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Retail worker

"unalive" should just mean the opposite of undead. if undead means a dead thing thats alive, unalive shuld mean an alive things thats dead. no i dont have any examples. ☝️yet

#the body moves but the light has gone

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#abigail thorn's videos are all excellent #and often put forward gender class and race as comprehensive examples to explain the philosophy topic of the day clearly #like its not a Topic Moment its what's under the hood of important questions #its just excellent educational communication

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#this is a good transfer of generational knowledge

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who up experiencing divine madness

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re @mousebrass

[context]

Sorry for the delay, I just needed some time to simmer my answer. (for frame of reference, I'm mostly referring to fallout 3 and fallout 4. not new vegas, and I don't know enough about FO76.)

When I said 'Bethesda's fallout will never say no to you', I meant in sort of a structural sense. The gameplay and the storytelling combine in Bethesda's fallout games to do nothing but affirm the player's forward motion.

They do this so well the storytelling is ONLY a function of the gameplay loop: a relay race that progresses with total blindness to what the player actually does so long as they hit the checkpoints that advance things along.

Forward motion is good, we need stories to progress and to get from one event to another, we don't want to run around in circles in a game achieving nothing. And we don't want to encounter a true dead end, or a frustrating 'sorry mario the princess is in another castle!' situation where we feel our prior actions were pointless.

BUT. Hear me out. Negativity, 'being told no', friction along the way, is important to an 'adventure' being more than just an endless gopher loop.

Lucy MacLean IS given objectives in her journey. But the narrative is not her personal facilitator; instead she can't proceed UNLESS she does these increasingly heinous uncomfortable things, okey dokey! She COULD choose not to do them, but she'd 'fail' or thinks she would. Her struggle 'drives the story' rather than styling her actions as intuitively synonymous with 'progress.'

In Bethesda Fallout games. It really doesn't matter what dialog options you choose, progress is inevitable. And blind. If you choose peaceful or guns-blazing approaches. Want to join the fascists? You won't encounter too much content that places pressure on you for doing that. Want to side with the scrappy underdogs? Done, it won't be that much of a strain on your resources. Take the evil option? Except for maybe a few NPCs that could desert you, you won't be constrained by that commitment very much.

It's 'the customer's always right', when that idiom exists basically to facilitate transactions and nothing else.

In fact, the one time in a Bethesda fallout game where meaningful pressure or negative consequences impacted you, in fallout 3, the ending was so unpopular it was retconned in a DLC. But it doesn't have to be this way; there are many times in New Vegas where you might feel conflict or constraints on your actions, a 'no' that makes what you actually choose to do feel more interesting. Like, enough times that I think anyone who's played it, could think of one (their favorite one?) right now. I don't even have to list examples, because the variety is great enough that different people can choose which one feels compelling to them.

Remember when I said we wanted to avoid scenarios where we feel futile, running around in circles, pointless, or obstructed? Well, after a while a lot of Bethesda games become that anyway even if they always take the player's side. People just... give up playing a save usually by level 30. Boundless affirmation towards forward motion, where all paths are THE path and you're the main character of reality, it sucks. it's why Lucy MacLean's wasteland experience will leave you wanting to play fallout and then sighing when you boot up the game that just got a 'remaster' and it's still mostly drudgery. When SHE hits 'quest objectives,' her world doesn't say 'yes! now go do...'

It says "oh, hell no. but you gotta... unless maybe..."

#fallout #belated reply #the bones of the quest chains and gameplay loops show too much in bethesda games #turning them into relay race fetch simulator instead of roleplaying games or even 'action/adventure' games #a constant forward motion is also cowardice and unwillingness to make the player navigate their own choices #if that is the case just... omit the choices. remove the 'roleplaying' element. actually put us on rails instead of pretending. #long post

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dune is so funny it literally opens like

CHAPTER 1

“It sucks that I understand Time Cube and as such cannot avoid becoming a genocidal dictator,” young Paul Atreides said to himself. “For me. Moral complexity is such a burden.”

CHAPTER 2

“Heard any good slurs for poor people lately?” asked the Baron Harkonnen homosexually, knocking back another shot of orphan tears.

#your... your mind

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when autism

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Stand alone complex? I find it quite simple,

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I will say it is hard to be nice to people here when so much of casual tumblr vernacular is just… inherently hostile. Some of you genuinely do not seem to understand that there are alternatives to flippantly insulting strangers.

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#all compliments as above but now i am interested in the viability of Pole Opera

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#aH YES #'the hipster's wager' #a classic maneuver #also works for books and poetry

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Reading comments saying how in Deep Space Nine whenever the crew faces a moral dilemma, they often just turn to Garak, and it made me want to make this