Memory Book/Fractal Confusion (Kevin Breeman)

After you have filled in information in a specific section, be sure to remove the "instructional" text, including this introduction!

Initial Instructions: Please Remove Start by giving some information about your "real" self. This can include your gender, age, occupation, and so on. Remember that any information about your "real self" that is requested on these pages is purely optional. The point of the project is to collect your memories about playing in the group, and doing so does not require personal details. However, if you are comfortable giving them, they will be interesting for the reader.

Response

I believe that I would do well to provide a kind of modus operandi rather than a personal history here. Perhaps I will reserve that information for the "real life information" section.

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, 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 Edification

I have done my best to create in Breeman a character who produces 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 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 accompanying the main storyline.

The smileys have also served me in this capacity. 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 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. Though when he encounters such flaws in himself I use the opportunity to produce interesting metaphors.

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. 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 broadly 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 group 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
• Patri Jia Kom
• Ithaca Ellens
• Jan Droogendyk

Real Life information

As noted above, this is purely optional. However, feel free to talk about your real self, including what you do for a living, your hobbies, interests, and so-on.

How you came to UFOP: SB118

Talk here, with as much length as you please, about how you found the group and why you applied.

History

Now talk about your memories of the group. Here are some ideas for what to talk about:

• Where were you first placed? What was it like starting to sim on your vessel?
• What have been your greatest challenges in this group?
• What have been your greatest achievements in this group?
• What do you hope to ultimately accomplish?
• Where do you see this group in five years?
• How do you think this group has contributed to Star Trek's legacy? How has the group contributed to the internet community?

Character 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.

Patri's story and its subsequent closure as a result of the emotional ramifications of my getting far too deep into it, prompted me to create a much less tormented female character,

Sarah Novak

.

Key Simming Strategies

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.