I have to go now, so this isn't exactly proofread or necessarily coherent.
Thank you for the kind words Jonas.
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Here's my shot at some answers.
Mr. Freeze wrote:
7. Why does everyone care about what happens online? Does the real world even exist anymore, or does everyone live online like in The Matrix?
This is by far the most important question for you to answer because it determine, in part, the answers to your other questions.
To illustrate some of the ways you can interpret it, consider Phasmatis smacking Trestkon. (If you've seen NCIS, think of it as a Gibbs smack to the back of the head.)
If you look at Forum City as being something like Tron or Reboot then what's going on is that the users are using an ordinary forum, just like this one, and that gets translated into cyberspace by a sort of metaphysical connection such that what they say on the forum plays out in Forum City where avatars are real people living real lives. So Forum City would be like the platonic ideal of the PDX community.
In that case Phasmatis smacking Trestkon would involve Phasmatis' user typing, “*smacks Trestkon*” and posting it to the forum. Trestkon's user might not be online at the time. He might not be awake. (The two of them do live in very different places) but the message waits for him and when he does read it he responds however he sees fit. It could take hours or even days and the two users might never be online at the same time, but for the avatars living in Forum City what would happen is that Phasmatis and Trestkon would be in the same place at the same time and Phas would smack Trest and Trest would respond in real time.
Trestkon would care (if he did) because he, the avatar, just got smacked. If a user didn't really care about what was going on then the avatar would reflect that. If a user acted without caring about what he did to other people because he thought that things on the internet didn't matter, his avatar would would be a callous bastard. If a user was entire unfazed by what happened to her avatar because she didn't let internet goings affect her emotionally, then her avatar would be stoic.
The reason that things could happen in real time in Forum City when they didn't do that in real life without Forum City and the forum it is the cyberspace version of forking in different directions would be the magical nature of pretty much all settings that have a Tron/Reboot style cyberspace.
The upside to looking at it like this is that it explains why people can be online so long (they're not) and why things matter so much for avatars (this is their world) and how this kind of cyberspace can exist in 2004 (it's always existed, we just don't know about it) and probably several other things. It means that the users are not necessarily giving things their undivided attention. For Trestkon to go into Sol's Bar doesn't require his user to walk there, making sure not to trip on the curb or bump into anyone or anything. It does not require the user to open a door, or even consider the possibility that the door exists. It doesn't require controlling the avatar in real time, it just requires him to write, “*walks in*”
Which, it should be noted, gives the avatar a lot of free reign to decide how he's going to go about doing things.
The down side to looking at it like this is that a lot of stuff doesn't makes sense. Death, kidnapping, and stopping GameSpy come to mind.
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Three steps or so to the left, consider something like the above but instead of an ordinary internet forum the forum in question is actually set up as a text based game. Now people going there have reason for staying in character (they're playing a game) and there's a reason for there to be things like perma-death and kidnapping (it's part of the game.) Yet it retains the positives of the previous version in that you don't have to have people controlling their avatars moment by moment, which is a pretty big one, and avatars care because this is their world.
That said, such a game would be horrendously unwieldy to program or play because you've still got Phasmatis' user saying he smacks Trestkon at a time when Trestkon might not even be online, except now you're trying to make an actual coherent game out of it. On the other hand, I'd guess that old fashioned RPG players have figured out a way to do something like that to some level of not suck so that they wouldn't have to have characters appearing and disappearing at random when someone couldn't show up to a session.
Regardless, in this case you have a reason why Trestkon can't just write “*I sprout wings and fly to the space station*” and have it be so. The game would have rules, and the things that happened in it would have to be within the bounds of those rules.
You also, potentially, have a little bit of wiggle room as to how you can take on GameSpy. I present two completely different ideas:
If we assume that there is only one kind of account, and the difference between an administrator and a player is in what the account has access to, then potentially by pushing the limits of the rules in directions GameSpy didn't expect, you could gain access to the same stuff (the space station) and terminate their accounts with a gun. At which point, if they don't actually have access to the physical server (say it was located in some other company's server farm) they're screwed and locked out of Forum Planet. (Because their accounts were terminated they don't have access to the company that is running the physical server. Why the server doesn't get powered off when the third party stops getting paid by GameSpy is left as an exercise to the reader.)
It doesn't make sense if you look at it closely, but if you squint and tilt your head to the left, it sort of feels like it could almost make sense.
Idea 2:
GameSpy ruled the world as evil overlords using a set of rules that were stacked in their favor
but they were players and players who played by the rules. Those rules were unfair rules that they wrote, but they play by them none the less. When they lose they take accept it and, presumably, start afresh with new accounts. Forum Planet is whatevered (freed, conquered, democratized) even though the users for the GameSpy aliens still own and run the server.
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Stepping into the middle of the spectrum, forget everything about platonic ideals and avatars as separate from users. We're into .hack//SIGN territory. Forum City is an online place that users can play. That means that everything an avatar does in Forum City is controlled by the user and the avatar is only present when the user is online. When Phasmatis smacks Trestkon that means that they were both online at the same time, they were both in the same virtual location, and (if we're assuming this is a vr game you jack into) Phas actually reached out and smacked Trest.
The major downside to this way of looking at things is that for Evil Invasion to be there watching Trestkon's datafeed for as long as he says requires Evil Invasions actual user to be sitting there watching the feed. For the fan fiction shop to be open twenty four hours a day requires one of the the employee-operators to be in it 24 hours a day meaning that they need to average more than 12 hours in the system each. (Because sometimes both are there at the same time)
Also, kidnapping. Kidnapping and torture. Why would someone stay logged in while their character was kidnapped and tortured? Why wouldn't they say, “Fuck this?” and log out. Why would DD be logged in when you got to the space station, why didn't he get bored with being a prisoner and decide to log off?
Something that should be noted is that the shift from not real time control to real time control means that doing menial work changed from the user simply saying that you're doing menial work, to actually playing farmville (assuming I correctly understand the gameplay of that game.)
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Stepping all the way to the other end of the spectrum from where we started: The Matrix.
I'm probably going to leave it there.
Or not, I've been talking for so long, why not a bit more? It is possible to log off, which means that you can't have it be exactly like the Matrix as in everyone is stuck online barring extraordinary circumstance. Well, actually, you could. You'd just have to find an alternate meaning of “log off” like logging off meaning that you leave forum planet and get dumped in some other part of the internet.
If we're talking full on Matrix then that creates the potential for a couple of things. (Both of which are, I think, very far from TNM, but your mileage may vary.)
On the one hand, if the wine tastes as good, if the colors are as vibrant, if the whatever is as whatever, then people could actually willingly be spending most of their lives online. Mind you if they were there's a decent chance they wouldn't chose to spend it in a slum when they could go to internet utopia, but that's a reason why people might care so much. This could be their world.
On the other hand, if it hurts as much as the real world, you could have the potential for some real trauma. Which has some disturbing implications.
I don't think it makes sense to think of Forum City as being too much like The Matrix. It's an interesting tangent, and I've gone there before, but I would say that at most it makes sense to think of it as being like a virtual reality computer game with a safety function to prevent it from causing pain, and a way to log out in a real hurry if something gets to be too much.
The idea that someone might actually be tortured by logging into Forum City would, I think, go beyond the bounds of TNM's setting.
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I tend to go for the idea that it's more akin to Tron and Reboot than .hack//Sign and The Matrix in that the reason people seem to be online all the time is that they aren't but their avatars are, but parsing exactly what the user sees is difficult at best.
If you assume that it is a forum then what the hell is ABI making a spacecraft? Is it some interesting bit of coding that just gets represented as a spacecraft? If it were coding, why would it only be able to be used twice?
If you assume that it is a game, then how does that work if the players aren't controlling things in real time?
1. Is it possible for a non-staff member to create additional sections of a website? How stable would they be? (The idea I had was a vast landscape made of metal...which is really a gigantic machine, powering the coding that keeps the landscape together..among other, more nefarious purposes. The deeper you go, the more bizarre and complicated it becomes).
I'm going to go with: No, but...
And the But will be tied up with some other answers.
6. How was the Goat City connected to Forum City? Was it a BSP hole? Or something else? (I don't think this was stated in game besides "Well, it just is". Correct me if I'm wrong)
8. How is hacking portrayed? Can a hacker make things appear out of literal thin air (it IS the internet, after all), or is it still all on computers?
A fair degree of the answer to this will be wrapped up in how you answer the basic question of what forum city is. Is it the platonic ideal of a forum, is it a virtual reality people jack into like the Matrix, is it …?
If you're thinking of Forum City as being the cyberspace-is-a-real-place version of a standard internet forum circa-2004, then it's probably connected by some piece of fairly standard html, with the gateway you see being the cyberspacial translation of it into visual form. If you're thinking of Forum City as being more like an virtual reality, then it's probably connected by said virtual reality's version of a map exit.
Of course from the perspective of people in Forum City the answer is: Magic.
Which brings me to hacking, and also the “but...” from above.
Regardless of how you look at things there is a difference between hacking in Forum City and hacking Forum City. The first uses the computers that we see in the city and only has control over things it makes sense for computers to have control over. It does, basically, what hacking in Deus Ex does.
Hacking the city itself is probably more similar to the creation of Goat City. If I were to try to, say, move the TNM Spoiler Zone to my website I'm pretty sure that that would involve me hacking (copying it not so much, but actually making it so the data was there and not here would.) So hacking the city would seem to basically be magic.
So now onto that “but...” from above if someone were to make a mod where, say, you leaving the door to the server complex open on Day 1 led to it being overrun by goats on Day 2, and then if the goats took over the server complex the denouncement said that, because they had taken over the server complex and hacked it with incredible prowess they were able to create something from thin air I probably wouldn't object on continuity grounds.
Also, it presumably varies from website to website. If you were at wikipedia's version of Forum City then it would be possible for an ordinary user to create as many city blocks as they wanted to.
9. As a correlation, are special weapons like the PHAT Rifle programmed? Or just built with some funky tech?
From the inside of Forum City perspective, regardless of what you think Forum City is, anything like that would be physically constructed, unless it was magic it would be done following the rules of the city.
2. Does WorldCorp have research locations/regional headquarters in other websites? Moreso, would WorldCorp even still be around in 2011, endings aside?
While WorldCorp seems to have it's sights set on Forum Planet, I see no reason that they couldn't be elsewhere as well. Especially if they thought that something elsewhere would help them where they were. (Does setting up an outpost there help the to take over Forum Planet?)
3. Seeing as firewalls are physical beings, can viruses also be humanoid? Can a virus gain sentience?
In a Tron-Reboot version, absolutely. In a .hack//SIGN or The Matrix version, maybe.
10. Is "Planet Gamespy" literal? Is the internet some bigass galaxy, and Gamespy only a single planet?
Probably.
[Edited to fix formatting, and clean up a spot where a sentence stopped short.]