evensong

This apparent paradox leads me to conclude that for a person of average skill, in terms of difficulty, the game is perfectly balanced. Good job, Obsidian!

I just hope a couple more people would tell OP that rape is worse than swear words! Maybe they'll understand that they are wrong for making this mod at all if just a couple more people shouted the exact same thing at them. Five pages hasn't done the trick, well... maybe six will! Slightly related - I always found it slightly amusing that games and mo with M or R ratings quite often appeal mostly to teenagers precisely because of the mature content. As a relatively grown-up person, gratuitous violence and genitals just doesn't tickle my fancy any more, you know? Game of Thrones is for an adult audience? Tell me more about these adults who need **** and exploding heads to pay attention to a thing.

Only made the egg salad, which was, well. An egg salad. I guess I'll try to make the cookies, though, they sound incredible!

PoE is everything the Lord of the Rings could have been.

It's always sad when a tin ear with an iron fist and a jelly brain produces wooden prose. Edit: Or jelly fist and iron brain, take your pick.

Inadvertently breaking the No Swearing Rule with the song title, I guess. Sorry! I don't know how to censor that.

On the broadest possible level, I think most people will find it very hard to agree with the fundamental reasoning I'm following here (feel free to pokes holes in it, though): 1. Jokes are a part of culture. 2. Culture influences opinions and attitudes. 3. From 1 and 2, we may deduct that jokes have an influence on opinions and attitudes. The linear relationship you're presenting is an obviously ridiculous strawman, of course, I have never claimed this joke will have any kind of specific end result, nor would any reasonable person. This joke will not shape anyone's opinion on its own, and if it did, I'm glad I don't know the person whose opinion it shaped. The joke is, however, part of our cultural tapestry the same way any cultural artifact is, and denying that the cultural background of a person will tend to shape their attitudes is just as ridiculous as the strawman you're attacking here. The point and problem is the aggregate effect of the trope, which as you've shown, is a long-standing trope. I'm not going to bother listing specific examples of how culture can shape belief and opinion, because it is trivial to both imagine and find examples of. The joke itself is, as I've explicitly stated before, not a big deal on its own, and it has clearly been blown way out of proportion - it has become a symbolic cause, not a realistic one. Like PrimeJunta I am sick and tired of talking about it, so this is gonna be the last longer post I make about any of this. I may make a limerick or two, though. And yes, it was Mark Twain who said that. Mark Twain was also notable for his satire of the powerful, and would probably have thought it ridiculous to compare a publisher changing something they printed to "censorship".

I'm not being disingenuous. You are allowed to have your opinion. Saying anything else is ridiculous. This is not a problem with SJW's, it's a problem with people who don't understand how arguments work. My opinion is also dismissed out of hand pretty often because I'm a feminazi, but that's hardly tantamount to censorship, I just dismiss those people as ****ing idiots, because anyone pretending my opinion is inavild because I'm a feminazi, or anyone pretending "check your privilege" is a final say in any discussion, is a ****ing idiot. It's not especially hard to find people who will engage in a real discussion either. While the trap trope has certainly been around for a good long while, the "it's historically accurate!" angle is not an especially convincing argument to me. The game was produced today, and reflects issues dealt with in our society today. It exists today. Not a thousand years ago, not even ten years ago. I'm not saying erase history. I am wholly opposed to changing any words in Huck Finn, for instance, or changing the Norse myth where Thor dresses up as Freya to get his hammer back from Trym. I am saying that any cultural artifact produced today shouldnt pretend to exist in the period it depicts. Considering these issues are still problematic today, there's a fine line between depiction and perpetuation, and it seems clear to me that the trap trope is harmful to trans people, as it is one of two tropes about trans people in popular culture. The other is Jame Gumb. In sum, jokes or psychopaths. Weird and dangerous. This view is prevalent and manifests in real laws, suicides, murders.

Please allow me to point out an instance in which you were allowed to have an opinion:

If there are no negative consequences to backtracking, why are you complaining about the mechanic? When you're enjoying a game, isn't boredom a negative consequence?

Well, his reasoning is perfectly clear here - enable discussion of serious topics without enabling jokes that kick downwards in social hierarchies. I don't think the poem was that big a deal, it's just an expression of the transphobia our society produces, removing it is the right thing to do but it's also not going to change anything - but I think it's amazing that people don't understand the difference between the value of having a discussion of difficult and sensitive topics, and making fun of people on the losing end of sensitive and difficult topics.

I think it's easy to conflate saying something is unnatural with saying it is bad because it is such a common way of denouncing things as weird or bad. Not always, of course, but like... If someone told me "I think genetic modification of vegetables is unnatural", I would be surprised if they turned out to be a GMO proponent, you know?

Meh. He's in a high-stress study environment and plays video games to unplug his brain for a while, I can understand that. He certainly manages it.

While I was playing PoE over the easter break, my flatmate was playing DA:I, he made a character that looked as much like himself as he could manage, then proceeded to try to sleep with all the female characters.

Another obvious parallel in PoE to the real world is the similarities between animancy and genetic modification; questions of whether unrestrained intellectual curiosity is an inherently good thing, whether or not traditional morals are useful as a bounding tool for it, tampering with things we don't understand that can have catastrophic consequences, and so on. See also: weapons of mass destruction, The Godhammer etc., there's a million things to look at here. More fundamentally, there HAS to be a huge overlap between any fictional universe we're supposed to relate to, and our own - how do you relate to a moral conflict if you have no conception of what right and wrong means in the society where the conflict takes place? The alternative would be a completely unrelatable society, which could probably make the basis of Umberto Eco's worst short story yet.

But this fame is Obsidian's expression, not Firedorn's. It's their game, and there was definitely a filtering process for the backer texts in place before this whole hullaboo - like, it would be incredibly dumb of them to not have someone sort through them and bar the worst stuff. They would not, for example, have allowed openly racist messages, or encouragement to kill specific people in real life. You can be 100% sure they did not make the Backer pledge completely open, because that would be insanely dumb of them. So Obsidian controls what they want to release into the world, and to a large degree, because theyre a commercial company, that's based on what their customers want. Even if you think that they caved to pressure quickly to avoid a major confrontation, as opposed to simply having accidentally let the limerick slip through in the first place, that's a cost/benefit analysis they made with regards to THEIR OWN speech, and you certainly can't force people to say things they don't want to say. If Firedorn wants to run off and make his own RPG, he can put in as many dumb poems as he wants. Hell, you can make your own! And people would certainly be angry, but you wouldn't have to retract it if you didn't want to, there is no legal mechanism demanding that. The only pressure here is a predicted commercial one - and that is not sufficient to call something censorship, unless you also think it's unacceptable censorship to refrain from buying Nike shoes because of their child labour involvements.

Real talk though, don't buy Nikes.

**** that. I want my shoes made with passion, you just don't get the same level of craftsmanship if there's no soul - the shoes will just fall apart, and the only thing I hate more than soulless children is soleless shoes.

My voice will ring loud, clear and positively dripping with testosterone, from the mountaintops, unfettered, proclaiming the ideals I stand for: Freedom of speech! Democracy! Your feeble attempt at censorship is just another form of mob rule under the STEMinazis!

I imagine one of the perks of being a huge enough STEM nerd to work at NASA is that you get to wear whatever garish and horrible things you want. Socks+sandals to shoes ratio is probably pretty high in those offices. And more power to them! **** it, wear whatever you want, just maybe not while holding important press conferences.

I don't think you're quite right, but I don't think you're quite wrong either. The murdering and looting stuff is a problem that plagues all video games attempting to discuss serious topics - the Bioshock series is a good example, where you really do explore (through the story) complex and interesting topics like the free market, free will, religious fervor, racism, (plus some quasi-stoner multiverse theory stuff) etc. while the game is also presenting quicktime events where you are presented with a hamfisted binary moral choice, and then literally gore a dude's face out with a mechanical hook machine attached to your arm, after which you proceed to murder ten thousand people. I think this is a barrier that's going to be a problem as long as video games have to deal with the constraints of interactive gameplay, which is, well, always going to be a thing in games, or they wouldn't be games. Even in weird and novel games like Going Home or The Stanley Parable, those constraints are still there to some extent. I don't think anybody is saying that the topics discussed in PoE are directly applicable to the real world, that's rarely the case in books or movies as well - but I'm certainly finding aspects of the game to be interesting explorations of religion and reactions to slow creeping catastrophe. The obvious parallel to PoE is Children of Men, I guess. The moral choices are often less interesting, maybe slightly less so than the dumbass D&D alignment system where everyone fits neatly into nine distinct categories... I dunno. Like, I agree that the moral choices in the game aren't that interesting, but intellectually dismissing it as having no value because it doesn't literally explain how to lead your life in reality seems a bit off as well.

A poem written in jest was discussed with a great deal of zest as the internet fought, quite a few plainly thought all the threads were a nuisance and pest.

I don't think so, not necessarily. That would be a useful trait for a scientist. It's also incredibly easy to claim, however, and incredibly pointless - you'll have a hard time finding anyone who doesn't think their own political opinions are based on reason. It's about as useful a concept to claim for your opinions as "common sense".

There once was a woman who spake: "Misogynist shirts, I can't take!" But her words went unheard As it turned out this nerd was an optic illusion, a fake!

Serves me right for only listening to fake women, I guess.