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Messages - Endorya

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31
Design / Professions, choosing them or not?
« on: June 30, 2014, 08:29:53 AM »
I was injecting yesterday a fine chunk of professions into the game's editor when I pondered if the player should in fact be forced choosing a profession during his character's creation phase. The real reason behind it is giving the player total freedom during his training process because choosing a profession means raising a certain group of skills where some of these skills could not be part of the player's interest in developing as priority or at all.

So what options I thought of? I thought of having the player choosing his character's age, if the character is too young he will not be able to choose a profession during the character's creation phase and the player itself would be the one to manually train his desirable set of skills in-game. (Please understand, training a skill in my game means spending weeks, months or even years of his life-spawn to effectively increase them, depending on the skill level and how much he wishes to advance.) If the player decides to start with an older character he can choose one or more professions right from the start, depending of how old the character is set to be.

So what do you think of this? Should this be an interesting starting decision or should the player simply choose what skills to start with right from the beginning, maybe discarding the professions option as a whole?

32
Design / Re: Major moral controversial features in a game.
« on: June 30, 2014, 07:56:15 AM »
^ ... henceforth known as Lord Douchebag
I guess your insult is justifiable; I wouldn't say Lord because that would imply you don't know what a true douchbag is, unless you believe that being the ultimate douchbag is someone that creates a charade thread discussing game features like torture and raping, something like April's fool. Anyway, it's cool.

yeah, I only ironically made that thread about virtual rape and child molesting. No big deal.
I guess that doing it ironically would be less worrying than creating it as a fact, at least this is what I think. I just hope this didn't traumatized anyone. If it did, well, my humble apologies, yet again.

As tempting as it is to pile on, I suggest we all make a mental note of what has transpired in this thread, then comment on other more worthy topics.
You just suggested the inevitable.


33
Design / Re: Major moral controversial features in a game.
« on: June 29, 2014, 04:27:59 PM »
*** Explanation ***

Ok guys, enough with the charade lol.

You all have just been submitted to an exercise based on an old topic of mine that once was in fact my objective, I mean, including those infamous options in one of my early versions of the project I'm currently implementing. I did discarded their inclusion because once I realized that some harm could be done through them, I really didn't want my game and my name to be part of it. The problem is not the options themselves but the dangerous minds wielding them. The world is simply not ready for them and I doubt it will ever be.

I did brought this discussion to some other forum. However, the forum's admin didn't want his forum to be related to such discussions since the forum was connected to commercial products, namely table RPG books, so the discussion was locked and soon after deleted; the discussion got a little hot too (go figure).

The whole point of doing this was just to see if you would handle the discussion better than those at the other forum and I might say you did handled it quite well. I was also expecting more people not being against these controversial features in comparison which with the other forum and it did happened!

I was extremely surprised by the soothing dialog existing in the first page of this thread, so I thought that some degree of rudeness could change that lol. My wife says I don't react too well to sarcasm, so I took advantage of Rickton's first post having some sarcasm to make the whole discussion a little bit more... alive, just to see if people would change their behavior and opinion. Well, it did work for some, namely for Mushroom Patch.

The funny thing about Rickton's post was that his 'shitting' and 'pissing' suggestion was in fact quite similar to some post that some guy made at the other forum. I actually laugh like a mad when I read Rickton's 'shitting' and 'pissing' argument. Anyway, Rickton I'm really sorry if I got hostile with you ;) but I really needed to do that. I kind of immediately regretted getting "rude" at that moment because I think it was too soon, I should have waited until the thread got about 2 pages, but oh well, I was too excited about it.

Then I just got a little bit of fun with Mushroom Patch, I really wanted to see if he would go hostile if I kept pressing him or if he would simply leave the discussion. Sorry mate if I said something less fortunate but at least I got to know you think I have a terrible english lol! It's all cool!

For the most of my posts it was just me trying to be someone who still believed that raping and torturing were fine options to explore. Damn! God knows how hard it was for me to find arguments hard against AgingMinotaur's and Jim's posts. Well freaking done mates!

I just hope no one will be upset for having me creating a charade thread where you devoted your personal time and effort against something you believe it was really happening; I did mention a few times throughout the whole discussion that I was just curious about your opinions :)

I thank you for your unconscious participation.

34
Design / Re: Major moral controversial features in a game.
« on: June 28, 2014, 08:49:25 PM »
Ok, my final post is already written but I'll post it only when this thread gets a full day without a single post. Just because. :P

35
Design / Re: Brainstorming: Item lists.
« on: June 28, 2014, 08:20:09 PM »
I think a lot of game developers look at this particular thing the wrong way round: they first add tons of items and then start to think how to use them. Wrong. You first think how items are going to be used by monster or in the game world and then you add them, one by one. Better yet have a support for that particular type of item in the engine, considering most of the things that can happen.

Trust me, I've done this mistake in large scale.
I think Krice hits the jackpot here. Think of an item and simulate its usage in the game, think about all the variables it will use and how they will be used by the game's engine, this will also help you categorize the item itself. As Krice, I also made that same mistake. I once had a specific category and class for body parts, which later on I came to realize that it would work exactly as my ingredient type item; I was developing a pointless object structure that was already available through my ingredient type class.

36
Design / Re: Major moral controversial features in a game.
« on: June 28, 2014, 08:03:00 PM »
Fantasized rape/sadism is neither self-contained nor masturbatory. It can't be. Guess what pedophiles have? Child porn on their computer. This is not an arbitrary correlation. It is stoking the fires that lead up to the final, horrible act. You mention that rape/sadism is portrayed elsewhere, and is this is true, but there is a HUGE difference. It is almost always portrayed with the goal of creating empathy for the victim. A game where you are potentially the rapist creates the opposite effect. Even the movie Funny Games creates empathy, perhaps even more so --- we are being held hostage ourselves as the sadists display increasing powers of luck and eventual omnipotence. We feel powerless. We are the victims.
Guess what rapists have in their computers, rape video clips from movies. When a rapist watches a movie about raping he will surely view and compare himself with the rapist; he will not feel for the victim being raped; those rape scenes will definitely empowered him making you idea of "we are the victims" truly subjective and remember they also are part of the 'ourselves' you mention.

Look, if I bought wholesale into the soccer mom mentality of "If they see it, they'll do it" hysteria, I would not be playing video games. But psychologically, there is a subtle but extremely important difference between imagined acts of (anti)heroic impersonal violence and imagined acts of personal, hateful violence like rape or torture.
"hateful violence like rape and torture" - what about murdering?. Oh yeah, I keep forgetting, killing nowadays is cool. These are great days for all serial killers out there who get sexually aroused just by killing innocent people, because nowadays their fantasies can be easily simulated through all the virtual and legal violence available. Well maybe this is a good thing, maybe these games where you can kill innocent people 'just-because' will stimulate those lunatics to a point they will not feel compelled performing those crazy ideas in the real world.

But if you are contriving a given situation and suggesting "this is an example of X, rape/sadism is another example of X, therefore they have the same effect when portrayed" then I think I know why you are having such a difficult time reaching a common point of agreement with most people that you've talked to about this.
What I meant was pretty clear. The results of your criteria were easily mimicked by using other variables. Everyone has a hard time accepting everything they do not agree with, regardless of the amount of concisive logic behind 'the' explanation.

You have mentioned logic several times in this thread. Maybe you need to think about this in a wider scope. I do not know whether you are neurotypical and frankly it is none of my business, but for the 98% of humanity that is NT (including a few outliers like Einstein) it is undisputed that real world situations cannot be distilled into logical expressions to any particular illumination. The world is simply too complicated, with too many subtle associations between the elements in play, to take a real issue "solve it" logically. This ain't A = B, therefore A + C = B + C ... surely you are not approaching the issue from this stance?
As I stated before, you can't have a book talking about people and expect to understand the whole mankind. I sure do agree with you the world being too complex but even within such complexity, simplicity still exists. Some things that are simple for ones can be complex for others and vice verse. So how can we both come down to an agreement? We can't, some opinions simply can't come down to an agreement, like religion and science.

My ultimatum is quite simple. Don't like it don't eat it and don't worry about it because no one will force it upon anyone. How can one disagree with this beats me but thankfully I'm no longer trying to understand it.

Nonetheless I enjoyed your writing, I did had to think about it for a moment. From everyone who posted against those options you and AgingMonitaur got me the best writings.

37
Design / Re: Brainstorming: Item lists.
« on: June 28, 2014, 02:23:41 PM »
This is from my own project. It is an outdated and incomplete list but it might help you out.
I advise you to create families so you can browse items in your game with filters, assuming you are including a large diversity of item types.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/o60bqj7ghdaa71m/Item%20List.jpg

38
Design / Re: Major moral controversial features in a game.
« on: June 28, 2014, 01:42:03 PM »
I don't understand the point of this discussion. Is this supposed to be a thought experiment? Depictions of rape or torture are inherently more disturbing and taboo than depictions of murder because history and because culture. Killing an orc is not killing an orc, it is being awesome. Killing the guy who sees you commit the crime is not killing the guy, it is being James Bond. These things are admittedly masturbatory little micro-fantasies, but they do no harm because they are entirely concentered in the self. Rape is specifically about the other - having power over the other, and abusing it. That is not a neutral, exploratory element to introduce into a happy little pretend video game. Stuff like that has a way of bleeding out into the world.
It is definitely a thought exercise. I was very curious to see how roguelike players would handle this issue; I was in fact expecting mixed feelings about it and I think my hunch was right. During all these years that I've been discussing this topic I've also learned that there are persons who are not bothered at all with this issue but that simply feel too uncomfortable of admitting it publicly.

Killing an orc is not killing an orc, it is being awesome.
For you, it might be awesome, for some people it might not be that great, specially if it is an innocent orc, like an infant orc.

Killing the guy who sees you commit the crime is not killing the guy, it is being James Bond.
If you kill a guy who committed a crime, you become a murderer yourself by our own society's moral code and established rules of conduct. It is fine with me that you think that you are James Bond, some people will simply disagree with that ending up recriminating you, even if we are talking about video games.

What I'm seeing here Jim is you attempting to explain the motives of some actions based only on your own character's principles. I, me and myself, can't simply put out an argument towards a public audience, explaining them that torturing in a virtual setting or whatever you want, is this much worst or that much good when I can't be everyone.

Everything has a way of bleeding into the world because we are all different with different degrees of acceptance against everything we come in contact with. For some people Metal music shouldn't be allowed, abortion shouldn't be allowed, gay marriage shouldn't be allowed, violent movies shouldn't be allowed, eating cows shouldn't be allowed, man wearing long hair shouldn't be allowed, piercings shouldn't be allowed and I'm not even going to mention racial subjects. Other people may be perfectly fine with accepting all that I just described, including having torture and raping features in virtual setting, I'm one of those persons.

Rape is specifically about the other - having power over the other, and abusing it. That is not a neutral, exploratory element to introduce into a happy little pretend video game. Stuff like that has a way of bleeding out into the world.
Me having a gun pointed at you forcing my will upon yourself will turn out to be exactly the same thing; It might not be about torture or sexual abuse, but I sure can abuse you mentally and force you to do things against your own moral code. For example, I can force you killing that child next to you by threatening killing your whole family in case you fail to do so. This is me having complete power over you.

PS: It is not a little pretend game, it is a massive pretending little game.

39
Design / Re: Major moral controversial features in a game.
« on: June 27, 2014, 04:26:55 PM »
OK, I thought I was done, but I'm going to give myself one last chance to try and clarify what I'm trying to say (plus give some suggestions of other evil actions) without the "freshman English bullshit" (I think? I don't really know what that even means).
Yeah.. sometimes I simply skip his comments in many other threads because most of the time I need to read and re-read what he posts to make sense out of it. I'm not saying with this that the problem is his.

You're not necessarily excluding things by implementing other things, but there will be things that you can't do in the game, just by the fact that you won't have programmed them in. Maybe they weren't explicitly excluded, but they won't have been included when rape was.
There are tons of evil things you can do (for varying degrees of "evil") that aren't rape, and would probably be more interesting from a gameplay perspective. For example:
Excluding is removing something from somewhere. I can't exclude something that didn't exist in first place. Yes, we can go philosophical and state then when you devote time to something, something else could be done instead but that doesn't apply specifically to raping or torture; It doesn't exactly states that incorporating a certain set of options will result in having less options in another category, it just tells that the game will take longer to be developed because there is a higher number of options to implement.

  • Kidnapping people and ransoming them back to their families for massive amounts of money
  • Selling kidnapped people into slavery, or enslaving them yourself to have them build a giant gold statue of you, fight for your amusement, join your army, etc.
  • Cooking your dead enemies into meat pies and selling them to the unsuspecting populace
  • Deposing the king, taking over, and imposing draconian laws to imprison and execute all who oppose you
  • Bribing the doctor in town to steal people's organs and give to you to sell on the black market/make potions out of
  • Buying up all the houses in town and renting them at extortionate rates and never doing any repairs
  • Burning down the homeless shelter
  • Burning the farmer's fields so the people have no food to eat, then selling them imported food for massively inflated rates (or just letting them starve)
  • Sneaking into people's homes and poisoning their food
  • Putting addictive drugs in candy and giving it away
Those are options that could coexist easily with both torturing and raping, in fact kidnapping and ransoming is already including in my list as well as cannibalism. I can continuously add options to my game until I die. I do thank you for mentioning them!

You can't just absolve yourself of all responsibility by saying "It's the player's choice!".
True, you need something like a EULA instead, informing the player that the author is not responsible for any harm that might occur by using his game and that he will use that software at his own risk. The user will not be able to play / install the game until he complies with that agreement. Of course the message will be much longer and in more detail, supervised under my lawyer's knowledge. No worries.

And that's the "why" I keep asking about. I know you want to offer a wide range of player choice, but why is rape specifically a "choice" that you want to give priority to, despite evidence it might not be the best idea?*
I never said anything about giving priority to any of those fiendish options nor I classify them as special; that's how people who are against those tend to view them, not me. These options will actually be the last ones I will implement because there are many other importing things I need to take care of. The torture and raping are just 2 extra options available, if you remove them you still have a shit load of things you can do in the game. If my fast calculations are correct, raping and torture cover only about 0.5% of the game's total features. Just the game's crafting system may provide about 40% of the things you will be able to do in it, this includes, crafting every single item the game has, (I'm talking about creating items with dozens of thousands of possible combinations), including building shelters, houses and even castles.

(*And I just want to make clear, I'm not trying to imply it's some kind of subconscious rape fantasy on your part or anything, there are plenty of reasons: Shock value, stubbornness, want to make some kind of statement about something, because nobody else is doing it, historical accuracy, it's the most evil action you can think of and so it needs to be in a moral choice game, etc.)
In short, I'll just go with freedom and reality, for whatever people might think this actually means. I know what this means and that is enough for me.

Catch you tomorrow.

40
Design / Re: Major moral controversial features in a game.
« on: June 27, 2014, 12:53:59 PM »
Sorry guys, I'll have to break connection for now. I'll probably just come here again tomorrow morning.
Hang on here Mushroom Patch, I mean muchroom patch as in a common noun - you should revise that. Nah, I'm just messing with you. :P

41
Design / Re: Major moral controversial features in a game.
« on: June 27, 2014, 12:28:38 PM »
Quote from: mushroom

I would be interested in hearing different points of view on something with some technical substance relevant to roguelike games, but this is, with few exceptions, just a slow motion freshman English bullshit session hosted on web 1.0.

AgingMinotaur lays it out pretty well above. Aside from that, I don't think we're likely to learn anything new about a subject that's been flogged to death since the mid-90s and the fact that you have an internet connection suggests to me that you haven't been living in the sort of isolation for the last 20 years that would result in an unfamiliarity with the stale talking points being bandied about in this thread. (Although given that you took the unusual step of discussing the implementation of horserape with your coworkers, I doubt any of this will close the matter for you...)

Sorry if my English is not that great, as you said and quite well, I'm just an English speaking freshman. It is funny though, how your last 3 posts filled with impeccable English failed to add anything useful towards this topic. Well, you did whine about it though, which is a classic procedure for things we feel uncomfortable with. Chill out dude, here, have another mushroom, this time with no patches on it.

[EDIT]
I failed to see the logic behind: unusual + horserape + co-workers. I guess the problem must be related to my freshman English.

42
Design / Re: Major moral controversial features in a game.
« on: June 27, 2014, 12:10:34 PM »
Quote from: mounta1nman
Do we really need to turn up the dial on interactive rape and torture?
That is something that you, the player, will decide. You are not forced to play or download anything you don't want. Horror movies affect you that much? Don't watch them.

Quote from: mounta1nman
Does it seem like a particularly smart and or necessary idea within the realm of your purportedly inhuman logic?
Does it seem particularly smart developing some many war games? Oh yeah, killing is nowadays something acceptable in video games, because it got trivial. Basically, now killing is just cool 8) and don't forget to add all sorts of agonizing screams to the victims in video games, with bones being broken, loads of blood and gore, just in name of immersion and because it is just cool.

43
Design / Re: Major moral controversial features in a game.
« on: June 27, 2014, 11:57:19 AM »
Then we're about the same age. You're a year older, so I kneel to your superior XP pool ;) What I reacted to, however, was your very hostile reply to a completely sensible post. In your original message, you seemed to be honestly asking what people would think about adding atrocious actions to a RL. Rickton replied with some points that are important to consider before doing something like that, without condemning where you're coming from. Then, you were the one who got overly emotional and accused him of being immature, just because he pointed out that it's not completely unproblematic to add rape into a computer game.
My problem with Rickton's post was related with two things: The explanation of the obvious regarding "respecting the opinion of others" (come on) and the pissing and shitting suggestion filled with pure sarcasm. It had nothing to do with how he views the rape / torture features. Think about it, I had this discussion dozens of times before, his statements didn't exactly come as a surprise to me.

Quote from: AgingMinotaur
Touching upon this, but hopefully getting on with the discussion, I'm not too fond of the emotional/rational dichotomy you seem to be using. I sincerely think that emotion is an extremely important part of human intelligence; amongst other things, it constitutes some essential justifications for why we have ethics in the first place. Without emotion, there can be no reason, only rationalism.
I could say this to be quite subjective. You don't need emotions to realize that saving 1000 people is better than saving 10 (logic at play), however you could choose saving those 10 persons because one of them is your beloved one (emotions at play). When I say logic, I mean having it controlling a huge chunk over the decisive factor. We are not robots we do need the emotional side, unfortunately if the emotional side takes control over a decision, it will cloud our sense to accurately judge a situation. A court of law acts upon logic to make logical decisions.

Quote from: AgingMinotaur
As a designer, you need to justify (to yourself, at least) why you are putting effort into including some of this and excluding other things. For fun? To make a point?
I never mentioned anything about things I might be excluding by implementing those infamous features. I didn't exclude anything to include those options as a matter of fact.

Quote from: AgingMinotaur
And please note that I'm talking about explicitly implementing sadism here, in which case the argument that "it's the player's choice" really doesn't fly.
Oh but it does fly right trough it, the same way you are the one that decides if you character will be a good or a bad fellow. It is exactly the same thing. They are called options exactly because you get to decide which ones to take. They require player input to be triggered. Having the torture option is exactly the same thing as having the option to drop an item whenever you feel like doing it, mechanics wise. Emotionally it is different story, which the player can still control in the end, so why the fuss? You can disable those options through the option menu, meaning they will not be present in the game's action list. It simply doesn't make any sense to me being against gaming features that are not forced upon you; something that only triggers with your own will.

For all these years I've been discussing this topic, none of those who are against it managed to make perfect sense to me. It must definitely be my fault. Maybe giving priority to logic is a problem for many people, in which case I do thank myself for being in such way. Every time I let emotions getting in the way I end up doing things I regret.

Quote from: AgingMinotaur
I don't believe anyone becomes a bad person from ASCII fantasies about giving rimjobs to centaurs.
Unfortunately there are people who believe that.

Anyway, thanks for the time and effort you put in elaborating your whole post. I did enjoy reading it and it did touch some important aspects regarding this issue.

44
Design / Re: Major moral controversial features in a game.
« on: June 27, 2014, 10:14:11 AM »
Honestly you could add an encyclopedia's worth of information and I still wouldn't understand.  I'm rather glad I don't.
That's cool with me as long you don't blame me for not understand it. I don't understand myself how can someone enjoy Pacific Rim, but this is a problem of mine.

45
Design / Re: Major moral controversial features in a game.
« on: June 27, 2014, 09:59:18 AM »
Quote from: mushroom
This thread is so bad. What is the point of discussing this anyway? You take pains to say you're only talking about irrelevant features (you know, the kinds of things people who actually write games don't include), as though this makes an essential difference in the normative question you pose. First, it doesn't. Second, who cares if it does? Who's going to write the value neutral, noncompulsory child rape game?
I actually care for everyone's opinion because it helps me to better understand mankind, how people work. If you think that this topic is that bad, I really don't understand why you keep reading it and posting in it. I guess you just needed to make sure I knew about the way you feel about it. It is absolutely fine with me if you view these features as pointless, but don't take that argument as everyone's ultimatum.

I actually find this thread quite interesting. I enjoy a lot noticing different point of views even if I totally disagree with them.

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