Digitally-Enhanced In-Person Gaming

My current thinking goal is to enhance our weekly RPG sessions, with pen'n'paper'n'dice, book-searching, & sometimes miniatures/maps with modern tools...the smartphone or tablet (iPad).  Primary benefit is quicker-access range of options as well as a richly-detailed experience.  It'd allow showing/sharing the available choices, probabilities, narrative-possibilities for different styles of RPG-gameplay.  Particularly those with player-created plot-elements (Aspects to tap, etc)

Thought about Humanity's future...

"...If the Industrial age was about the dominance of the machine over nature, the digital age is about the reinvention of nature through technlogy.  We now have the power to adapt the environment to ourselves, to redesign nature according to our own specifications.  Our mission is no longer merely survival, but survival with a maximum amount of pleasure and control..."-- Iara Lee, Synthetic Pleasures.

Demise of Caprica

Y'know, at its best, SciFi produces 'great entertainment with provocative & thoughtful commentary' but its most common TV representative is outer-space-dress-up (space-wear or rubber/CG-aliens) regurgitating bland action tropes emphasizing the chosen-people-righteousness & always-win-in-the-end-superiority of humanity ( perhaps this is spelled 'SyFy' ? No offense to the "Mansquito" or "OctoShark" art-films, of course )

Do you guys think the universal definition/meme for science-fiction is a "setting", as in futuristic-tech, robots, space-travel, etc? As if scifi doesn't require science, novel ideas, current speculations, just a "setting."

For any popular entertainment fiction, whether it be modern-action (24), historical-drama (Rome, Madmen), what is labeled 'science-fiction' (V, SG-U) or what is not (LOST, Fringe, The EvEnt), perhaps it'd be clearer if we dropped those labels and measured shows in terms of:

[] Good-Story/Writing = compelling characters with consistent choices, believable-turn-of-events, & satisfying-plotlines

[] Intriguing Ideas = speculative commentary about life today (Iraq-planet, religion, politics) or tomorrow (all the socio-enviromental whatifs...)

[] Audience-Appealing Setting = a place and time that thematically identifies the story...( Space-BSG turned off common folks, Mostly-Modern-Caprica turned off SyFy-setting-loving folks, Wild-Chinese-West-meets-Space Firefly turned off FOX Execs )

[] Plausibility = a measure of how possible the story is...from retellings of actual events ( JFK, W) to possible tech ( robots, virtual reality, genetic- ) to fantasy as we know it ( magic, Faster-than-Light-Travel ). ( Funny to consider that most spy shows, like James Bond are mostly science-fiction-setting in their spy-gadgets and fantasy in their bullet absorbing. )

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Caprica was definitely good & bad:

On the good side, the show had cool ideas about religion & 'virtual-heaven', the future of A.I., exploring how no-consequence virtual-worlds could become rife w/ deviant sex & violence, how uploading your mind lets you 'live forever' and the consequences of it, a society with prejudices that are mirrored but different than ours (not racial/sexual-orientation issues, Caprican-Tauran ones), how terrorist recruitment of kids happens so easily, and the story of how humanity's cylon children were born into slavery.

On the bad side, the dialog had a fair amount of cringe-worthy moments, lots of character-contradictions (Greystone), attempts to comment on virtual-violence/sex/obsessions lamely turned into showing it for too long, there really wasn't one character that was a 'good/decent' person...other than moments of Sam Adama's Halatha humor, i really didn't like anyone (although evil Sister Clarice was a memorable Attia-like villain), and its overall vibe was distilled depression.

Oh well, back to Fringe/SGU