Editing Stripped Gears (section)

==Story==
The year is 20XX, and robots have become indispensable in society. Powerful positronic brains combined with several breakthroughs in rechargeable batteries and animatronics meant that it had finally become feasible to build humaniform robots that could fill a wide variety of roles. At the low-end, these brains aren't good for much more than housekeeping. At the high end, these robots fill a wide variety of roles. Lawbots are dedicated public defenders, medibots are the perfect general practitioners, and law enforcement and the military have obedient "man"power that don't collect pensions.

Naturally, not everyone was perfectly happy about the rise of robots, and it wasn't long after the first models entered the consumer end of the market before anti-robot activists successfully campaigned to heavily regulate them. Civilian robots always had to be "Three Laws Compliant" - that is, compliant with Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics - but that wasn't enough. Thanks to a few easily-scared killjoys swayed by a couple horror movies about haywire robots going on killing sprees, robots had to be further inhibited. Under the principle that a robot cannot do anything it has not been programmed to do, [[Stripped Gears Combat|combat]] skill packages were banned and access to all but the most "simple" of brains had been heavily restricted.

And, for a while, this regulation seemed to work. After all, what was the point in taking a Three Laws-compliant bot and loading it up with [[Stripped Gears Combat|combat]] software?

The point, as it turned out, was entertainment. Nobody's sure exactly where it all started - clubs in London, New York, Chicago, and Tokyo all have strong claims of being the first ones to do it - but a culture of underground robot pit fighting sprouted up like mushrooms after a rainstorm. People had started taking their domestic robots, wiping their programming, and loading them up with [[Stripped Gears Combat|combat]] subroutines so that they could watch their meidobots and butlerbots and nannybots and sexbots rip each other to pieces. Naturally, these clubs became dens of all manner of vice and shutting them down became a high priority for law enforcement. Cops quickly figured out that a [[Stripped Gears Combat|combat]] meidobot makes a shitty maid when all her housekeeping skills had to be wiped to make room for the ability to beat another robot into an unidentifiable mass of metal, and the Junk Johns (the owners of these [[Stripped Gears Combat|combat]] robots) learned to get their hands on high-end brains that could [[Stripped Gears Combat|fight]] AND clean. The arms race was on.

Public opinion on the matter remains rather split. Some feel that as long as the robots are hardwired into Three Laws compliance then it doesn't matter if they know how to hack apart another robot with a chainsaw. Others feel that there's too much risk of a robot going rogue after a [[Stripped Gears Combat|fight]] and killing people. The media, for its part, seems to make a point of preserving the outlaw status of these rings because the issue makes great ratings. Either way, the problem isn't going anywhere any time soon, and truth be told, most of the Johns couldn't care less.

===Further Reading===
Stripped Gears is meant to be relatively open, with no fixed setting or plot, but /tg/ has written a great deal of [[Stripped Gears Writefaggotry|additional material]] that might provide a jumping off point.