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Rigged Death Trap posted:Yet still, nothing is better to pipe away heat than a liquid metal. Not necessarily. Yes, a metal is very conductive, so it will heat up and cool down quickly. However, it also has a low specific heat, meaning you need more of it to store lots of energy. Water has the highest specific heat by volume of any commonly available liquid1 - nearly double that of molten salt - making it fantastic for transporting energy. 1: that I'm aware of KillHour fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Oct 29, 2014 |
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Oct 29, 2014 00:58
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It also has useful phase change temperatures (lower than the melting point of most solids we use) and requires a lot of energy to change phase (solid <-> liquid and liquid <-> gaseous) and so can absorb a lot of energy while staying at roughly the same, useful temperature.
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Oct 29, 2014 01:13
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Lord Windy posted:I choose the Illuminati when I was a child and I would choose them again. There is possibly a little fear of the unknown in my decision making but mostly I am very content with the status quo. This boggles my mind, because while I have had a very similar life in a lot of ways I came to a very different conclusion. Are you really saying that things like the recent Ferguson riots, or the incestuous tangle of politics, special interests and lobbyists (I'm speaking as an American) don't show a need for a drastic restructuring at a fundamental level? I haven't been the victim of these institutional problems myself but I still think they need to go and sooner rather than later.
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Oct 29, 2014 01:51
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Bremen posted:And, well, Everett is clearly going to betray you the moment he sees an advantage in it. It's pretty clear from all your interactions with him that he should never be trusted. He has the advantage of not being cruel like Page, but other than that is basically just replacing one dictator with another. But so is the Helios ending; They're basically just variations on each other, IMHO. If you want absolute power in your character's hands, go with Helios, if you want more distributed power go with the Illuminati. Either way, hope you don't get betrayed. I'd just like to mention quick that I doubt Everett would betray JC so easily. He treated his own mentor like poo poo, true, but if Bob Page is any indication it would seem like Everett has a soft spot for those he takes under his wing, and even after what's happened it doesn't look like he's learned his lesson. I'd really worry more about Stanton Dowd offing JC, but I get the feeling that Dowd will stay out of things so long as he doesn't see a certain pattern of behavior start to repeat itself.
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Oct 29, 2014 01:58
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I told Warren Spector about this LP over the weekend. These days he's directing the Denis-Sams Gaming Academy at the University of Texas in Austin. We'll see if he gets around to reacting to it. Also, Frank Miller! Or, inspired by. 
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Oct 29, 2014 02:07
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mmj posted:This boggles my mind, because while I have had a very similar life in a lot of ways I came to a very different conclusion. Are you really saying that things like the recent Ferguson riots, or the incestuous tangle of politics, special interests and lobbyists (I'm speaking as an American) don't show a need for a drastic restructuring at a fundamental level? I haven't been the victim of these institutional problems myself but I still think they need to go and sooner rather than later. I've tried several times to describe how I feel about this and I keep deleting it so I will try and be as simple as I can. Even if things look bad now, the steady march of progress since human beings became a species has been one of improvement. I believe in the very core of my being that everyone is fundamentally good or at least tries to be. Even Hitler, someone who did evil and unspeakable things did them thinking he was doing the right thing. So when it comes to the Illuminati, who feel like I do in that they believe in a steady march of improvement I will go for them hands down. Tong's is just plain wrong, it will just set us back into a new Middle Ages and I have no clue what Helios is planning to do. So going by my good life and beliefs, I will pick the people with a good track record.
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Oct 29, 2014 02:48
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Lord Windy posted:I've tried several times to describe how I feel about this and I keep deleting it so I will try and be as simple as I can. This strikes me as incredibly naive. Sure, there's a steady march of progress that improves lives, but the major question is whose lives are being improved? Take slavery as an example - sure the slave owners were improving their lives, but they sure as hell weren't improving the lives of their slaves. Similarly, what about the Inquisition, the Crusades, or almost any war in general? People certainly do like to improve their lot in life, but they're not above wiping out some other poor bastard in the process to do it.
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Oct 29, 2014 02:54
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When this question originally came up, I was all for the Helios option. The Tong one is already stupid (all the internet goes through this one point? The internet doesn't work like that.), and I figured that the Illuminati end was almost as bad. The thing is, the Illuminati is a known factor, and they really haven't hosed things up too badly over the last 200 years, excepting letting Majestic 12 loose. I expect that they will keep doing as they always have, stick to the shadows, and only mess with things that they have been messing with for those 200 years. I say all this as somebody who has never played the game though. But seriously, let's say the internet goes down. What about intranets? LAN networks? The internet is just a bunch of servers connected by wires. That really is it.
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Oct 29, 2014 02:58
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When I was a kid and could only play this on the PS2, I picked Helios, because the blank mask thing merging with the sinister triangle monster to become some kind of weird talking solar iconography was way-cool. Sadly, the HD graphics now allow me to see that Helios is just a Lawnmower Man face with funny lines coming out of it, and it has lost its appeal. Tragic.
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Oct 29, 2014 03:04
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This is a future where every traffic signal on the planet is connected into a central computer, a scenario that was engineered in by years of successive government policies and which only loosely mirrors the real life attempts at similar (Room 641a for example). The fact is that highly centralized telecommunications are a dream of organizations like the NSA, and they do everything they can to promote them. I mean, Echelon IV, mentioned in this game, is a real thing.
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Oct 29, 2014 03:06
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Strong Mouse posted:
Colonialism, both World Wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War aren't loving up too badly? The Illuminati are either far more ineffectual than they claim to be or utter monsters.
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Oct 29, 2014 03:26
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paragon1 posted:Colonialism, both World Wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War aren't loving up too badly? The Illuminati are either far more ineffectual than they claim to be or utter monsters. Okay, yeah. And the answer is probably yes to both of those.
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Oct 29, 2014 03:35
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Dirk the Average posted:This strikes me as incredibly naive. Sure, there's a steady march of progress that improves lives, but the major question is whose lives are being improved? Take slavery as an example - sure the slave owners were improving their lives, but they sure as hell weren't improving the lives of their slaves. Similarly, what about the Inquisition, the Crusades, or almost any war in general? People certainly do like to improve their lot in life, but they're not above wiping out some other poor bastard in the process to do it. Just because bad things happen doesn't mean good things won't in the future. Slavery is all but dead, huge wars rarely happen and a lot of that other stuff was hundreds of years ago. Isn't that exactly what I was saying? poo poo that is bad today will likely be a thing of the past tomorrow. That's why I would go the safe, steady illuminati route rather than the other two radical.
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Oct 29, 2014 04:48
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paragon1 posted:Colonialism, both World Wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War aren't loving up too badly? The Illuminati are either far more ineffectual than they claim to be or utter monsters.
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Oct 29, 2014 05:05
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Tong's ending would only allow people with the organization and the power, to rule over the people who depend on a now dead leadership and forgotten entitlements. He also demands you bring him the prototype lightsaber, but not when you somehow broke sequence and now he won't accept the one you throw at him. Screw Tong. Illuminati is rather ineffective, depending on how you view their effects on every bad thing happening in the world in a century. I also killed his mentor because I scrolled through his dialog too fast and clicked his death panel switch, so Everett might end up as a disappointment and taking credit from everything his boss told him. Now if his mentor also had bad ideas, then the group is a disease that must be cleansed. Helios said he was programmed to bring safety and prosperity to humanity. Ending a Communist superpower and bringing an unregulated Free Market to the Chinese who welcomed the change. I am all for everyone having unrestricted opportunities to gain vast amounts of wealth that belongs to those who made it.
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Oct 29, 2014 06:25
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Lord Windy posted:Just because bad things happen doesn't mean good things won't in the future. Slavery is all but dead, huge wars rarely happen and a lot of that other stuff was hundreds of years ago. Isn't that exactly what I was saying? poo poo that is bad today will likely be a thing of the past tomorrow. Of course, right now we have sex trafficking going on (though it's largely unreported), backlash against increasing social freedoms, mass unrest in the middle east, actual genocide going on which nobody is really intervening in, outbreaks of various epidemics that people are actually upset that we're helping to combat, increases in school shootings, an increasing wealth gap, and so on and so forth. My point is that most people act primarily in their own self-interest, rather than towards some sort of common goal. Most people also don't give two shits about who gets hurt in the process, so long as the people who get hurt aren't from the same country and/or have a different religion or skin color. Yeah, there's a steady progress towards a better standard of living, but I'd argue it's in spite of human nature rather than because of it. Even if it is because of human nature, there's a lot of progress that's paved in blood.
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Oct 29, 2014 07:34
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Lord Windy posted:I've tried several times to describe how I feel about this and I keep deleting it so I will try and be as simple as I can. I understand your sentiment, I just think that a serious shift in the basic concept of society is the most likely way to improve society as a whole. It might not be as drastic as the shift from feudalism to early versions of capitalism but certain central components of modern society being overhauled or completely replaced is a time honored method of advancing human society. I do agree that the long term trend of humanity has been towards a general improvement in living conditions but there have been times where basic social assumptions had to be revisited in the course of progress. The Illuminati option is stagnation rather than taking a risk to improve the condition of humanity in general.
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Oct 29, 2014 07:39
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At this point I'm just standing back, horrified at the turn this discussion has taken.
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Oct 29, 2014 08:14
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Marathoning my way through the LP, I wish I had noticed this thread sooner since this is one of my all time favorite games. Really enjoying watching someone who knows so much about the game and is showing so much of it off. Learned a ton of new things, especially about conspiracies which I never really paid much attention to before, very neat stuff. This has probably been asked and or answered before but are you going to be covering the sequels?
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Oct 29, 2014 09:38
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This is a wonderful series of lectures and an excellent LP. I always choose the Helios ending. The Illuminati have no transparency - they're not accountable to anyone and therefore can't be trusted or impeached should they become (or more accurately continue to be) corrupt. With them in control of world policy nobody else ever has a chance to affect it. Tong's ending is out of the question - the removal of globalization may make everything comprehensible for a time, but who's to say the same power structures wouldn't reassert themselves? It's the kind of reset button scenario that Bastion's ending criticised. How can we do things differently if we're denied the information we require to make different choices? Which leaves Helios. Helios is an ending I inherently have a problem with in that it's creating a God. One that's perfectly informed and highly responsive to the needs of humanity, but a God nonetheless. I prefer it to the former two endings because it means an individual human would have the chance to change things - to use information as a currency to alter the world. But that approach comes with flaws. A meme can be helpful or harmful, and a lie can spread so much faster than the truth. In a perfect democracy minorities can be shut out by the will of the majority, even unconsciously. Say the majority were to believe in something harmful, like vaccines causing autism, and so Helios outlaws vaccines. It's a scenario that could go very wrong very fast. Science is already poorly understood by the general public, but imagine if that public could now dictate science policy? Perhaps that's why JC's there? To provide a baseline set of values by which people's choices can be weighted? But then that's just a hyper efficient way of imposing JC's will on the world. Being an illuminatus at an efficiency the illuminati could only have dreamed of and at an unimaginable scale. Nobody is perfectly critical about their own thinking, so what if one of JC's biases was extrapolated into policy? What if JC, even at an unconscious level thought himself superior to Gunther and Anna? Would Helios then weight mechanically augmented humans as less important to its policies than nano-augmented humans? Even if JC is my avatar, I don't trust myself with that kind of power, because I don't believe I'm aware of every bias and prejudice I have. I certainly try to act against them, but I live in a biased culture whose values can't help but influence my own. How many times have I seen movies advocating a black and white morality? How easy is it for me to think of someone else as evil and myself as good? How quickly would my viewpoint be amenable if I understood them better? Would I be too quick or too slow to reconsider? How quickly and reliably can I make myself less wrong? After a century of government will that rate change? By how much and in which direction? I know my tastes vary wildly after even a couple of years, often to the point of resenting the amount of time my younger self spent on things. But ultimately I have to pick Helios despite my reservations, because neither other system acts on behalf of anyone other than the ones instigating it. It may be in Helios' favour, but Helios' directive is to serve the needs of the many, not the few or the one. Even doing that imperfectly would be a start, and it could be upgraded later where necessary. I should note that this is a scenario that Transistor criticized, making Supergiant Games two for two for creatively deconstructing Deus Ex endings. Still, it's a system with an inbuilt capacity for change, which is better than the alternative. Even if it reaches equilibrium, it could still be unbalanced one day.
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Oct 29, 2014 10:16
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I think that the Helios ending holds the greatest appeal due to the fact that it's the essentially the wild card of the three. Both Tong and Everetts solutions can both easily be picked apart by historical examples and the known truths of the corruptibility of man and also the fact that said systems have to change simply because no matter how great a person is, they cannot govern indefinitely. Both endings seem part of the same inevitable cycle. Helios on the other hand provides an alternative to that cycle. It's only real flaw, is that any consequence it causes is completely unpredictable as it stands, which is a very big flaw in many ways. The whole idea could easily lead to the extinction of humanity as whole or uplift them in equal measure or it could end up doing absolutely nothing different. But that's singularities for you. It's either the wisest choice or the most foolish. At the very least the Helios ending is the most interesting option.
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Oct 29, 2014 11:27
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The way I always saw the three endings was giving the player the option to show what they believed in the most: the past, the present or the future. The parallels aren't perfect by any means, but the way I interpreted it was that: - Tong was burned by technology being ultimately useless (even though he's supposed to be really good at at least computer systems and electrical engineering) and couldn't help him when he became sick, so once the options at Area 51 presented themselves he wanted to retreat back into something that was known and safe to humanity and tries to persuade JC to pull everyone back into something less powerful and capable but also more manageable. He presents an ending that believes in the PAST and wants to drag the present into it. Of course, there was also the component of seeing what someone like Bob Page could do with highly advanced technology - remember, Page isn't just someone just running Page Industries as a CEO; the guy firmly believes that information and knowledge are the means to power and he displays technical aptitude; the DX bible calls him a "super-nerd", but also someone who is power hungry and a control freak. Tong also isn't the only one who is turned off by this - I think Helios doesn't consider Page a better candidate than JC precisely because of his aspirations to control; Helios just wants to integrate the human element into a new being, not put something that desires control as much as it expresses to already wants to (or I guess has determined is the best course of action it should take) already. - The Illuminati at this point in time are kind of like an underdog; they used to run the world, then they were beaten and betrayed by one of their own; an offshoot organization essentially took control and forced them into scattering and hiding. Page must've been even more ruthless in trying to destroy them precisely because he believed, as the Illuminati themselves did, that information and knowledge are the means to power and therefore they still represented a threat. And it's precisely because of their knowledge that when/if Page is taken out of the picture that the Illuminati can snap back into power; they still had the knowledge of how to run the world. Now, how the world would be (and was) run is an entirely different thing, as a lot of characters in the game also mention but essentially, they present an ending that believes in the PRESENT and want to drag their glorious past (when they were at the peak of their power) along with their power structures and institutions and ruling with an invisible hand back into it. - Helios is a bit of an enigma in how it's presented. Sure, it tells the player what he or she wants to hear, if they're even open to the idea of a merger of AI and human consciousness running the place... However, there's always a "but what if..." hanging in the air in that ending. Sure, there's the thought of "well, if the PLAYER is the human component then surely things would be okay!" but honestly, if you actually did manage to position yourself in a situation where an AI essentially merged with you and provided you with the conduits of a ton of real power over the world... do you really think there's not a lot that could go horribly wrong? That you'd gently caress up? How much lenience would the new entity from the merger have to "make mistakes" in the human sense? There's also the fact that we don't have AIs like that in our world (our "reality"  ) and can't compare it to anything that, as far as we know, actually exists. It represents the unknowable (both in the nature of the merger itself, the "nature" of the AI and the actual ability of JC/the player to pull off what the AI presents as a good way to govern humanity) and is very much about dragging the current world into the FUTURE.I also like, from a writing and game design standpoint, that the game supports the player wavering in their decision; characters will try to try and put you back on their desired outcome if you start to do other things which support the other two outcomes. Essentially it's still "press button; get ending" in that there's no checks being done on the rest of the game (aside from Paul showing up only if he lived and the likes) and everything is isolated in the last map. But they tried to obfuscate that fact by getting you to do objectives of slightly different nature for each of the endings and also spread out those objectives all over the map. The sequel and prequel were much less successful in that (the sequel had some variation after you pressed the singular choose-ending button with multiple outcomes and you had to carry it out; the prequel had some variation depending on who you found in the last map before you literally had to choose from a bunch of buttons). A lesser game would have also probably allowed you to gank Page before doing the endings, but I think it's so much more enjoyable hearing the smug self-serving bastard break down more and more and after a while essentially starts begging you to stop. "Hey, I'll give you Europe, just don't take my toys away!" Speaking of the Helios ending, it always amused me how JC could be viewed as very much not a morally suitable candidate thanks to the player and the nature of the game (and how players were trained to play games through other titles). I'd wager that the "average" player had committed a whole lot of murder, theft, etc... and even the game itself doesn't allow you to keep your hands clean (glitches like Navarre's don't count). But then again, I always saw it as if it's not morality the AI is after, it just needs to understand the human condition a bit better.
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Oct 29, 2014 13:30
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I'm kinda curious how many people have seen this video, and how you feel about it with respect to Helios. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU I mean, it's important to keep in mind that the goal of the video isn't to make people afraid of the future and its potential, but rather be thoughtful about how we can prepare for further automation of our daily lives, which doesn't quite tie in with Deus Ex as it is. Still, I think it might be a bit relevant to Helios anyway.
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Oct 29, 2014 14:41
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Helios ending is the only really viable one. Tong's ending would mean that JC would be useless, as a machine man without a global infrastructure to rely upon. Illuminati in charge would just mean that he's as likely to get used up and thrown away at some later date. Therefore, Apotheosis!
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Oct 29, 2014 18:18
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I'd always choose the Helios ending because I could never remember the instructions for the other endings and I never thought to check to notes page 
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Oct 30, 2014 00:33
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It's a shame that Tong decided to go with such a heavy-handed method because in theory his idea is the best one. Wrest humanity from the grip of unaccountable rulers. Freedom for humanity at last. But destroying the entire global communications network isn't the way to do it. If he or someone else on his team had figured out a way to lobotomize Helios, wiping out the AI and leaving only the computer networks to run on their own, incapable of being directed and manipulated to such a precise extent as if they were under AI control, that would have been ideal. Instead, you are forced to do the exact opposite and create a perfect dictator for all of humanity. A God. Merging with Helios is the best option available. The Illuminati is just too unaccountable, and they are fallable. They could eventually split into infighting factions, and with the massive power of Helios at their hands, humanity would suffer for it. But if JC merges with Helios, at least he can try to keep the AI from changing things too radically.
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Oct 30, 2014 03:17
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JT Jag posted:It's a shame that Tong decided to go with such a heavy-handed method because in theory his idea is the best one. Wrest humanity from the grip of unaccountable rulers. Freedom for humanity at last. But destroying the entire global communications network isn't the way to do it. If he or someone else on his team had figured out a way to lobotomize Helios, wiping out the AI and leaving only the computer networks to run on their own, incapable of being directed and manipulated to such a precise extent as if they were under AI control, that would have been ideal. I think Tong's position was that as long as the world is one global community, someone will try to control it all. Only by destroying all the progress towards globalization could people have small scale government; just lobotomizing Helios wouldn't have been enough.
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Oct 30, 2014 03:33
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Bremen posted:I think Tong's position was that as long as the world is one global community, someone will try to control it all. Only by destroying all the progress towards globalization could people have small scale government; just lobotomizing Helios wouldn't have been enough. If Helios was lobotomized, no one would ever realize anything was different than it was in the first place but a small handful of people, and they could be dealt with if necessary. The world would keep moving, but now it would be beyond the grasp of any single entity.
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Oct 30, 2014 03:39
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The Helios ending is the only one that, imo, could lead to a positive outcome. The other two are just lame attempts to turn back the clock on godlike AI. In either of them, humanity will eventually get back to the point where the Helios ending is possible again. At least with your avatar merging you could conceivably direct the course of events toward more democratic and egalitarian standards. Just because you have the power to screw everything up doesn't mean its inevitable that you will and fleeing from the problem isn't going to prevent it from coming up again.
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Oct 30, 2014 05:14
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Really, the only sensible objection to the Helios ending is "I played as rear end in a top hat Denton, and I don't want someone like that running the world".
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Oct 30, 2014 16:30
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I think the biggest area for concern is if you left JC untrained in Computers.
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Oct 30, 2014 16:50
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I played DX again last week and I found that the game is very unfriendly to stealth players. The augmentations which are most useful for stealth play (Cloak, Radar Transparency, Spy Drone) eat energy like crazy. Thermoptic camos last about a minute, even with Enviromental Training at Master level (on the other hand, Hazmat suits, ballistic armor and rebreathers last practically forever). So it's pretty hard to sneak around and in some places, it is almost impossible to avoid a gunfight (unless you have a camo or can use cloak). Another thing: almost every time in the game where you see a few people standing near each other, they're having a conversation. You miss a lot of conversations between enemies if you just kill them right away. In some places, it's pretty hard to get close enough to the enemies to hear the conversation without them spotting you (I used Cloak and Run Silent in these cases). Here are a few examples: - A conversation between two MJ12 troopers in the Paris streets: quote:MJ12 TROOP 1 - A conversation between an MiB and two MJ12 troops at the bottom floor of the main building in Vandenberg: quote:MJ12 TROOP
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Oct 30, 2014 17:46
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The Trilateral Commission is meeting in Belgrade. They are coming for us. 
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Oct 30, 2014 17:55
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Edward_Tohr posted:Really, the only sensible objection to the Helios ending is "I played as rear end in a top hat Denton, and I don't want someone like that running the world". Yeah, handing the entire world over to a benevolent AI always ends so well in science fiction. Especially when the AI is only a few days old and totally unproven. I feel like this is a game with no good ending, and so I prefer the option that's least likely to screw up the world permanently. Tong's ending wipes out so much human progress that things will probably never recover completely. With the way people tend to distrust new technology, seeing it all suddenly self destruct will prove them right and seriously hinder attempts to rebuild the networks. And if the AI thing goes bad, suddenly Tong's ending is the best case for the world. Meanwhile, we already know that someone can overthrow the Illuminati's handful of people ruling the world in secret, so at least if that ending goes bad, someone can fix it. Of course, in the other games it turns out that they're all the good ending, which is probably why the "become the ruler of the entire world yourself" ending is so popular. But just taking Deus Ex as a standalone, Helios comes out of nowhere and feels like a dangerous gamble. Who's to say that the AI won't just take over JC and continue leaving corpses in places so it can deliver creepy dialogue? And hell, who's to say that Helios wants JC over Page for selfless reasons? It could just as easily be "I can manipulate you more easily" or "I want to start my takeover right now and Page isn't ready yet."
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Oct 30, 2014 20:52
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J.theYellow posted:I told Warren Spector about this LP over the weekend. These days he's directing the Denis-Sams Gaming Academy at the University of Texas in Austin. We'll see if he gets around to reacting to it. He got around to it.
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Oct 30, 2014 22:39
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I knew I remembered something about the greys being genetically engineered rather than actual aliens. Mutated cows or hairless monkeys, eh? (... Allegedly.)my dad posted:Jesus Christ undergoes a very special transformation for the sake of mankind, and he's a part of a trinity? They're a bit heavy handed with the symbolism here. I can see the reams of christian symbolism in the game now that people are pointing it out, but wow did that all go over my head when my younger self played this. Even 'JC' Denton. It just... didn't even register. I guess though that it's fair to describe me as: a) Very very not-christian, and; b) Very very unobservant. That's just a tiny fraction of the stuff in Deus Ex that went right over my head, though. It references so much history I had very little if any knowledge or understanding of - maybe it would have helped if I didn't live on the other side of the world from where it all took place, or if I had studied modern rather than ancient history - but nope, so ~woosh~. It makes me appreciate even more all the hard work Bobbin put into presenting that stuff in the lectures; so thanks! Anyway, I can't remember what I chose on my first playthrough, but it was probably the Illuminati or Helios ending. Tong's ending seems almost cartoonishly evil considering the unimaginable amount of suffering it would cause. Since then, my thinking crystallised and I've always considered the Helios ending to be the best ending (or the least bad). It makes me think of a particular line in one of the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy books (in relation to Zaphod Beeblebrox being Galactic President, I think); something along the lines of "only those who don't want power are suited to be in positions of power". That line always really appealed to me, and I think the Helios ending comes closest to fitting the bill in that regard, so it's little wonder it's my favourite.
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Oct 31, 2014 01:36
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Antistar01 posted:That line always really appealed to me, and I think the Helios ending comes closest to fitting the bill in that regard, so it's little wonder it's my favourite. Personally I went with the Tong ending. Not because I thought it might magically change the human condition, but because gently caress the Illuminati, they got JC's world into this mess in the first place.
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Oct 31, 2014 02:35
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Friar John posted:I'm not sure why people are talking about Helios as totally disinterested. He begins to take over Hong Kong with no orders to do so. If Helios didn't want to rule the world he wouldn't be asking JC to merge with him. He could have said to Denton "Yo, Page wants to merge with me and take over my systems, can you stop that?" but instead he tells JC that he wishes to merge with him rather than Page. He doesn't want to rule the world, he wants to administrate the world, and this is to me a meaningful distinction. It doesn't want to rule out of a desire for personal power or gain or profit. It has no need for any of that. It only wants to administrate. It only wants to perform the functions for which it was created. It wants to be god, but not because being god has perks. It wants to be god to do all the lovely side details, the administrative details of godhood.
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Oct 31, 2014 03:53
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Paramemetic posted:He doesn't want to rule the world, he wants to administrate the world, and this is to me a meaningful distinction. It doesn't want to rule out of a desire for personal power or gain or profit. It has no need for any of that. It only wants to administrate. It only wants to perform the functions for which it was created. It wants to be god, but not because being god has perks. It wants to be god to do all the lovely side details, the administrative details of godhood.
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Oct 31, 2014 04:04
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The three endings are basically the devil you know, the devil you don't, and flipping the loving table over. In the context of their symbolic rather than literal meanings, it makes sense to pick Tong's ending because it's a rejection of the premises that led to Deus Ex's future. In a narrative sense it makes more sense to pick Helios, because this is a loving cyberpunk story and it has to end with a crazy transhumanist paradigm shift.
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Oct 31, 2014 05:38
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