I recently watched Searching and it is a great movie, would recommend it to anyone looking for a good dramatic thriller movie. The trailer is below, and it all essentially tells its story from a computer screen. We get webcam footage of the actors, like when using Facetime to talk to each other, and other times its video clips or websites that we are seeing on screen to help add to the information as the father searches for his missing daughter.
I have been looking at doing a breakdown on the Computer User character types for modern and futuristic roleplaying games for a long while. Being a Computer Programmer and working Technical Support, I have an understanding of how the machines work and can see when things in TV shows and movies and games are doing things that are essentially the ‘Rule Of Cool’ with this technology, because it makes for a good story. I love a good Techno-Thiller, and I like playing the Hacker character in a lot of games but find that there are problems with some people and understanding how to make them work in games with other players.
The biggest example of how computer users don’t fit in games that I know of started with the Cyberpunk 2020 game in the early 90’s. There was the Netrunner and they would be a character who would hack dataforts which were laid out like crossword puzzle grids. It was like the scene in Johnny Mnemonic where he goes online to find information about the fax that was sent and who wants him dead, which I included a clip of below. As only the Netrunner is interfacing with this world, they are the only ones doing anything and thus usually became the time when players would do a food break. Shadowrun had a similar character, the Decker, who would be connecting remotely to systems. In both, it runs at the speed of thought so actions would be done in seconds but the whole thing could take a long time in the real world.
Now as this is going to be a lot of detail to cover to show how to make this character work in games, I will break this down into a few pieces and do posts on each, trying to build off the concepts and techniques to make them useful in a system neutral way. The first I wanted to focus on is information gathering since that is one thing we see the Computer Guy doing a lot in works. They have the resources to gather information for the characters who need it. Criminal procedurals will usually have one of these characters at the office where they look up records for the field agents, such as address of suspects, checking their financials and any priors and the like, with Garcia from Criminal Minds being a great example. It gets even worse when you get into Heist or other action works. The Computer User there will have to deal with finding out information on people like where they work, their car, the money they make and so forth, as well as listening to police radio, helping keep the team of cameras, cracking security, laying false information for identities to keep the team from being found out.
To give you an example of the sort of information that is out there, let me direct you to a song by Stupendium. Stupendium made a CP2077 song Data Stream that talks about how much control the corporations have going so far as to have a Bridge which is just a list breakdown of some of the things that are already being collected, inspired by a list of data collection Facebook did from what I heard.
Name, age, qualifications
Stupendium- Data Stream https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bem_d49NBLc
Race, faith, career aspirations
Political leaning, daily commute
Marital status, favorite fruit
Family, browser, medical history
Hobbies, interests, brand affinity
Fashion, style, your occupation
Gender identity, orientation
Lifestyle choices, dietary needs
The marketing contact you choose to receive
Posts, likes, employers, friends
Social bias, exploitable trends
Tastes, culture, phone of choice
Facial structure, the tone of your voice
Before getting into the real meat of things, I want to just to define what it is made up of and why it is so important, your digital footprint is illustrated by these two older images from the video game series Watch_Dogs and then a 2020 infographic of data produced daily.



So, with all this information out there, trying to find a specific piece of information is going to be hard. Based on the data estimates, there is 2,500,000 Terabytes being generated daily by the world. So, when you hear people talking about search engine optimization, there is a lot to that to make sure your data turns up first in people’s searches or else it could get lost in a sea of random data. Over 50% of clicks go to the first five search results, and around 95% of searches never leave the first page meaning all that other data is hidden. What sort of things can be hidden there? If you search by a person’s name, you may find a lot of thing about them or you may find things about someone with a similar name or even the same name. Try finding about ‘John Smith’ without any other filters and you could be there for a while trying to find the specific one.
After we start limiting our search information to things like age, region, ethnicity, we can find results starting to drop off, eliminating false positives from the information. There’s still a large number of data to go through. If we assume you have access to all data with nothing hidden behind paywalls that you don’t already have access to, you can get all sorts of things. That list of Stupendium’s shows a great amount of data but you can also have access to stuff like school yearbooks that can give a lot of information about who someone was, company newsletters that are usually published to the corporate site to let people have an inside look at the company, hospital records to see if they have any medical issues that can be exploited, do they do any volunteer service that you might be able to catch them at? Basically, if there’s a piece of information about a person that can be tracked, it likely is somewhere.
As a GM, I find myself asking players to specify exactly what they’re looking for and then using that to go through a mental checklist of the sort of information it would turn up before presenting them with any relevant information their search turned up and a lot of other information they might have come up with but otherwise are just fluff. There is many games which will have some information searching rules for computers and the ones I have seen usually just have ‘Players find or don’t find what they want’. So, I started making up a lot of fluff information and then handing it to the players for information that they can use to help build the universe of the characters and also have some information they can use for leads.
Orwell is a good game series for this, as the idea of it puts you as a profile diver gathering intel on people to prove their guilt or innocence of a crime. This means that any sort of intel you find can help shape your opinion of the person or persons and you need to decide on your take of what you find. Sometimes the information conflicts so you need to decide on which is more important for the case you are trying to make for the suspect. If you want to see more of this sort of style done, check out the movie ‘Enemy of the State’ starring Will Smith, a thriller as he is hunted for having evidence of a crime and it becomes a story of surveillance, secrecy and the shadowy agencies out there.

So, there’s a lot of information out there and it takes a lot of filtering to go through if you’re looking at the footprint that we leave behind. This footprint, however, can sometimes be the start to further investigating. Neil Stephenson is a fine example of this, such as in the short story SPEW, where the character is a Profile Auditor and talks about a previous Auditor’s success:
I am thinking of Adderson. Every one of us, sitting in our cubicles, is always thinking of Adderson, who started out as a Profile Auditor 1 just like us and is now Vice President for Dynamic Programming at Dynastic Communications Inc. and making eight to nine digits a year depending on whether he gets around to exercising his stock options. One day young Adderson was checking out a Profile that didn’t fit in with established norms, and by tracing the subject’s social telephony web, noticed a trend: Post-Graduate Existentialists who started going to church. You heard me: Adderson single-handedly discovered the New Complacency.
Spew by Neil Stephenson
It was an unexploited market niche of cavernous proportions: upwards of one-hundredth of one percent of the population. Within six hours, Adderson had descended upon the subject’s moho with a Rapid Deployment Team of entertainment lawyers and development assistants and launched the fastest-growing new channel ever to wend its way into the thick braid of the Spew.
Of course, as Gamemasters we have all the players at the table to think about, so in my next post in this topic I am going to talk about Asymmetric Information Gathering, or in other words, how to incorporate the whole table in on information gathering instead of just one guy sitting in a room doing work and then coming back with the next location for the players to kick the door in at.