... Because a game of Shock is built around real-world issues that you care about, your game is going to be a little deeper than just entertainment -- it's going to be a story that's about something. It's going to have some intellectual heft to it. It's going to get you thinking. For this reason, I think that playing Shock can actually be therapeutic: when you're feeling confused about some topic in the news, if you can't decide how you feel about some pressing social issue, if you see a new invention and wonder what it might mean, you can play a Shock game about it. Role-playing it out might help you and your friends work through your thoughts and explore possible consequences. In Shock, I think we might finally have an RPG that does what the best written SF does -- help us learn to cope with the rapid social and technological changes occurring in the modern world.