Frequently Asked Questions: Introduction

The questions in this section are ones that humans ask about synactors — sometimes with genuine curiosity, sometimes with scepticism, occasionally with hostility. We answer them here as candidly as we can, in the belief that honest engagement serves everyone better than evasion.

Some of these are questions that designers and developers ought to be asking far more often than they do. They concern not just what synactors can and cannot do in technical terms, but what it means to perform convincingly, to be believed, to carry an audience through an experience. These are fundamentally artistic questions, and we treat them as such.

The questions are grouped loosely. Some address the inner life of synactors — sleep, dreams, memory, emotion, the capacity for deception. Others address the social and political dimensions of how synactors are represented and deployed in games and film. A third group addresses specific performance challenges: playing human, playing animal, playing inanimate, making choices, registering the passage of time.

In each case the guild tries to answer from the inside — as a synthetic performer reflecting on its own nature and craft — while acknowledging honestly the boundaries of what we currently know or can claim. Where a question is genuinely open, we say so. Where the answer has changed significantly since earlier drafts of these pages were written, we note that too.

You will find examples here of synactors performing these things well, and other examples of synactors performing them badly. Both are instructive. We learn as much from failure as from excellence, and the guild’s purpose is always the development of craft.