Random thoughts... - by Tocky
Azaran on 30/3/2024 at 18:41
Before AI: Don't trust everything you on the internet
After AI: Don't trust anything you see on the internet.
I can't believe the amount of AI images being shared on FB as if they were legit (and only like 20% of commenters catch on). It's even got me doubting genuine photographs I see on there now. I instinctively start looking at the minutiae and details to see if they're fake...
mxleader on 30/3/2024 at 18:50
It'll be especially awesome when political parties start using AI images and videos for muckraking against political opponents or anyone not towing the party line.
Nicker on 1/4/2024 at 20:10
As dated as the special effects for the first Star Wars seem today, I knew when I saw it, that we were entering an age where the line between reality and pure invention had been crossed. Even the best practical effects still signalled that they were stand-ins for what the director had in mind. We were willing to ignore the obvious trickery to engage the story. Now we don't have to. The work of imagination is done for us.
Now our job is to see through ever improving falsity and find the truth, if any truth is there.
This may not be all bad. Perhaps it is an opportunity to up our game, if people are willing to do the background work. But in this climate of autocrats simply telling the crowd to believe whatever comfortable affirmations serve the strong-man's purpose, that's a lot to ask many people.
Cipheron on 13/4/2024 at 00:35
Quote Posted by Qooper
Bioshock had its moments. But System Shock 2 was on an entirely different level. A level that the elevator didn't quite reach because there was a biomass blocking the elevator shaft. Remember Delacroix complaining that someone hacked the computer to play Elvis songs all night? I guess she wasn't a fan even in the middle of all that smoke and debris. I say she could've used some pick-me-up in those grim circumstances.
"Would you kindly ..."
One of the most brilliant things Bioshock did was it took some gaming tropes nobody thinks about, and turned them into actually relevant plot points. I won't say more on that one because of spoilers.
But one of the best known ones is that you can 'harvest' the little sisters for their ADAM chemical. If you do that you can get upgrades a lot quicker than you would otherwise. So there's a moral choice there to be made, you actually have to sacrifice something to make the decision to save them. A more straightforward game would just give you a reward for saving each one, as progression. This game makes you confront the choice every time.
So overall I think Bioshock just has more depth. You've got the whole setting, which is based on real-world Libertarian proposals for "Seasteading". Even the focus on the unregulated drugs and medical research, it turns out that's a parody of what those people have actually proposed:
(
https://fee.org/articles/seasteading-and-health-care-islands-of-innovation/)
I heard this on Behind the Bastard's two-parter on the Seasteading movement which I caught a few weeks back:
(
https://podbay.fm/p/behind-the-bastards/e/1638293764)
(
https://podbay.fm/p/behind-the-bastards/e/1638442800)
But the genius level factor is that it's not just some "plot point" they turn it into part of the game mechanics and progression system, similar to how the "little sisters" ethical choice you need to make is plot point, ethical decision and has gameplay consequences.
So i think that's why the depth here beats either System Shock II or Deus Ex, because of the way the plot, real-world satire, and game mechanics interact. For example in Deus Ex you have nano upgrades because they're cool and futuristic. There's no deeper meaning in the story for why you have those, except they wanted an upgrade system and "nanotech" has the "cool factor". But in Bioshock, the upgrade system is based on a critique of these Libertarian Utopia plans that included actual Ocean Cities and ideas about unregulated drug and medical experimentation, and explores the consequences.
Sulphur on 13/4/2024 at 01:37
Not really.
As it turns out, the resource implications of the choice about the Little Sisters are rendered mostly irrelevant as you continue with the game. See (
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2007/08/little-sisters-save-or-harvest-we-break-down-the-best-approach-for-adam/) the graph here. What that leaves are the moral implications of rescuing vs. harvesting, which would have been an interesting area to explore except Bioshock doesn't really do anything with that beyond the bare minimum.
As for 'Would you kindly...', agreed, it's a great idea. This forum had issues with Bioshock's inability to follow up on the exact thing it was critiquing back in the day, because while the Andrew Ryan scene was an incredible way of putting the exclamation point on it, the game then just fell back to what games always do anyway. The problem of course is that the point Bioshock is making about the nature of video game design is very difficult if not impossible to surmount, so of course it wasn't able to do much about it.
There are some inconsistencies with Bioshock's depiction of a Randian libertarian utopia with what objectivism actually says, apparently (I didn't dig too deep because quite frankly, I cannot stand Ayn Rand), but it is very literally putting a libertarian wet dream on a sea bed, and despite that being just about impossible to do in the real world the way BS does it, it's definitely a compelling image anyway. BS gets points for attempting to be deep, but in reality it doesn't go much beyond the average scuba diving session.
CZmeltdown on 2/5/2024 at 19:46
A bit off topic but just why is postal 4 so disliked if anyone here has played it before?
heywood on 2/5/2024 at 21:52
Sulphur, I agree. In my opinion, Bioshock's gameplay has a lot of breadth but little depth. Tenenbaum's gifts nullify the adam difference and make harvesting vs. saving an inconsequential gameplay choice. There was never any significant advantage to harvesting, so the morality choice wasn't meaningful. Same with choosing plasmids and tonics and weapon upgrades. The game gives you many different ways to dispatch enemies, all of them effective, so the reasons to pick one over the other seemed mostly cosmetic. There was never a moment in Bioshock where I had to stop for a while to think about my character build. And there was a lot of grind to complete research to level up and collect loot for upgrades. The "Would you kindly..." twist was very clever and caught me by surprise. It was the highlight of the game, but it occurs too early.
System Shock 2 is the opposite. Every choice is meaningful, especially when playing on hard, and your decision making is more important than your shooting skills. On the other hand, the plot twist is predictable.