"Unless the behaviours and personalities of these things that compute are designed well enough the things that are not so good about them or unavoidable have the potential to come across as flaws in the object’s character, break the suspension of disbelief and do more harm than good. Running out of batteries, needing a part to be replaced or the system crashing could be seen as getting sick, dying - or worse - the whole thing could be so ridiculous and annoying that it gets thrown out on its ear before long." Lots of cracking stuff in this: designing personas, making personalities that aren't annoying, persona-design as role-playing or improv.

"A Bitter Aftertaste is a jeepform roleplaying game for four players that premiered at Ropecon, the Finnish national roleplaying games convention, in 2007. It is about two lovers who have just had the best sex of their lives, sitting on a balcony overlooking their city, and talking." Two players are the physical characters; the other two are their internal monologues and thoughts. Sounds wonderful - a combination of roleplaying and improv. An RPG designed for an audience.

"With no planning, we all started acting as if we were people in a real office. Almost immediately we began to adopt characters and send officious announcements. Soon we were referring to characters in the office who didn’t exist in real life. Meeting rooms were booked, couriers arrived, servers went down, timesheets were requested, and embarrassing emails were accidentally sent to everyone in the company." Phil is right; it's a wonderful, bonkers piece of improv-email theatre.