you get that this wouldn’t work as a critique if it was obvious you could make different choices right? Then it wouldn’t make the player complicit. If you’re not complicit it’s just a game saying “military shooters could be different” which is a nothing statement.
Like how games with a “get the information (evil)” and “get the information (good)” button aren’t offering real moral choices. Or how deus ex would lose all impact if the “here’s a gun, go kill these people” starting mission tempting you with a rocket launcher popped up a “you might change sides in the future” warning.
By involving you, leading you just like any other military shooter for a bit then cutting you loose is what creates the critique. You compare notes after playing and someone points out something and you go “huh, why didn’t I try that?”. It’s not condemning you for not trying that, it’s asking you if you’re happy with a genre which trains you to never to try it.
It’s weird. I credit my scientific education with waking me up to questioning stuff. Like when you learn about how we know stuff, the limits of proof (e.g. can’t prove empiricism is “true” it just works extremely well for certain things), how hard it is to wrangle stuff into scientific questions and so on the elephant in the room is how fucking impossible most questions are.
Then you get thinking about how untested most of society is, how many different ways there are to interpret things, how unknowable the “goodness” of your preferences is and so on.
Yet, in the same cohort as me there were a lot of people coming out extremely certain of their own worldview and blindly faithful in technocrats and the mystical power of throwing data at stuff to solve enormous problems. Like we are anywhere near being able to calculate out a human society.
So idk, I think it’s less stem vs not stem and education quality and kinds of people/where they’re at in life. You could probably go through a lit crit course and come out blinkered too, being able to do lit crit doesn’t guarantee you’d have good opinions.
Military shooter games glorify war and shallowly reward horrible behaviour. Spec ops does it differently.
Majority of people: do horrible thing
Some people: experimental and find heroic thing is rewarded.
Discussion possible, why did the majority do that? could we talk about horrible and uncreative design patterns in the genre of military shooters? How media portrayals of war train us not to look for peaceful solutions? Whether this feeds into how we view American imperial wars?
you: no spec ops bad video game because I didn’t do the good option.
I think you’re actually engaging with it a bit shallowly. You are the one who invented the rule and a different framing is exploring how, if games seem to put us in situations where we must do horrible things to advance even a couple of times, we take that as a rule instead of risking losing to find other ways.
Which is a fairly glaring indictment of the whole military shooter genre which is all about “hard men and hard choices” that completely dehumanise the factions you’re in opposition to.
haha, $company you’re so relatable. You’re a friend, you get me. Not a souless machine inhumanely optimised for profit twisting flesh into eldritch parts to power the rituals that sustain you.
Yeah might be worth a test. I assume most modern pigments are probably pretty stable, this was 10 years ago using ink that was 40 years old even then. At a certain point we all just develop idiosyncratic neuroses as a result of experiences :)
Yeah I’m in Australia and I left my lab notebook by a window over a holiday break. It was probably getting over 50 C daily and the ink all faded. I don’t think it was UV, as multiple pages were damaged, I think the ink wasn’t hugely temperature stable.
It wasn’t like magically gone, but faded enough that my chicken scratch was hard to read. Between that and water damage at various points I figured I’d just switch before something got fucked up beyond salvaging. Besides, you never know what’ll be interesting to future generations. Whether it’s a grandkid paging through something to get a sense of who you were or some researcher going through archives. Archivists ink is non acidic, so it doesn’t destroy paper over time. Idk whether printer ink is.
Yeah I had one ages back but you did need to replace the wicking material and tip periodically, filling also involved slowly infusing with a syringe and drawing needle.
In the end it was about as much hassle as a solid fountain pen and I couldn’t use archivists ink so I went back.