tad too formal in my own bio. So I'll give a few details. Let's see, first off I'm a computer programmer / automation engineer in real life specializing in the Java programming language. I love reading and philosophy and Star Trek (duh).

I joined this group because I love writing and I love thinking. I wanted a place where I could shoot off some ideas and see how they played among a group of friends. For the rest of this page I'll give some history of what I've done here and how I've tended to roll when simming.

Introduction

This text is and always will be an organic one. Since I'm trying to convey a history of my role in this group while still a member I cannot ever portray objectively or even clearly every part of that role. I cannot say for certain what my membership here will contribute to the group nor what it will contribute to my own life.

Broadly I am at a stage in my membership of this group at which I see myself as trying to tell little stories with my sims. I try to carry forward the plot while at the same time attaching to my posts little comments or observations about life. Sometimes I fear I will get into trouble for this some day though I think if that happens it will more than likely be because I've somehow taken that approach to simming to an extreme.

So with this approach in mind, I give you what I believe to be an accurate picture of what I've done here from my rather humble position as a novice.

Previous Writing Experience

I've never been published as a writer. But I do often post to poetry/prose forums and I have been known to keep a blog. That experience has made my sims a tad verbose at times about my characters' internal thoughts (indeed, one of my points for improvement going into this group was my lack of dialog with other players). I've also tended at times to make simming into a more laborious task than it needs to be. But that is probably also owing to the fact that I want to get out of this experience some practice writing.

The Modus Operandi

I have approached this game with several major goals in mind. Broadly these goals include the intellectual and psychological edification of the players involved as well as myself, exploration of issues as they might evolve in the future (for example, religion and its role in society), and experimentation with literary styles. Let us examine each of these in turn.

Intellectual and Psychological Edification

I have done my best to create in Breeman a character with a rich thought life. In writing his thought life I have tried to give my readers some food for thought (excuse the pun). I've given Breeman a good imagination that serves both him as a computer programmer and me as a writer. I have been able to capitalize on his imagination in creating extended metaphors by which to carry themes and story arcs through multiple sims. The major example I can think of now is Breeman's 'crying issue' in some recent posts, in which the images of the planet Venus and of supersonic flight were presented as lines of thought supporting the main storyline.

The smileys also served me as sources of interesting ideas, while also providing a readily deployable engineering task force to grant Breeman greater mobility (consider for example, Breeman's electing to join the boarding party aboard the USS Phoenix during the USS Independence-A's retaking of that vessel).

In Breeman I have tried to create a voice of moderation. Whereas many of my PNPCs show some kind of extreme Breeman will try to correct these flaws. A good example of this occurred in a sim in which Breeman tried to bring Novak's excessive jubilance into check.

Breeman:  Mr. Novak, I understand that for you this voyage is a practicum.  But you still need to tow the line like the rest of us.

::Sarah was starting to understand.  She was coming down from her fun-loving undergraduate self and landing into a hardened shell of reality.  It was
 the shell which her mother and father had started to tell her about when she'd reached age thirteen and which the two had not stopped talking about 
since.::

Novak:  I-I understand sir.

Breeman:  Look, I know how you're probably feeling right now.  I joined starfleet because I didn't want to have the responsibilities that a life in the 
world would have meant.  But now I've got other responsibilities.  I have to serve this team as best I can.  Part of that was you and I testing out 
this devil's garden so that I can now tell Lt. Cmdr Brice that our ship won't be destroyed by a rogue spatial anomaly.


Novak:  Okay.  Thank you sir.  I will be more ... serious.

Breeman:  That's good.  ::He smiled::  Now let's go and get this report off to Commander Brice before he starts wondering what the holdup is.

When Breeman encounters flaws in himself I use the opportunity to produce interesting metaphors. It is my hope that through Breeman's voice I can provide inspiration to others both through the character's flaws and through his strengths. In short, for me simming is not only an exercise in entertainment but it is also an excercise in exploring the way things could be both in the world at large and in the internal world of the self.

Exploration of Issues

I have devoted some posts exclusively to exploring social or philosophical issues. For example, a recent post concerned Jan Droogendyk attending a service at the 'chapel' aboard DS-17. I employed Patri Jia Kom in order to look at neuro-plasticity in greater detail, after having read Norman Doidge's book. I had her brain somewhat damaged by the effects of a botched Grendellai attempt at tagging her as a slave. The effects of this slave tagging included an almost psychic ability to sense the transmissions of data abroad and more generally it led to Patri's having a very unstable personality.

Literary Style Experimentation

As mentioned previously, metaphor has played a large role in my sims. However, I have also employed dramatic irony. I worked with another member of my ship (Nickels) to produce a sim which explored the problem of occasional drops in self esteem as they are experienced by most of us. This sim made use of irony in that Breeman was attempting to hide his own emotions while the person with whom he conversed believed him to have been witness to a failure on his part.

Characters

Primary

• Kevin Breeman

Non-Player Characters

• Smileys
• Jan Droogendyk
• Sarah Novak

Retired Characters

• Patri Jia Kom
• Ithaca Ellens
• Lance Apone

Real Life information

My education is that of a computer scientist and, to a lesser extent, a writer. I am happy to say that I am employed as a computer programmer.

How you came to UFOP: SB118

My interest in UFOP began when I was trying to find a game in which it was possible to write stories collaboratively. Naively I fancied myself a rare breed in my interest in such an activity, believing that most other people would baulk at the notion of a game in which people had to work to produce a textual artifact rather than follow the pre-existing plot of a video game.

I was pleasantly surprised when I ran across UFOP and, not knowing the conventions of simming, I wrote a story for my entry sim. It was accepted and I underwent a wonderful training cruise involving mutated tribbles and here I am.

History

I would like to tailor this section with some of my own information. However, for the sake of trying to be consistent with the template, I will offer first answers to the questions presented there.

Answers to Template Questions

Initial Placement

I was placed initially aboard the USS Independence-A. I found the game there immediately engaging. This isn't to say that there weren't challenges. For example I might have gotten a bit too picky with one simmer's writing style in an OOC and I worry that might have driven him away, as he shortly thereafter sent a note that he'd be taking a leave of absense.

Greatest Challenges

To be quite honest I find playing this game the most natural of any game I've ever played. Am I better at it than other people? I doubt it. It's just a good fit for me. However, as I've hinted elsewhere in this article, my tendency to get too overly attached emotionally to writing characters has gotten me into trouble on one occasion.

Sometimes I get a bit nervous with OOC's because it's easy to let IC and RL personnae blend with each other. I have no idea how people who are married in RL manage to sim IC dating and even marriages. I don't think I could do it. That's not to say that Breeman is basically me transported into the Star Trek world. There's a lot about him that's different from me. However, I do invest a lot emotionally into writing a character, to the point that I'll sometimes find myself feeling the way they feel at random points in my day if I think about what to write next.

Also, citing sims in mediawiki format on this wiki has been rather tricky. I finally developed some good regular expressions that can be used to convert the sims. I might script it and post it up here so others can create articles easily based on their sims.

Finally, I sometimes don't involve others' characters enough in my sims or I add a tonne of background information to the posts. I worry that might make others think I'm hogging a spotlight or something. Then there is the excessive scientific and engineering lingo in a lot of my posts. I suspect that might be driving some away. And of course sometimes I worry I'm offending people in OOC emails, like the one I sent about the planet Desperot possibly claiming certain players' characters. In that email I included a reference to one player who wasn't posting a whole lot. I hope that didn't offend him.

Greatest Achievements

I have accomplished several things while being a part of UFOP. The thing I'm most proud of I think is my simming logistics strategy of using linux's Festival text to speech engine to convert the set of emails for a given day into an MP3 for consumption while I perform various household tasks. I have had many long and enjoyable hours contemplating the motivations behind various writers and their characters while sweeping the floors or cleaning the bathroom or mowing the lawn.

What I hope Ultimately to Accomplish

I think I've provided a summary of that above. But perhaps more detail would be beneficial here. I think I've been having some measure of success in using this game to think more positively. I have written narratives and contemplated scenarios in which many would give up and capitulate while my own characters and those of other writers have pressed on.

What I hope to accomplish then is to portray men and women, aliens and children, who, in spite of the greatest adversity and hardship, press on nevertheless.

Also I like using this group as a place to throw ideas that would not otherwise have an audience around. My job in real life is a very creative one but it still does require me to be more professional. Here one can explore one's creative side and let one's hair down at the same time with comparatively less consequences.

Where I see this Group in Five Years

I don't really know where we will be in five years.

How this Group has Contributed to Star Trek's Legacy

I don't know that I am authority enough on Star Trek and its fanbase to comment. I have always seen Star Trek as probably among the best shows television has ever produced. I know it's certainly had an effect on me. As to the effect it's had on other people, I have no idea. I don't watch much television anymore simply because I haven't the time.

Auxiliary Character(PNPC) Development History

Here I will give a brief description of the characters I have invented, in chronological order.

Jan Droogendyk

was drawn from my own experience working for an old Dutchman on a farm during the summers of my university years. He was a stern man but also one who taught me a good work ethic.

Ithaca Ellens

was based loosely on Ellen Ripley of the Alien series. She was left aboard Science Station 7623 to shut down a transwarp conduit experiment. She was inocculated with an experimental anti-radiation syrum but she was tormented by voles (common term for rodents throughout the galaxy) during the aftermath in which she waited in vain to be rescued by her comrades. Her story itself was based loosely on the strange guilt complex expressed in HP Lovecraft's "The Rats in the Walls" and also on Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

Patri Jia Kom

was a character whose story consumed my time more than Breeman's. This eventually led to a major incident involving a marathon sim. In short, she was designed to explore human emotion from the standpoint of a human outsider. She was a quasi-romantic heroine in that she was tormented by the consequences first of divorced parents and second of a botched slave tagging attempt that left her with a prosopagnosis preventing her from recognizing her parents.

Retirement

Patri's story ended due to both IC and OOC factors. In the case of the former it ended because Patri was pursuing a dream of racial extermination through the ritualistic killing of a Grendellai named Cyrus. This impossible and unrealistic dream owed presumably to her arrested development at the hands of the botched slave tagging attempt. A rescue attempt by the FTU ended in failure when their vessel was detected as it attempted to escape.

Turning to the OOC reason for the story's end, I composed, with the help of some others, a marathon sim in which I attempted to extricate her from the ship's brig so as to enable myself to continue writing her. This "Patri Incident" was probably the lowest point in my history here but also an important turning point. It represented the end of the "grand strategist simmer" picture I had of my role in the game. I saw myself as some kind of strategist pulling strings in order to further in-character plots and moral tales without reference to planning with other group members.

I should point out also that Patri's story arc represented a kind of pilot project. The character Patri represented the IC representation of an online persona I had been using to conduct research into the occult in 2008. I thought it would be an interesting project to deploy a version of that persona for use in this game.

Finally, I was getting too wrapped up in writing depressing posts about a fundamental disconnect between Patri and her emotions as a result of her implant. As Patri was sent away with the SFMC I decided to try my hand at a non-neurotic female character,

Sarah Novak

A carefree university graduate, Sarah Novak is currently serving a practicum in software engineering aboard the USS Independence-A. She is a skilled computer programmer and has assisted Breeman on a few occasions.

Blake Dragon

Blake Dragon is a musician who performs traditional heavy metal music at religious services throughout the galaxy. His music is a mixture of many different religious traditions. As a theist tending toward a judeo-christian bent Dragon imbibes much of his art with references to themes of sin and redemption, seeing himself as a kind of facilitator of unique spiritual experiences.

Eric Da'Pan

Eric Da'Pan represents a more practical-minded scientist. He has a doctorate in astrophysics and he is also a very people-oriented person. He acts as a sort of opposite to the very theoretically-minded Kevin Breeman.

Current Simming Strategies

I'll just describe how I've gone about writing my sims here. I'm sure others have used similar methods for writing though perhaps under different names. Presently my sims are part of a sort of architecture, with the real world at the top (on the left) and the simming world at the bottom. The intermediate layer is the set of narrative voices that allows the reader to peer into the sim world.

Narrative Voice Injection

This involves making use of the narrative voice to add a bit of effect to a post. For example, consider the following piece of text:

The chair under him lurched a few centimetres but his body felt stationary and motionless. It wasn't that the physics on the bridge were in some way violated so much as that his brain, in conforming with the laws dictating the physics of this region of space, did its feeble best to maintain conscious experience with the disjointed information. Where parts of his sensory system were able to register, small temporal fluctuations in other portions of his brain were causing reality's coherence to diminish a bit. Of course Kevin was not able to recognize this at the time, and so I must clarify the matter as his narrator in order that this narrative might maintain the coherence which its subject lacked in experience.

Here, the narrative voice acts as a meta-character, mentioning that he/she/it must clarify a few things for the reader since Breeman himself is unable to fully recognize what he is experiencing.

Historical Memoirs

Breeman frequently cites references from a journal kept by a mysterious and often suicidal great great great ... great grandfather in the 21st century. By means of this source of information I am able to use Breeman as a vehicle to comment on issues today through a 24th century lens.

Nothing is Sacred. Everything is Significant

This has been an underlying creed in my writing here and elsewhere and even in my living of life in general. There is no experience which cannot be explored, no person from whom it is not possible to learn. Even those pessimists I was complaining about earlier in this article can teach us to have greater resiliance in the face of the peanut gallery.

In producing sims I engage in a no-holds-barred pillaging of my life and of the books I've read, the people I've met, and the places I've been to produce the posts. There's no place I won't go and no experience I won't draw from, good or bad. Of course I don't add really personal stuff - that goes without saying.

Metaphor Injection

Pick a metaphor or image and run with it, turning it over in your sims. The Venusian counselling sims and the quazi-jovian red-spot I think are examples of this.

Pick a Group Geared more to Part Time Simming

When I first joined I had no idea how much time it would take me to post for this game. So I went with a group geared more toward being able to post 1 to 3 times per week. Looking back this has been beneficial not only because it suits my hectic working schedule but also because it gives me more time to write well thought out posts. I couldn't see myself writing in a group geared toward posting 4-7 times per week. I couldn't keep up and write well there.

Retired Simming Strategies

Simming as a Game of Risk

When I first started as a regular player here I saw myself as some kind of strategist, trying to move characters around like nations in a multi-lateral world of plot development akin to the board game Risk. Indeed, my general feeling toward this game was inspired a lot by my recent reading about world war one and the atmosphere of distrust that preceeded it. I would have to say that the Patri-Jia Kom incident ended that.

This was for the better as I focus now more on the team-oriented aspect of simming. I should like to focus even more on that in the future.

Current Strategic Conditions

In this section I describe the current situation in which I find myself as a writer in the game. This section is designed to act as a living record of my successes and follies. Dates given in this section will be in RL time and not in IC time. It will be composed of a set of discrete dated reports under the grand rubric usually of the mission or some aspect of it.

Desperot Conditions

2009-10-16

With the intent of spicing up the planet of Desperot I proceeded to write a few posts about a man named Rowls who lived on the planet and who experienced strange and possibly hallucinogenic experiences. While on the face of it this was a good idea it did have the drawback of apparently running contrary to David Cody's post about the world being devoid of life. It is indeed the case that I was aware of the planet's lack of life, but I wanted to inject the possibility of some kind of alternate reality which interfered with the present reality of the planet.

Negotiations took place and my sims stood. Further sims by other writers continued this stream of ideas about people occupying the planet. At present there appears to be a stall in writing. This is likely due to real life issues but may also be due to confusion caused indirectly by myself.

I pledged not to continue writing about Desperot's 'people' for a while but I did write a post about Breeman's finding something about the way in which the planet behaves. At the IC request of David Cody I am holding Breeman in his current position in the game until further notice and will concentrate on current deployments of PNPCs.

2009-11-08

With the introduction of new characters into the game I have been concentrating on increasing character interaction with Breeman and the others. I've also introduced an arachnoid robot named Henk in order to explore Breeman's arachnophobia . The spider's AI specializes in the psychology of behavioural modification (naturally) and so he is a wonderful vehicle for exploring psychology, particularly that of phobias.

2009-12-06

I've been doing well exploring writing more emotional and sociable characters using Eric Da'Pan. Da'Pan's interaction with Ens. Tyriden th'Dani has been a great vehicle for both myself and for Ens. Tyriden's writer to develop our two characters. This narrative arc is occurring at the same time as the story arc with Lt. Jg. Breeman on the surface of Desperot.

Regarding Desperot itself, I have been simming a lot of vignettes about the effects of whatever is happening on Desperot on a miner name Rowls. It appears that the other writers aboard the ship are working on a plot about alien communication through energy discharges. I think I'll back off for a while and see what they come up with. I'm actually hoping they end up inventing the core of Desperot's mystery while I follow their lead and write after-effect sims.