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Mantis42 posted:In Alpha Centauri you replace merging with the computer with merging with the planetary superconsciousness. Does this mean it's bullshit that in Fallout [1] the dip ending is a game over instead of a victory? After all, Fallout 2 ret-cons it so that Master's suicide reason was bogus.
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Jul 31, 2023 00:22
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Mantis42 posted:Originally I think the dip wasn't a hard game over but they realized it would be unfeasible to create a whole section where you play as a Super Mutant. That said, while The Master is a gestalt consciousness his army wasn't and also the Fallout 2 thing is just a joke and not canon (like 40% of the content in that game). I guess we can say that Marcus in F2 is an unreliable narrator overall, but he definitely was a true believer, and it's not like the human societies F2 presents are shining beacons of hope. I suppose the later entries in the series have different takes, like 'Father' in F4, but he's portrayed as a bad guy too.
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Jul 31, 2023 00:29
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Xander77 posted:That assumes that every game has to be a power fantasy with the player determining the fate of whatever. Meanwhile, Disco Elysium (cue 20 page manifesto). Do city builders count as a power fantasy? Usually the player is the omnipotent god-king, i.e. the mouse cursor telling everybody what to do, so it kinda fulfills the narcissistic part I guess. But for example in Timberborn, which is still in early access, the current "number go up" - goal is trying to make your little buddies as happy as possible, as measured by the game's abstracted over-all happiness tracking system. Of course the game's mechanics do allow for formation of starvation gulags, so 
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Aug 10, 2023 03:39
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Tree Reformat posted:In that city builder, all decisions are still ultimately the player's. Unless I'm unaware, there's no town council of AIs that can overrule anything the player decides to do. All single-player games are ultimately dictatorships of the player, and cooperative/cohabitative multiplayer games... well, we see what clusterfucks those tend to be. I agree, (most?) city-builders and 4Xs and the like explicitly place the player as the omnipotent agent. I'm just wondering if it'd be possible to make an engaging and fun game in this style where the game mechanics encourage the creation of a "happy" population. I guess having a town council and then voting the player out for being a screw-up would be a mechanic like that, but as you say it might create resentment among the players for removing agency. Beartaco posted:Absolutely. Building real cities involves getting involved in community activist groups and joining local politics. What I wouldn't give to just plop a billion dollar railway system through my city. It is a power fantasy, but this conversation sort of began with the thought that vidja games as a medium encourage sociopathic behaviour, which certainly is true for some games, but I'm wondering if "benevolent" power fantasies also make for fun games. I like Timberborn  Also obligatory 
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Aug 10, 2023 04:00
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Beartaco posted:There's no such thing as benevolent totalitarianism. Sure, but the beavers aren't real, and the question is what would be the player's motivation for their actions. If I play the evil version of the Nameless One in Torment, I am deliberately being a horrible monster of a human being and the game rewards me narratively and number-go-up-ways for behaving that way. The simulated beavers in Timberborn don't have agency, but the goal of the game as it exists in its current state is to try to not be an rear end in a top hat. The game world, for lack of a better term, tells me my little buddies are feeling better today than they were yesterday, number went up. I think these game mechanics encourage different types of behaviour in the person being the player running the show.
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Aug 10, 2023 04:05
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Tree Reformat posted:My point isn't so much that video games encourage sociopathic behavior per se. Indeed, if metrics are any indication, I think most people play video games for the power fantasy of safely choosing to be the big heroes they feel they can't be in real life. Oh yeah, that is true, I can't off the top of my head think of a game where genuine conversations and such even exist. Playing co-op with bots in an FPS is co-operative in a way, but even that kind of simulated co-operation is, erm, artificial since if the bot dies, it usually isn't a big deal for the player. I'm sure we will begin to see AI-driven dating sims and other horrible click-baity stuff like that soon enough, but I wonder how realistic-seeming an RPG simulation one could make with an AI buddy or three who are given agency*. And we're still stuck with the game devs defining the game world's structure in some way, such as the pre-baked scenarios in Deus Ex. *Yes I know current chatgpt-AIs and the like are not aware, let's just stipulate that the game would simulate agency by letting the AIs tell you they disagree with you, or make independent and not pre-written choices about their actions, like shooting someone they don't like in the face even if it hurts the player's number-go-up stuff
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Aug 10, 2023 04:22
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Sep 1, 2023 19:29
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