Presencing - as described in an earlier entry - is a type of synthetic engagement that extends contemporary entertainment. Fan fiction illustrates how Presencing utilises traditional entertainment spin-offs within “amateur” arcs. The Urban Dictionary describes Fan Fiction as:
1. “A piece of fiction within a fandom utilizing characters and situations from a pre-existing work including (but not limited to) books, television programs, films, and comic strips.”
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2: “…Fanfiction is when someone takes either the story or characters (or both) of a certain piece of work, whether it be a novel, tv show, movie, etc, and create their own story based on it. Sometimes people will take characters from one movie and put them in another, which is called a cross-over. ”
This RPG is made up of microblogged output from BSG personas, both Human and Cylon. Some characters are known [intentional], some are unknown [self-initiated] and some are yet to be represented. Several of the Twittercast players choose whether to adhere to the plot developments and conventions established by the TV series. An example of this mirroring where certain BSG TV series script/semantic markers ["Frak" and "Gods"] are employed by Twittercast players:
The Cylon Twittercast promotes character development through extensions that accommodate alternate characterisation, elastic narratives and fandom overlays. Twittercast participants operate as character controllers or puppet-masters which acts to push this RPG into conventional ARG territory. Feel free to participate and shape the resulting narrative/player architecture:
“…it’s a pretty anarchic situation — there’s no Laura Roslin on twitter as far as I know….I’m open to the idea that she could participate in some way. and Leoben and Galen are off amusing themselves — I’m sure they would appreciate having someone else to talk to. make a big entrance, if you’re going to jump in? I could help? Tory was just about to show Laura around the baseship”.
“…people’s emotional responses to a wide variety of robots, from non-humanoid to completely humanoid. He found that the human tendency to empathize with machines increases as the robot becomes more human. But at a certain point, when the robot becomes too human, the emotional sympathy abruptly ceases, and revulsion takes its place. People began to notice not the charmingly human characteristics of the robot but the creepy zombielike differences”.
In synthetic environments, humanesque avatar adoption illustrates just how the Uncanny Valley Effect diffuses in line with Mori’s revised principle. In-world participants [both game oriented and otherwise] display comprehensive identity projection in order to achieve workable immersion. This projection promotes the adoption of synthetic character “skins” as extensions of consciousness, rather than presenting as externalised automatons. Players then view their avatars as an Ego [in the Freudian sense] elongation as opposed to a humanoid mirror.
Humanoid avatars may also fall into an _ultrahuman_ perceptual category as shown through the example of _Emily_:
Emily operates as an amalgam of a geophysical and synthetically rendered entity: her face is mapped to that of her human counterpart, a live actor also named Emily. The resulting augmentation accelerates beyond the Uncanny Valley dip [as seen in the graph above] via minuscule asymmetries that aren’t scaled high enough to break the beauty-symmetry barrier. Her face is unlined, unmarked, yet still convincing as a heightened variation of a “real” actor. Emily embodies the concept of the digitized _Übermensch_; an iconic mix of synthetic + geopresenced perfection.
Could the technology used to produce Emily extend to the creation of augmented identity “sets” where tailor-made avatars are worn according to contexts/moods? Could the future of the cosmetics industry involve the mass production of illusionary facial constructs applied as easily as make-up [think: a mixture of a holographic caul and synthetic rendering]?
