Caltrops - Reviews - Re: Morrowind

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by Zseni 08/03/2004, 3:32pm PDT

Ray of Light wrote:

Zseni wrote:

Yeah, that's probably why (escapist, unrealistic) games don't do things that way. It would be super if Good didn't need Evil, wouldn't it! Mormons are very upfront with me about the Duality Of The Universe, a trait they share with Zoroastrians and Maoists, but everyone else would much rather believe what the video game designers believe, which is that Good and Evil are sort of like The Traveller and The Borg except sort of universally prevalent.
The Common Enemy is the genesis of everything. Everything civilized, anyway. The very first members of the very first tribe must have united to fight some predator: strength in numbers is simple and obvious, while co-operation (the real backbone of a group) is predicated on trust and other things beyond the instincts, intuition of an individualist species.

Logically, a group's higher functions are all the justification it needs to exist, but people still get angry and scared and whatever, and they blow over that house of logical cards and then... what? The bus gets driven by some dark, mammalian part of our brains, that's what, and this driver will have no truck with macroeconomics; it needs to hear tigers in the woods, if only to assure it that this group thing was a good idea after all.

"Destroy Enemy / Need Enemy" -- Most people dislike the inconsistency, they reject it. So? For all people, the behaviours they can honestly explain are a subset of their exhibited behaviours. Conclusions based on the former are fruit of a stunted tree.

Nonsense. You and Machiavelli later tell me that Evil can't keep mercenaries in line: how can it keep in place an entire power structure? Furthermore your teleology here depicts a mercilessly unprogressing humanity, which I reject offhand. We have developed broadband and Hot Pockets, we have even cultivated altruism. The idea of perfect non-dependent Good is just another delicacy afforded to us by technology and evolution. Some would argue that Hume gave it to us centuries ago.

If the really smart philosophers and theologians made games, they would all be like Earthbound or, alternately, Solitaire. But Earthbound and Solitaire have already been made, so the big thinkers are moving into the publishing field.
Celebrities are our modern philosopher kings. This doesn't upset me; someone needs the job, and ability to act is as fine an indicator of intelligence and thoughtfulness as any historial criteria. Maybe better than most.

That's terrifically flip. Why would we have modern philosopher kings when we never had historical ones, with precious few exceptions?

What a queer thing to pick out as the key RPG oversimplification. What about the part where every single RPG hero decides to go after the big guy personally instead of becoming rich and hiring someone more qualified?
Mercenaries!? Nevermind that Ultimate Evil: Machiavelli says they don't work period.

Yes, the whole thing falls apart there, doesn't it. Here you are all undone by Machiavelli, that brave knight, that military genius.

I think the idea that every time you boot up a game you manage to inherit the body of the Chosen One at least as preposterous as the notion that there can be Good without Evil.
We're all Chosen Ones. The escapist part is that in the game, it's obvious what you've been chosen for.

I can see how that might be escapist to other people. But not me. And in any event, is it more escapist to believe that you are the chosen one, or that Good is truly Good and does not require Evil?

You're Agent Smith, Ray. You think people need to be a little unhappy. You're willing to define their truth - thoughtfully, compassionately - as something that will satisfy their needs as you perceive them. I'm not like Neo, I'm the Hand Of God, telling everyone that they can take what I give them. And if that's Nothing But Good, they are just going to have to deal with the internal conflict that causes in them.
Not quite. I think people need to feel stong emotions, because that's how they assign importance to life events. Astonishingly, the nature of the emotion doesn't seem to matter, only its magnitude. Call it an elegant hack from the Hand of God.

Your notion of Nothing But Good is a paradox, a golem built of muddy intentions doomed to manifest its necessary Evil in unintended ways. The best you can aim for is Nothing But Truth; the evil's still there but at least it's beautiful.

Nothing But Truth is even more untenable than Nothing But Good. There's no guaranteeing we're not living in Nothing But Good right NOW and just unable to conceive of it in its its glory because we are too concerned with that one's suffering, this one's death (how do you know they aren't Good?) Relativists and Calvinists get to think like that, but only the uneducated are certain that 1. Truth exists, 2. It is beautiful, and 3. it is non-synonymous with Good. Which is, of course, more open a paradox than the one you would have me believe my position consists of.

You want to define Good as something which fails to provide them with strong stimulus. Why? You can have for free the notion that man is an evil animal, a divine mistake which abhors Good and suffers in its presence. They could also be very violently bored with it.

And that brings us to me, defining truths. Take an average person. 99% of his brain's top drawer is total bullshit. That guy thinks he's going to heaven. Or hell. That lady thinks she'd be happier with new tits. That one dude is sure compound interest is a hoax. That other dude believes he looks good in stripes. And on and on. It's a collection of rationalizations for their actions and desires, that (almost) randomly spits out HAPPY / NOT like Cthulu's own Magic 8-ball. Thing is, for any given mass of actions/desires, the possible isomorphic arrangements are nearly infinite, and at least one of those will tend more to "happy" than "not". Finding such arrangements is one of my many talents.

You've floated two contradictory theories of human behavior simultaneously! One: they have simple, direct, predictable responses to sufficiently strong ideas (action and reaction to Good and Evil as you have given them) and two: they are so immensely complex there is no telling wherein lies their happiness or reasons for doing almost anything. You throw in a beknighted child of the two, the idea that you personally have a gift for navigating the madness to elicit the simple and direct response of happiness.

It's a sloppy Hobbesian humanity you govern, but I assure you it is one completely alien to me. And, certainly, you have failed to make me happy. I think very little of your solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short argument that Good is the coupling partner of Evil because people need it that way; the abstract and ambient universe has never been in the business of handing over to people that which they need. You are putting the Earth at the center of your little cosmology, but I am more than content to impartially administer perfect peace, justice, and rightness to a craven little species which can't begin to comprehend my blessings.