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I love how the Reapers evoke Skynet mixed with the tinfoil cone doomsday machine from Star Trek the original series. Skynet is the technology gone awry story, and doomsday machine is the 'flood' story where we connect the disappearance of real or unknown civilizations to some kind of inherent fault in society or mankind. The idea of children spurning parents is kind of an interesting one in biology. Did you know that the human placenta is extremely aggressive and traumatic to the mother? We're right up there with rats in terms of aggressive placentas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2dDwLKk1YA I bring it up because it kind of cuts to the quick of the struggle between mother, child, father, and sibling. He even goes into the game theory equilibriums for the basic relationship and how it's related to inheritance. The talizoras make the geth (who are loving awesome, and ME3 is baller if for no other reason than you can play one in the online horde game), then suffer an equilibrium problem having to sacrifice their resources to their offspring. The salarians end up with an equilibrium problem when they teach the krogan how to nuke things. The protheans end up being too stingy with their help to make a useful contribution to the defense against the reapers. The reapers reap all the time due to the reasons which I'm not clear on whether we can mention or not yet. Quit reaping, reapers. Anyway, I think my point is, Mass Effect is a tripartide treatment of the subject of aggressive placentas, and what we can do to mitigate their effects on the womb of human kindness.
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Aug 22, 2014 00:20
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I have a feeling we're coming at this from different perspectives.
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Aug 22, 2014 04:05
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Lt. Danger posted:Plausibility is fairly arbitrary anyway. You're just saying that. Seriously though, everything is arbitrary. Plausibility has to do with the construction of a narrative that tracks arbitrary events and attempts to offer a hypothesis about the Brontosaurus by Anne Elk, Phd. So in a narrative context, it seems valid to say 'this seemed arbitrary, because the narrative was insufficiently constructed to make me 'buy' that a series of events constituted a pattern other than that derived from the lunatic ravings of a bourbon drinker.' You know how grog was rationed to the crew of warships? It's like that. You can have grog every day, but if you're caught drunk before the mast, it's the lash for you. Also no buggery. Which, obviously, is not relevant to a bioware game. Edit: I'm in favor of what the dude above said regarding the idea that Reaper's aren't assholes--they're just completely committed to the extermination of life, and hey, if that means that saying something insulting and confusing to a creature might make it sad and less inclined to fight you--then so much the better. It costs so little to try, you might as well.
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Aug 22, 2014 23:29
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This makes sense. Garrus does spend a lot of time recalibrating the weapons. And he's a more plausible gay liason than Kaiden. edit: oops, forgot  edit 2: huh? How is there    and  but not ?\/\/ edit 3: thanks! TheCosmicMuffet fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Aug 23, 2014 |
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Aug 23, 2014 00:46
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Javik needs a romance option. I think the story is missing the possibility where you don't screw, instead you just focus on the terror of the reapers. Javik's whiny bullshit needs a moment where you say 'hey, so you suck at your job, amirite?'
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Aug 24, 2014 23:25
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Psion posted:how a character who's basically an independent adult handling her own poo poo and being responsible (mostly) - even having a character arc about getting more responsible - got turned into ~mai waifu~ perplexes me. Because you're not thinking about this like a delusional person with unexamined social anxiety. What common element does every other love interest in the game have (male or female)? Think. Think about their personalities, physical attributes, voices, in-game powers... Give up? It's a loving face! Tali is a living embodiment of a chat-friend or a phone sex operator. Even talking to her in person, you only get her answering machine. Tali is catnip to a special brand of very strange person because she is a complete cypher. Sure she's 'hyper competent' and 'assertive'. But she's those things like ticking off checkboxes on a scarynerd's imaginary woman-on-a-pedestal list. She's got this like... complicated stuff at home, you know? That you don't have to worry about. She super smart and can do things you can't. But it's all off camera, and nothing she does interferes with what you do. Best of all, any time you talk to her, you're talking to a motorcycle helmet with a russia-mail-order-bride accent. She even kind of sounds like a sexy stormtrooper. I don't know how that plays in, exactly, but I'm sure it does. In many ways, the 'romances' in bioware games are blank slates. There's only an occasional character who will not succumb to repeated poking of their 'hey baby eff my p' conversation options. But, they impose one crucial handicap on the lifestyle of a weird and creepy; you have to PICK ONLY ONE. Except for sluts (lol! (they don't deserve anything, amirite?!)). Let's track some bioware romances... Morgame. Morrigan. Morgana. Whatever. Claudia Black. - Give me presents - Give me more presents - More presents - I'm going to give you the dragonage equivalent of the 'green' ending, except that when I say 'green', I mean 'nothing changes' and when I say 'ending', I mean with my vagina. Secretary lady - Compliments - Compliments - Compliments - Private strip show (or something? Shower? I forget) - Feed my fish for me Moral lady option - Do something cool to a stranger - Ask me about my morals - Lie and say you agree with my morals - Get 200 points in 'good' or 'light' or 'paragon' or 'secular humanism' - I only love you forever, even though I've been parked at the inn since chapter 2 I have a propeller head conspiracy theory about how the 'morality' system of a bioware game gives you a hint about the 'romance' system and visa versa--that these two systems are in some sense in constant conflict, and that, in reality, when you are working the alignment system to max out and get the best conversation options, you are secretly romancing the bioware staff writers. There's 2 modes of morality in Bioware games. In one mode, you accumulate both 'paths' separately. Sometimes the only way that a path reflects at all is if you have a companion with you at the time who will judge what you do. In the other mode, it's an either-or, and people react to you based on how far you go. In ME1, you needed to gain 'morality experience', basically, to unlock charm or intimidate. The raw alignment you accumulated would affect the ending, regardless of the major choices you made at the end. You could also New game + it and keep your charm or intimidate skills--then go hard the other way so that you had both skills at one time. In ME2, paragon/renegade was a percentage based on how far in the game you'd gotten. Either/or. In ME3, paragon/renegade are separate silos, and there's a raw 'reputation' you accumulate that gives you access to dialog options that can eff with a bro. In essence, this means that, unlike in the previous games, if you are 'gray' in the sense that you're part paragon and part renegade, you're more like both at the same time. You can choose whether to end a conflict with the magic words 'come on guys, can't we just be friends?' *OR* 'we don't have time for this, you guys! Now just make friends.' So it's like, if the game is a Tali, and you're all about getting in there, ME1 is saying 'ok, but you have to give me presents' (in the form of skill points spend on charm or intimidate) until you can do it with the game. By which I mean, get access to new conversation paths (including ones with special rewards). Then ME2 is, much like the characters in it, kind of a foregone conclusion. All it wants from you is *DEDICATION*, bro. No loving around. You paragon every time there's a gon to para, or you're a cheater, and that's not true love. Then ME3 comes back around and says 'ok, you know what, good bad, you're the one with the reputation'. So just make it happen. Pick from the litter. If you ever say something mean to a guy, then that means you're a little mean. If you're ever nice, then you're a little nice. Just wait until the last chapter, and pick the outcomes you want. In terms of idiotic fake relationships, I'd say the one you carry on with the writers is probably the most elaborate.
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Aug 25, 2014 20:03
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"Shove my multitool into the door until it surrenders" is *another* fascinating commentary on Bioware romance options. But I think, to be fair to ME, it's main sin as far as the skill system went wasn't that it had one and that it gated content--it's that it would *show* you content that you couldn't get as if that was supposed to entice you, somehow. I vaguely recall a random cave on a planet somewhere with a nuclear bomb in it, and if you accidentally decided to investigate it, you had a matter of seconds to disarm it or be incinerated. Like--that's cute in Fallout, but for something like ME, I don't know what the point would be. They just needed to not show you greyed out conversation options (because your intimidate/charm was too low) or hackable/engineerable doors (because you can't unhack/multitool them). Then it's just a problem for completionists, and honestly, for the completionist, isn't it a little more fun when you aren't even sure where all the poo poo is to begin with? TheCosmicMuffet fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Aug 25, 2014 |
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Aug 25, 2014 20:55
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Live. Her personality seems stunted. Which I guess is because she's an inside-out version of a girl who didn't get to go to college because she got pregnant at the prom. She's weird and tough, like Kurt Russell in Soldier. I'd like to see what is supposed to happen to her personality after her kids are grown up and move away to college. In the sense that she kills them. Also I want to see if any part of her turns green. Die. I thought she was dumb from the first moment she popped up in the game. The only thing slightly interesting about her was that she was in charge of the security guard guy. It was an opportunity for a competent senior woman type character. Instead she's a girl clone perfect version of some guy (if I'm remembering right?). She's a less interesting version of other people's stories. She's not as poo poo-torn-up as Jack. She's not as 'my family is in trouble!' as the frog guy, or samara. She's not as 'cool' as garrus, what's her name the ninja, or grunt. And she's not as important to story affairs as the other blue lady or wrex. She's dead weight, and if you can get another mission out of her dead body--so much the better. In general I'd say crew. But I don't remember what plot point you're talking about. So whichever results in an aftermath anecdote that seems interesting. Steve is smoking hot. You'd be a fool to pass on him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEJHrmliVQw Edit: \/\/ Ah yeah. Then Crew. If it's what I think you're talking about, they all deserve to die. And if Tali can't see how cool legion is, then she *should* fall off a cliff. What a drama queen.  I miss Legion.
TheCosmicMuffet fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Aug 25, 2014 |
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Aug 25, 2014 21:41
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/\/\ Golden? You mean red/fire/death one?Aces High posted:You do realise that Legion will die no matter what decision is chosen right? I MISS HIM. Also, you're a mean jerk, because *OBVIOUSLY* what really happens is that every Geth is Legion so you get to have your friend forever.  I do get way overly stoked at central theme of mechanical life as the progeny of organic life. Legion is just great, though. He's got like... he's a cyclops with 4 articulate eyebrows. His superiority is demonstrated; your mere human one eyebrow per eye, and 2 unnecessary eyes are clearly inferior. And he's so cute when he isn't sure how to answer a query. I think Turing didn't bet on my Lenny-like capacity to hug rabbits. You know. Metaphorically. TheCosmicMuffet fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Aug 26, 2014 |
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Aug 26, 2014 02:02
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Arglebargle III posted:You guys are all misreading Samara. She became a Justicar about 400 years ago after a normal life because her daughter escaped and started racking up a body count. Her Justicar-ness is very much wrapped up in her family issues. She's also really torn up about killing Morinth in ME2; she calls Morinth the bravest and smartest of her daughters. She's always been personally ambivalent about the Justicar Code and has a long history of offering people technical loopholes to get out of being biotically smeared across the floor. In her introduction she offers (sincerely) to spare the merc protecting the Eclipse boss and only kills her after she refuses to talk. Samara then gives the cop who's afraid of arresting her 24 hours to hold her before she has to try to escape. She talks a good game about the Code but her actions depict someone in a constant negotiation between the Code and doing the right thing in real life. Yeah. This is why I went with that unwed teenage mom thing. (One of) The problems with Asari, narratively, is that they're all bisexual supermodel wizards who live forever. But they act like what teenagers think that means. It's just like all the vampire/immortal/angel/whatever YA literature characters. I remember that idiotic movie where the lady who did Twilight had some plot about a teenage girl hosting an ancient alien intellect. Because, you know, those 2 entities are about on par and can cohabitate. If it's possible to write what it's like to be someone that can live for 100s of years in a way that makes sense, then it certainly doesn't happen much. Sovereign has the same problem, somewhat. A robot race that lives long enough to manipulate whole generations of civilizations? 'Graah, human, you are dumb! You can't fathom how much I think you guys are dumb and gross'. Babylon 5, in contrast, had this really great relationship with the older and wiser races in its sentient millieu. A lot of the time, they just couldn't give a poo poo about explaining themselves. A lot of the time they would blow someone up or vivisect their brain or whatever, because the analogy was 'how much do you care about an ant?'
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Aug 26, 2014 18:08
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Neruz posted:To be fair we actually have no idea what a multiple centuries old intellect would be like because as far as we know they don't exist. I don't think it's worth being fair. I'm not saying don't write it. But if you do, it obviously has different purposes depending on what you do with it. Is the Asari mental retardation despite being ancient wizards just meant to remind us that human beings are 250000 years old, but apparently just barely getting our act together? (e.g. Thorium reactors--can you believe that we're actually using WTO to hamstring chinese development--we are idiot apes) Does the omnipresence of their strippers act as a deliberate method to remind us that no matter how ancient, high tech, wizardly, and wise they're supposed to be, they're still basically dumb animals who spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about sex? When they pick the semi-isolationist tack in the story, I don't think everyone's first reaction should be 'oh that's the wise, moderate course'. It's more like they're supremely arrogant and completely useless. Probably the strongest players in the alliance (even over the Turians), and all they care about is their own rear end. It also goes to how they're constantly looking to hamstring the power of humanity in the first couple games. We had that episode about Turians recently, and what's interesting about them is that there's also a weird gender element. Turians aren't *actually* all guys. But all the ones we see are. There's one lady Turian and she's a multiplayer-only thing (I think? Oh right, there's DLC, too right?--Whatever, point is she's like Mon Mothma). So what are Turians. Functionally perfect, basically, right? Because they're short lived enough to be personable. They understand duty and pragmatism as well as Krogans without being psychotic. They are arrogant, but can be reasoned with. Whatever their inherent flaw that Saren is supposed to represent, they could be an intermediate stage between imperfect humans and decadent asari. Maybe their all maleness is some kind of message about being homogenous, and the asari all femaleness is meant to be some kind of bittersweet improvement on that. One of the things that's interesting about Asari is that they can mate with anyone, but who gives a poo poo, because all you get out of it is another asari. Just because they're 'aggressive' or whatever because dad was a krogan doesn't really count for much when you've got someone physically and culturally the same as their 'mother'. Is the message that the Asari are, in general, culturally smothering? Is any ancient superior race culturally smothering? Are they 'mom'? Are the Turians 'dad'? Are the Krogan your screwed up uncle who's in jail? Are the Salarians your aunt with too many cats? Are the Rachni your grandfather, who supposedly smuggled liquor during the depression, and was last seen in Honduras? Arglebargle III posted:I just thought you should know that. Man. And I thought you were cool.
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Aug 26, 2014 21:15
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Arglebargle III posted:It's the basic physical geometry of the world, although the term might be outdated. It is outdated. The only heightmaps in ME3 are in the specular layer for textures. In the old days, a way to get 3d terrain without spending a lot of calculation time rendering polygons for the world was to take a height map--which is a 2d black and white image that represents the altitude of a given point on a plain superimposed on top of a 3d render. Then the terrain would be rendered out into a bitmap, the picture would be superimposed on the heightmap and characters or units would use the heightmap data to figure out pathing and visual offset for being higher or lower than something else. In the case of Total Annihilation, it was even used to reorient units so they looked like they were tilted as they traveled up hill. So you look at something like Baldur's Gate, (maybe, I'm not 100% sure they needed a heightmap in that game, because they could just have used some occlusion and prerenders to do it all--it's a very flat looking world as I recall), and that's how they're faking the stuff like going up a ramp/stairs, or firing up at an angle when someone is standing on a hill. I think what you were saying was that the level is modeled to be very barren. It doesn't have any textures occluding the ground, like you see on a place that has plants or something. Though I don't know what to make of that, exactly, since I'm trying hard and can't really remember many spots in ME3 (or 2 or 1) that have much in the way of plants, or ground-hugging fog, or whatever. It's a lot of asteroids, snow fields, sterile interiors, and deserts. Menae is open and desolate in a way that not a lot of the maps in ME are, so that's kind of what I thought you meant. But maybe I'm not understanding what you're saying. Edit: Another way heightmaps were used was in engines that would calculate the geometry of terrain at runtime in order to more efficiently store very large maps. Tribes 2 might have done this? I think there were some flight sim style games like Magic Carpet that did this too. I think to a large extent this practice is fallen by the wayside because we're all much more used to having gigs and gigs of data from a game install, and the bulk of that comes from A/V and high res textures. In comparison, compressed geometry probably doesn't make as big a difference to install size at it used to. In any case, ME3 has no roaming environments or large maps by current standards. I'm pretty sure it's all just stored as geometry, since the walls don't have that telltale 'steep hill' look that let's you know it's runtime geometry using a heightmap. TheCosmicMuffet fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Aug 31, 2014 |
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Aug 30, 2014 23:51
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Neruz posted:In summary some of us would appreciate it if you would stop touching the poop Lt. Danger. Counterpoint, this is by far my favorite part. Comparing characters to archetypes and games to literature; ok, sure. That's nice. Drilling down on the relationship between Bioware, their fans, and the fans with the game? Pretty great. I got my  just from the idea that wanting to keep all characters alive is not only stupid, but by enabling it, Bioware hamstrings their ability to tell an interesting story.It kind of crystallized something about the series for me. I *loved* getting Tali killed in the 3rd game when it was part of the plot. I *hated* getting her killed at the end of ME2 when I took Legion with me into the cargo hold at the end. In the one case, it's because she represents a point of view who's time has come. In the other it's because Bioware has *no* idea how to kill someone without player intervention, so they arbitrarily decide that, since you like A more than B, you must not mind if we kill B. I'm curious if they've had a similar treatment in any other game to the ending of ME2, because once I looked online and found out how the deaths worked, I was kind of annoyed. To summarize, in case you don't know: In the ME2 ending, there are 3 active and 2 passive 'decision' points. Equipment you purchased for your ship and loyalty missions gate whether certain crew members will die as a result of passing through these situations. The active decisions make a fair amount of sense. There are basically 3 challenges, for the first one you need someone who's a tough soldier, for the second you need a technical person, and for the 3rd you want a powerful psychic. The first time through, I misinterpreted the first requirement as 'go back to the ship' and used Mordin because he seems prudent and smart. Apparently I was supposed to send Grunt or Garrus. But then there are a couple passive decisions that have to do with who you pick to join you. I think one of them is with the Miranda/Jack kerfuffle, where if you pick one the other one dies by Deus Ex Machina. But the one that got me was the Tali/Legion thing. For the record, I *love* Legion specifically, and characters like legion as well. He's like a Johnny 5; intimidating, but displays elements of confusion that narrate the idea that synthetic life doesn't necessarily have it any easier than biological life (at least at first). Tali I think is, you know, interesting as a fish out of water, and a method to introduce her Battlestar Galactica/AIDS-infected race, but she does very little of interest to me. Her space suit looks cool, I guess. So when they had disagreements, I always used my paragon/renegade speech cheating to force them to come to amicable terms. I like the pretty colors on those dialog options. I can't help myself. But anyway, then at the end you have a confrontation in your spaceship basement with a giant floating eye. So I took Brock Samson and Legion with me, because that's just what makes sense to do, and while I'm down there, my reactor core pours salt on Tali and she shrivels up. Not because I didn't shield it well--I had that quest/dialog thing figured out. It's because the game thinks I like legion better than her. And I do. But, perversely, despite the fact that the bioware games are basically *about* catering to the players, and that's part of why I play them, I still don't want to feel like the game is changing the story to cater to me. When I considered how unreasonable that made me as a person, it sent me down a path of calling into question literally all the games I played and how much they humored me and what, if anything, I got from them as a result. Failure states, in general, are a conceit of games that doesn't necessarily make any sense. Lt.D already touched on this, so I won't sperg any more than I have already, but I *really* like thinking about players and how they approach the ME series and Bioware with this sense of entitlement, and how Bioware writing has grown like sickly tissue around a tumor trying to correct for this relationship. I'd MUCH rather talk about anything that has to do with the community, how the community works/reacts, and what the assumptions are, than the structure of the assumed story. Honestly, I'm still listening to the parts about the story structure only because that's how I frame it all in my mind; it's not that I think comparing the characters in ME to jesus is cool on it's own; it's because of how that story is the quintessence of crowd pleasing in some ways (and the whys of how the concept of salvation works as a vehicle for being easy to digest by a wide audience) and how that relates to trying to please the sinners who play ME games that turns my crank. So just get right in there with both arms like the paleontologist with the sick triceratops in jurassic park.
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Sep 2, 2014 23:31
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monster on a stick posted:If you reconciled the Tali/Legion fight using the power of Paragon/Renegade points, and upgraded the shielding, Tali should survive regardless of who you liked most. She should at least have survived the approach to the Collector base. Interesting. To be honest, I often forget or incorrectly reconstruct what my choices were in a Bioware game. So it's possible I told Tali she was dumb because that is my firm belief. fake edit: Actually let me go look that up, because I could swear... more faked edit: Hummm. Yep. I must have unloyaltied Tali by taking Legion's side. Welp. Still. The whole concoction that they're trying to implement character deaths in response to perceiving that the player doesn't like a character point stands. After all, I don't choose to kill her. She dies because Shepherd took someone else's side in an argument, and that made a reactor overload. Either way, the idea that Bioware was desperately trying to find ways of killing characters that wouldn't make someone reload and try again is fascinating to me. Even as someone who's part of the problem.
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Sep 3, 2014 00:42
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Bioware doesn't have very good animators. Even for the facial stuff. Which is weird, considering.Lt. Danger posted:The consequence is a bit limp - either you get another squadmate that isn't interesting and doesn't do much, or you get nothing. Generally I think Bioware struggles with handling choice and tying it to any kind of overarching narrative. I have a feeling it's because they're not always entirely sure what they want to do with it. I was thinking about what it takes to get people to let go of a character, and I started reflecting on Final Fantasy a bit, trying to piece out the differences. In older Final Fantasies, you could and did lose characters as part of the narrative. Sometimes they could be 'found again', but if you never found them, basically, they were dead as far as you were concerned. This let them have their dramatic moments without compromise. The idea of 'what you get' from a moment is kind of interesting because it reminds me of how some characters were only 'gettable' by navigating a situation carefully or doing something special. The characters that were optional were effectively always a 'secret' of sorts. This started to taper off in the last few FFs. Aeris and the various hidden characters from that game were probably the last time I can recall character deaths and genuine side stories being handled that way. Bioware has the idea of a character as a reward, but they're generally not hidden in terms of going somewhere on a side quest or bringing together weird ingredients. They're usually hidden in a dialog tree. In some cases like Samara/Not Samara, you don't really get or sacrifice anything meaningful. I recall toward the end of Dragon Age (I forget which one), you could basically throw out one of your knights in a dialog tree and adopt your enemy as a new party member. He effectively just acted as a replacement for the knight you got rid of. What was particularly weird was that you'd go through the game and occasionally find a special item that didn't correspond to any character you had. It would turn out that these were for this guy you didn't/shouldn't know you could get. It's an interesting idea. In FF, when you get a hidden character, you get a compartmentalized story that might flesh out some element of the larger story (or an area of the world outside the main story), and you get a different combat aesthetic, usually. Like, in a game where the combat system revolves around characters that have completely unique abilities--the idea that a totally optional character that you may never get or see would have their own assets and affects just for the sake of being cool *if* you found them is pretty interesting. And compelling. And other jargon. In Bioware games, at least recently, there have been the DLC characters who come with missions, and usually whatever they're up to doesn't add much texture. Well I suppose it runs the gamut from 'totally irrelevant' to 'fan service' to 'bizarrely required to understand and enjoy the core story'. I can't remember a character that has any interesting or unique abilities, or aesthetic. In fact, a lot of them seem like different flavors of things that already exist--trying to cater to the idea of the player getting to choose their dolls, basically. Like, mechanically, they want this 'tech' and 'biotic' stuff in ME, and dragon age has different flavors of magic, but once you know what a character does, you basically know everything about them that you care about. There's a bunch of snipers, mostly they're tech guys. There's a bunch of biotics, mostly without powerful guns. You're basically saying 'I need someone who can drain shields--which doll do I like the most'. Bioware characters occasionally amount to nothing more than a costume and a chance at some dialog reputation points. They could have their cake and eat it too a little bit more, I think, if they forced some of the deaths and then allowed for something like 'finding' a character later. Shepherd in ME2, after all, basically dies, gets resuscitated and then rediscovered by his old allies. You could have experienced that from the other side--right? What if Ashley saved you, died, and then you're out on some planet, and all of the sudden she shows up to help you fight off Collectors and you're all like 'wtf?!'. Honestly it'd be way more interesting to me if the story arc had shepherd signing on with an old ally at that moment, rather than being brought back from the dead him/herself. Then it's about your perceived trust/distrust as a personal feeling, rather than just dismissively assuming this character should do what you say and come along for the ride. Though the idea of light mirror/dark mirror wouldn't work out the same way. Assuming that holds. Frankly, I think there's a light/dark mirror of the player in every ME, and it's different every time. It echoes the 'choice' system around being paragon or renegade.
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Sep 3, 2014 22:18
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I imagine that sort of humor is very funny to someone who spends 100s of hours looking at dialog trees.
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Sep 22, 2014 21:36
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Out of curiosity I started googling n7, since it never occurred to me that it was anything except 'cool spaceman numberletter'. I found this: http://www.spoonbill.org/n+7/ and this: http://www.plcs.net/contents.shtml http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=8987 There's a standard for a 7 digit integer that gets referred to as 'N7'. Which made me recall that you can do this in string formatting, too (same idea--you display as an integer value with 7 places--e.g. 0000001). So I sort of wonder. If each position is binary, that's 2^7 potential values which is 0-127, but it's up to 9999999 if it's just displaying whatever. Or maybe it's just referring to it being a logic controller variable that can be anything (though it's 16 bits, so I don't know why its named '7'--the most places it would use to display is 6). Meh. I guess it's not a programmer joke. Maybe it's the word thing.
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Sep 23, 2014 17:59
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Well. I do sounding of woodpile.
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Sep 23, 2014 22:32
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What does she mean what choice?! The choice to have a poison vagina and keep rubbing it against things! Also I don't get what you mean by problematic. (satire)
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Sep 26, 2014 21:42
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Willie Tomg posted:a) its really boring because ME3 doesn't subvert those ideas so much as embody them real, real hard. Capitalism and fascism are not exclusive. Capitalism is a doctrine around organizing an economy through the use of capital, which usually just means a state backed currency. A state is perfectly capable of using capitalism to organize its economy regardless of the structure of its agreements with the economic entities operating under its protection/control. At some point in my life I noticed that the descriptions of state and social structures that I'd been taught when I was young were getting displaced by a new, weirdly reductive set of definitions that made everything an alternative to something else, when, really, no society on earth has ever pursued anything so singlemindedly that you could characterize the whole society that way. You may be in a democracy, but it's likely your family or job is an autocracy. It's likely that, to some degree, fascist organizations come to be in response to disasters, social ills, or as a political tool to mobilize support. The end of It's a Wonderful Life is partly fascist, in that the people subsume themselves in the Building and Loan as a symbol of their community against an evil Potter Corp. It's also communist. Your church group or circle of friends are likely fairly communist. Hey I brought in donuts for everybody in the office, because I'm a filthy commie. ME3 is fascist to the degree that it covers fascism as a topic and behavior, and is about subsuming yourself in the narratives of another person and coming to believe that your will is the anima for that narrative. When in reality, it's Bioware's writing channeling dozens of other stories, each drawing on tropes that form a reader's digest of the weird conceits of our society. When you see a race of gentle blue women, who, despite being wise, ancient, and incredibly advanced technologically, aren't the most powerful society in the galaxy because, you know, chicks man, (amirite?), that's a fascist expression of the ideal of womanhood being a horn-dog/nurturer/breeder for the greater good of the society. Because you need to pump out more units, and keep your worker bees happy and cared for. I guess the internet isn't a great place for talking about fascism, but that's probably because people love to have opinions about things they don't understand and don't care to learn about. TheCosmicMuffet fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Sep 27, 2014 |
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Sep 27, 2014 17:52
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Widestancer posted:This guy gets it. I think there was a mini version of this with the TOR thread (or longer version or whatever). Because it's another bioware game. It was more the fan-thing of 'why can't I have gay dialog with *this* person or *that* person' (and I say it that way because that's all it is, and some utterly untitillating fades-to-black) than an opinion about whether it's ok or not to want that. Though there's always a goon who wants to let other goons know that they're marginally less cool because they want a thing in a game they like. Anywho, what struck me at a certain point in the conversation was how someone brought up the idea of how 'it's hard to code or test' or something. Or easy to code? I don't remember, the point is they put in this idea that it had some technical aspect. At the time, and it's still how I feel about it, what struck me was that the *easiest* path would be to just let *everybody* who has romantic dialog say it at the character regardless of the character's gender. In point of fact, in order to get the game to reject you based on gender, there had to be logic in there to care about your gender in the first place. The easiest thing was actually to just let it happen regardless. I think someone mentioned earlier that this was something that occurred in a previous Bioware game, and it lead to some push back from fans that it undermined the idea that the characters had an existence outside the character; since they'd conform to whatever you were doing, rather than reacting honestly. The Asari have that quality as an entire race. It's interesting to think that they conform to your expectations, and Morinth, who doesn't, is the one who's evil. She's actually mechanically evil in the sense that, whereas any other romantic interest will eventually let Shepherd forcibly monologue romance at them, provided you picked one or more of their preferred genders, she's the only one who'll end the game if you do that. Basically defying you in the only way a game that's designed around wish fulfillment can. She's also, unless I'm mistaken, one of the few cases of a completely pointless intimidate/persuade option that you're almost guaranteed to not have access to if you wait too long. If you get it, you 'impress' her briefly. Then Samara comes in to rescue you. If you don't, Samara comes in to rescue you. It's required to have done elaborate investigation stuff for you to get this far, and then have the option to kill Samara. It's like the idea is that you're fascinated by her, and therefore the game will give you the chance to have her in your crew, but functionally it *feels* more like the quintessential unhealthy relationship, with the added weirdness of being a bioware romance; you have to go through this weird rigmarole to get her. It's kind of like a hidden character who's also a bad girlfriend. Like, you don't want this. The game is resisting you. If you go out of your way to make it happen, you get punished. The whole Ardat Yakshi fiction combined with Morinth storyline is like a rape whistle for the Asari. It's kind of interesting that, by the time you get to the 3rd game, they are terrifying monsters that force you to run. And make horrifying noises. They're worse than the Turian behemoths, because with those, the best strategy is to circle, and terrain can effectively block them. The banshees don't care about any of that. It's interesting because in terms of meaningful female relationships in the game, the one with the Rachni queen is perhaps the most mature. You spare her as the last example of her species. She's captured and forced to breed soldiers for the Reapers, and then you rescue her, and she helps the alliance against the reapers. She's your mom in a lot of ways because she represents the perfect alien menace, but you go out of your way to make sure she survives. In the end she's on your side, and you're still killing her 'children' in the multiplayer and mixed in with other Reaper thralls. Meanwhile, the Asari refuse to help you until you sneak onto their home world while it's under attack to get their prothean beacon--symbolically the source of their power and 'head start' over the other races. Then they give in and commit to build the crucible. Another interesting element is that the last time their planet was supposed to be attacked was during the Rachni wars. Given your relationship to the Rachni (whether you save their queen or not), this seems vaguely meaningful. I always save the queen, because I like the idea of saving the last of something even if it's a huge risk. I feel like the Asari are reluctant to even be in these games in some sense. Ultimately, they're buzzkills, sources of frustration, and become your most potent enemies--in the sense of what you face during the game parts. They're decoration and they resent it. Or something. I'm running out of my own opinions to project.
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Sep 30, 2014 00:36
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Nihilarian posted:And I have no idea what he's trying to say with that. It's like 'where do people like Shepherd come from?' He's a video game character with 2 behaviors. Behavior one is getting npcs to give him missions/join his war effort/engage in low impact sort-of romance, and Behavior two is shooting aliens. In the history of the game, the Rachni were a threat so potent that the Turians, Asari, and Salarians united to try to fight them, but weren't able to. So they uplifted the Krogan. The krogan became heroes for it, but then became tyrants. Then Humanity gets in the picture, and over a misunderstanding or whatever, they end up in a war with the Turians which we lose. Humanity gets assimilated into galactic culture, but is kept at arms length because of what happened with the Krogan, and the possibility that humanity is that volatile. Also we're primitive, which doesn't help. The krogan race is like humanity's older brother, and you're going to the same school he went to. Everyone thinks you might be a troublemaker because *he* was a troublemaker. The relationship between the enemy Rachni and the Krogan is partly nurturing and partly disfunctional. The Rachni provide the reason for the Krogan to be uplifted. But they're also the reason the Krogan 'went wrong'. They're family in the sense that they share genetic traits; krogan can make kids rapidly, so can Rachni. The rachni war and the council coming together is what creates the Krogan. It's the decisive experience in the council's history which brought them together and shaped everything that came before ME1. When humanity enters that arena, before you ever hear about a Reaper, you're being told constantly about what the Rachni war was and what the outcomes of it were. In comparison, the Geth are little known. Krogan identity is founded on why they were uplifted. Human identity and desire to join the council revolves around the council's desire for another strong ally (because of the Rachni war) and their fear of what a primitive race with too much support might become. All the male authority figures in the Shepherd's military career are always talking about the council and what's important about it. It's an entity that's composed of completely separate characters and events that come together to form a parental presence. The Rachni are the Ur-story seed. They represent all the chief parts of the overarching story; allying against an enemy, desperate measures, and forgiveness or reconciliation. Mechanically, as a purely video game thing, the Rachni queen is perfect for the video-game shepherd, because she makes infinite aliens for you to kill, and they are drones that have no moral quality whatsoever. But, whereas the Reapers speak with a male voice and ultimately seem to want to defeat you (ostensibly), the Rachni queen speaks with a female voice (and in ME1 it's through an Asari, which is like, holy poo poo a little bit), though it becomes kind of grandma-horse-with-cigarette-smoking in ME3, and when you encounter her directly, you have the option to spare or help her. She teaches you a lesson, and sacrifices to help you (get experience points! and have fun shooting aliens--mechanically shooting games don't have a lot of hooks to have ludonarrative, it's basically who're you're shooting, and how or when you die). The development of your character is both literally and figuratively tied to killing aliens, and the Rachni queen is the only example of an enemy which tries to nurture you whatsoever. Only later do you get the Geth arc, and arguably, they are a lighter mirror to the Krogan Cain and Abel conflict you encounter in ME1. Even given that, you are not facing an existential question with the Geth. The good geth will survive regardless of your choice--it's really about whether you give them the keys to a potent empire or not (and as it happens, this choice is meaningless in terms of the development of the Geth as a race). If you don't save her, and later 'save' the fake rachni queen in ME3, she'll send help for a while, but then withdraw it, and cause an inconsequential penalty. The lesson isn't moral outrage. It's that, having spurned her, she won't be there to help you when you need her. Much of ME3 is spent going door to door trying to resolve the Rachni/Krogan/Salarian/Turian shitshow, and convince each member in the value of what you're doing. Your 'real' mom is completely absentee. And pretty meaningless. The symbolic mother of Shepherd--the reason this character in this game was created, was to fight the monsters in the game. The Rachni queen isn't symbolic of motherhood to shepherd just because she's a big mother thing--it's because she's the source and cause of so much of the narrative to begin with, and she provides a story arc that's a microcosm of the total story, but in a gentle way. I say gentle because, whereas the Reaper arc is 'we destroy all intelligent life, because intelligent life is inherently dangerous. If you expect to destroy us you have to solve that problem', the Rachni arc is 'we just love to swarm, please don't destroy us forever. We'll swarm over here instead, and nobody has to get hurt'. The reapers are a stick, the Rachni are a carrot. They even have names that are the same number of characters and start with Rs. If you take the letters from Reaper and Rachni together, and use some of the letters to spell Repair, then with the remaining ones, you can spell 'Reach'n', which is what I'm doing right now. Anyway, the whole experience of the player in game is like that of a child. The artificial choices--the frustration when you don't get what you want. The conflict between parents, siblings, and generations--the gradual maturation of the combat and dialog mechanics... In a weird way the transition from a skill and point based requirement for renegade and paragon options for having an assumed skill in persuasion and intimidation in ME3 is like the socialization of a growing person who gradually comes from experimenting in interacting with others to developing a personality which affects their interactions with others as part of deliberate behavior. So what I meant was, yeah, it's not like she's the figure of motherhood all by herself. Or that she accounts for all the nuances of a mother's relationship with a child in interacting with Shepherd. More that it touches on these issues, and, in a way, when your game is about shooty-space-mans the alien-shooter-guy, then how would you mother that. Well, give him something to shoot. But gently encourage him not to shoot too much. It sounds infantile, but if you think about it, as simple as it is, that's the entire game's premise. Life conflicts with life. The natural inclination of things is to survive and become predators. The tricky role of parenting is to try to temper a child's desires so that they learn how to face larger challenges than just being frustrated with their parents. The krogan are the older brother who got kicked out of the house after they were arrested one too many times. Your Reaper dad offers to let them back in if they'll help their younger brother (you) not to go the wrong way. Even the way the Asari and Turians are more strongly identified with the Reapers because of Saren and whatsherface's indoctrination in ME1, kind of reinforces the symbolism that ties together the Rachni threat with Shepherd and the Krogan. Here are these figures that have been punished for their hubris. As the protheans are punished by becoming the Collectors. When you rescue the Rachni you take them in reverse from living weapons to free and helpful contributing bug monsters. It's totally nurturing. Bug monsters are totally nurturing. Come to think of it, I'm not sure the Salarians and The Krogan aren't actually meant to be the same person. Like a sweet smart lizard that was catalyzed into becoming a big dangerous gangster lizard. The sweet smart lizard inside every killer is still trying to fix their mess of a life, but they're trapped. They're faced with sacrificing themselves to try to move on. They want to start over--when Wrex/Wreav deny that a salarian had anything to do with fixing themselves, that's someone who's personality has become heavily callused denying the more innocent person they once were, even as it helps to put them on a better (or worse) path. If you let Wrex help to teach you in ME1 (by not shooting him in the face--and not sacrificing yourself to do it(Edit: Now that I think about it, it's possible that you are supposed to kill your human companion instead precisely because they represent a more immature version of yourself--someone driven by self-centered outlook, and you have to destroy that selfish person to take a real risk and help someone who's caught in a cycle of being troubled and dangerous)), then he's there in ME3 to symbolically turn over a new leaf and put both the Salarian fear and hubris as well as the Krogan anger and resentment behind him. In a way the humans are what a well integrated Salarian + Krogan halves of a personality would be. Cerberus is kind of your turn at flirting with becoming one of the badguys, and their forces dog you because they're a skeleton in your closet just like the genophage dogs the Kroglarians. Also Kitsumi represents death and being a rock star because she's a ninja hacker who's got a hoodie and that's cool. Joker is like, the idea of jokes. And how Bioware can't write them well. Alright so maybe you know. Not his 'mom' exactly. But a mom. And it's still a little weird to have a mom plead with you for her life. Even if, at first glance, she appears to be a giant hideous worm bug who makes infinite amounts of soldiers to swarm you with. TheCosmicMuffet fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Sep 30, 2014 |
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Sep 30, 2014 18:58
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Kurieg posted:So how many times have you wondered to yourself what Tali's sweat must taste like? I don't know why tali even exists other than as a weird hook to give you an 'other side' to the Geth. I feel like you could have left her whole race and character out of the games and just confronted the Geth as the former slaves of an empire that created them, denied their independence, and then got wiped out in a war a long time ago. Or maybe existed 'somewhere' but the Geth had fled from another galaxy to avoid them. Even though I know that's not your point, you cad, you :  : The whole battlestar galactica cameo plot of tali et al doesn't fit. It's like it could have been a DLC for each of the 3 original MEs and you'd have lost nothing. Is she a sister? In what way does that experience matter or fit? Is she a type of warning? The idea that her duty to her people is what affects her point of view as being relevant to Shepherd in any way runs its course in ME1 when you decide to be either pro human or cosmopolitan. It's funny I was luke warm on ME1. I came in for 2 because the combat got better, and I like 3 mostly because that multiplayer horde mode is one of my all time favorite 360 experiences. I was never into the story until Lt D started this thread and DARED TO DREAM ABOUT CRITICAL NARRATIVE EXAMINATIONS. I'm pretty sure it's like apple cinnamon, I have diagrams.
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Sep 30, 2014 21:52
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The Door Frame posted:What do you mean by the BG subplot? The Quarians are the story of Battlestar Galactica. Maybe not verbatim, but it's close. There's obviously other stuff in there--you point out they've got some kind of shame thing going on, because, obviously, they look like humans underneath, basically, but nevertheless all wear suits that obscure their faces. They're out roaming and plotting their revenge with their scavenged battlecruiser. There's minor drama about finding a new home vs returning to the old one and arguments about being reckless in pursuit of revenge vs concentrating on survival. The biggest missing piece is the clone leadership, but I've never been convinced that part of the BG series wasn't just a concession to FX budgets from the time period, and then got carried forward because why not. The story has potential to payoff in a few ways, but in the end just comes to them showing up in orbit at their planet, and having it out with their former slaves. In terms of effect on the rest of the race stories, there isn't a lot going on. The geth are a mysterious threat that, in ME1 gives you a hint about the Reapers before you see them. In ME2, Legion starts to foreshadow the idea of possible reconciliation, or even some kind of allure that biological life has to synthetic life. That angle is something I particularly like, because I enjoy the kind of Matrix Agent Smith style character where a synthetic life has an anima that can be whistful and jealous, rather than having such alien thoughts that they're unsympathetic. I tend to imagine that Skynet in the terminator series isn't just exterminating humans for the sake of its survival, but is a bitter, angry entity that resents its own creation and the flaws of its creators. Anywho. So the geth are a very useful plot element in the ME series. Even if their background material doesn't have a huge effect on the world. The krogan/rachni/council relationship is huge because it's everywhere. It even pervades the underworld locations where batarians and the vermin cannibal things who's name I forget hang out. Because it's reinforcing this idea; Krogan are utterly humiliated. Turians occupy respectable positions. Krogan do whatever dirty work they can. Every time you see a turian, krogan, or salarian, you're getting some kind of post-rachni flavor in there. Even down to the Krogan poet who's trying to get an Asari to fall in love with him. That's not just a weird little whatever moment, it's symbolic of the fragile hope that the Krogan have of improving their lot. The human element is the affordance that gets you hooked as a player, and brings the unfamiliar surroundings a little closer. Then there's the Quarians. They aren't part of the underworld. They're related to the Geth in as much as they're... you know... literally related with plot points. But they don't contend with the Reapers personally as a major set piece. Tali is not full of a grandiose plan that's thwarted by the Geth--she's listless and unsure of her allegiances or what's best. She kind of just does whatever you want to do. She's Kasumi without a face. Or an 'insert imaginary hot dork here' face. The Quarians are introverted, which is another way of saying they have no hooks in the larger story. In a way the Quarians are a face to the Geth's troubles, not the other way around. And the Geth are the ones that are tightly involved in the story--but they don't even get ramped up until the 2nd half of ME2. They're a loose thread before then at best. So that's what I mean when I say it's a sub plot. You could have a whole Quarian drama composed of their ongoing exile, desire to return, internal political wrangling, unexpected disasters with Cerberus, Reaper-Geth, or even just motley raiders, folded into one or more DLC chapters with Tali as a totally optional character, and it wouldn't affect or diminish the narrative that binds all the other races together. It's like they enjoyed the *Design* of the suits so much they didn't want to get rid of them. Even that to me is weird, because I see no reason that Salarians couldn't wear those suits while in the field or whatever. Do away with them altogether and leave the 'creators' of the geth as an unseen boogey man that the Geth are haunted by. Rather than a people undergoing exodus and trying to decide to come home. It confuses one of the elements of the plot that I find interesting as well. In terms of similar characters/groups, the 2 that come closest to having something in common with the Quarians is the Batarians after you blow up their planet, and the Reapers, in the sense that, for all we ever see, the Reapers are an itinerant race who wander until they decide to come home and clean house. In their case it's forceful and threatening. In the Quarian's case it's an anticlimax. Battlestar galactica, the original series, is just a weirdo latter day star trek. BSG the modern series is more of what Lost should have been; an allegorical attempt to show how the soul determines its own punishment, and purgatory is a reflection of moral indecision, not necessarily a punishment. Not that I buy that premise per se, but at least the show is fairly sophisticated, and has some idea of the 100s of years of writing on the intracacies of judeo christian philosophy and myth. Quarians don't really touch on any of that. In part because all of that doesn't fit into the larger more interconnected narrative about generational uncertainty. It's not like it isn't important, either! They could serve as the tail end of the maturation process. Children become adults, and then adults get old and die, and have to face that. The quarians stay in an unexplored purgatory until they throw themselves on their own spear out of lack of ideas. The Prothean you pull out of the ancient refrigerator is a better view on repentance and purgatory than the Quarians; at least he *connects* to the web of core relationships. The quarians, to me, are about the same as the frog assassin who worships jellyfish. It's fine as flavor. But it's a wasted opportunity and, whereas the frog doesn't directly relate at all, and therefore is *just* flavor, the Quarians not only manage to be in purgatory canonically, but their whole subplot is, itself, in a purgatory between being meaningfully tied into the goings on of the galaxy, and being just flavor for flavor's sake.
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Sep 30, 2014 22:55
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Lt. Danger posted:I'm a little surprised because I would think the quarians are most obviously and closely linked to the intergenerational crisis. They are in an extended Titanomachy with their children; their exile is a prison from which they will emerge to finish the conflict. Their conflict is the exemplar conflict which the Reapers are intended to manage, and if Sovereign had woken up on time then the quarian-geth war almost certainly wouldn't have happened. As a touchstone for the folly of desiring control in general, their race has more in common with the wicked witch who has her ego stroking mirror than they do with the council's inflated sense of responsibility for trying to protect life. I suppose their suits might be a nod to that idea. You get a better sense of Quarians from looking at Geth than you do looking at them, directly. In that sense, if they're standing alone as an adjunct to the core stories, then I'd like to know why their presence in the world is intermittent. They have a delegate on your ship/in your plot, but does that mean anything more than just a hook for you to go do her errands? If Javik were in Tali's place, narratively, you'd have a better pervasive presence in the story, because, after all, any prothean relic would be a reminder of his/their failure, and an opportunity to remember his alienation from the galaxy. The Quarians aren't alienated like that. Though prison seems an apt description, there's no judgment attached. Javik is a disappointment. The quarians have no reputation to fall short of living up to, and no stigma to be put off by. They're flood victims. They cohere in terms of being a mirror of things happening elsewhere. They don't cohere in terms of connectedness to the other races, except through the Geth. The game has a very sprawling multi-species narrative that excludes them, or makes them the lonely dangling race-character. So maybe the point of their subplot is that they don't matter, and that's unique as being an expressive of extreme old age. Maybe all they want is those darn geth kids with their consensuses to get off their lawn. Their vulnerability to disease has an old age feel to it, and the fact that you only ever see, obliquely, at a distance, a photo of Tali kind of speaks to that photo of your grandmother you run across one day where she's young and looks extremely pretty and you say 'oh wow, is this you?' and she says 'yeah, *sigh*' and then you feel death's claws on your throat as you realize that everyone, eventually, gets kicked off their planet and forced to wander in interstellar space.
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Oct 1, 2014 23:00
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I think part in ME2 where they discuss the Geth disagreement makes it clear that, whether the Geth stopped after a bit or not, their motivations are fairly inscrutable, and in any case, whether there's an existential threat or not, the Geth didn't flee. In some US states there are laws about self defense that say 'you must give ground'. That is, try to escape from someone who's a threat and let the police handle it. In other states, you're under no such obligation and if you feel threatened, you're entitled to use deadly force (apparently up to the point of following someone around because they look suspicious, then confronting them on the steps of their own house and killing them because you thought they were reaching into their pocket for a gun). When it comes to moral outrage, if the Quarians did something reprehensible, fine. Unless I'm mistaken the Quarians *you* talk to in the game aren't those Quarians. Those quarians are long gone. So it's like saying that people from Missouri are all reprehensible and deserve what they get because their ancestors held slaves or were racists. Or germans or soviets or midwesterners with cavalry officers in their history, or west coasters who have relatives and ancestors who were in the marines or navy. The pathos and tension in the BSG show exists because there are confused and desperate people who are trying to upset the apple cart, but the apples in this case are innocent people, and the last of their kind. It's a primordial story; every human tribe at one point was an isolated band that could go from comfortable to desperate in the span of a bad year. Built into our story telling around good and evil is the moral difficulty of being in a band of 20-30 people altogether in your social universe. If someone is selfish and difficult, well, you may *still* need that person, and for every comeuppance myth/legend, there a forgiveness one as well. So, of all their problems, moral outrage isn't one of them. Whatever their people did, they paid for it. The Geth are hardly a champion of pure ideals. They're loving robot computers. They could have gone *anywhere*. They don't need a planet. Especially not the Quarian one. They could have been the exodus. The fact that they're not kind of relates to my deranged rambling about the Rachin and Reapers. The Quarians created the Geth--in every sense. The made them. Then they made them dangerous when they tried to destroy them. As long as the Quarians exist with their desperation to return to their planet, the Geth are at risk, and will continue to be threatening in response. But would you annihilate the Quarians idly? I would, but I recognize that I'm being cavalier. I guess I'm coming around on them a little bit, now that I'm seeing other perspectives on their background as Robot-abusers, because their story is an interesting reversal of a pattern in several other stories. In the prothean/reaper story, the reapers have no explicit creator, but it's certainly not the protheans. On the other hand, arguably, since the reapers clear cut the galaxy, the protheans may have evolved because of the opportunity afforded *by* the reapers. Then the reapers come home to roost and annihilate the protheans, who attempt to seed the future with their legacy in an attempt to get a posthumous revenge. Javik mentions several times that he remembers salarians, asari, and whoever as being primitive or unevolved organisms in his time. Apparently some of them were food. By that standard, you can infer that each generation of sentients owes its opportunity at advanced civilization to the periodic reaper cullings. The reapers themselves describe their motivations as being down to the fact that organic life is chaotic and destructive--meaning, if there *were* still an organic civilization, it wouldn't necessarily permit a new race to arise and replace it. The Quarians, in this story occupy the same position as the reapers; nitpicking over details about whether the reapers 'planned' to hang out in interstellar space or not is kind of silly. There's nothing to say that the Reapers are a civilization as opposed to the tools of a civilization that have been left in charge of a duty--which they may or may not enjoy, or at any rate, may not be a 'complete' existence. If they're extremely elaborate exterminators and the 'real' civilization is elsewhere, then literally, if not symbolically, they've been exiled to interstellar space to perform this extermination duty, and the only time their existence means anything is when they wake up and wage war for however long it takes. They're in hibernation, but the main elements of their story are the same. They're a self-contained cycle, while the Quarians represent a cycle that they will only participate in once. The Geth occupy the position of organic life. Yet, obviously, the Quarians are meant to be sympathetic in some sense. Even if just as people who are paying for their mistakes. Even if you really like robots (And I really do) there's something fundamentally unjust about their position. They acted out of fear and now they aren't just in exile, they're all imprisoned in full body suits that isolate them from each other because they can only tolerate one planet, and it's full of robots who hate them. The robots can tolerate anything. They could make living on a cess-pool virus planet work for them easily. Outside of extreme radiation, they could probably make anything work, really. So the Quarians, by narrative conceit, aren't being total pricks--they really *do* need to go back, and the Geth really *don't* need to be there. So it's interesting a lot of us are willing to project the invader persona onto them and side with the Geth just based on their posture in the story. But given the parallels to other areas of the story, I think there might be a seed in here of sympathy for the invader. It would parallel the threads of letting the Rachni queen go, seeing the Batarians reduced to diaspora after you sacrifice their planet, and the explanation from the reapers have good reasons for what they do--implying an element of self preservation. I'm sure there are some other sympathy for the invader threads. The Krogans probably count, though all we see is the aftermath, when the result of being the invader gets them genophaged. I suppose Morinth and the ardat Yakshi have some resonance there, too. Cerberus in ME2. Maybe it's all a metaphor for life as the perpetual invader. We sympathize with our own desire to live despite having no essential right to proliferate.
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Oct 2, 2014 18:05
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Oh god, I forgot about that whole part. Well, this is nice because now they're more interesting to me as a part of the story than they were. The idea of the hubris of creating life despite a prohibition is kind of great. It's even better because it's clearly selfish on their part--they want servants. And they're not worthy parents. Unworthy, unprepared parents. They're everywhere. In space.
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Oct 2, 2014 18:28
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It occurs to me that we don't really know what Asari do to give birth. They talk about mothers and fathers to imply something about how somebody has to bear something, but I'm not clear on if they don't just lay eggs or bud or what. For all we know they take samples manually and then use a pod, like the Kryptonians and Russell Crowe did before their planet was tragically eliminated.
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Oct 2, 2014 21:22
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Aces High posted:huge slap in the face to the fans Tali fans are a special kind of self indulgent who project a perfect girl onto a cypher and then adore it. To satisfy them, Bioware tried to execute on the most straightforward part of the tali fantasy; that underneath that stupid featureless face plate, there was a gorgeous model who was yearning for you. They tried to make it slightly coy and still deliver on exactly that fantasy. The idea that they could pick a perfect alien thing to be the right fantasy for everyone is unreasonable. There is no perfect fantasy for a plastic cypher that represents someone's perfect girlfriend--especially considering that with the imagination a person so perfect that they can't be represented by an image might exist. If they didn't show the photo, tali's mask becomes a tease. Choosing whether you want to be teased or see the 'reveal' is at the core of what bioware offers its customers. The really nuts quality of the whole thing is that you only catch a glimpse of this image, and it's hard to see. The only way to get a better view is by going out of your way, outside the game, to obtain it.
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Oct 12, 2014 07:11
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Lt. Danger posted:Last time I discussed fan reactions, I was accused of dredging up the dark corners of the internet and disingenuously using them represent everyone. Not unfair, I suppose. If you keep the thread going long enough, maybe you'll be able to make all those arguments just with posts from in here.
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Oct 14, 2014 17:49
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monster on a stick posted:The reason the liveships are there is to force the choice at Rannoch: if you choose the Geth, the Quarians are wiped out. This might even be a historical callback. http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-41-thors-angels/ That's a long history podcast about the various german groups (which includes people who became the english, french, and germans--and possibly the scandinavians). One of the interesting things mentioned is that the germans were respectful of their women, and were cheered on in battle by their women and children who would attend the event. It was in part designed to say 'look, you have to do your best, because if you don't, we're all right here, and it will all be over'. There's something to that, I think. The history of war is kind of interesting. There are countless cases of groups who win because they have discipline or just intimidate their way into a victory. Smaller groups have subdued larger ones because there is a huge gap between extermination and winning a battle. Until the modern era, it was extremely difficult and time consuming to depopulate an area. So you could fight battles and then, immediately after, be in no better position. You have to fight all over again because there are roughly just as many people and nothing meaningful about the political situation changed. When you're 'fixing' (or permanently reinforcing) the krogan genophage, krogan women are extremely present in that narrative. They aren't actors, but they represent, physically, the mortal danger to the krogans and the pressure to survive that they're under. When you meet Wrex, he's just a bachelor. The survival of his race is an abstract idea. When you meet grunt, it's the same thing. In a way, their existence means nothing. They just fight and have nothing to accomplish, except to enjoy themselves in war. The point of violence (one would think) isn't just self-gratification--the reason males (or females) are violent and competitive is because it contributes to the survival of their species by increasing selection pressure and promoting the maintenance of stronger members who can fight off predators or survive hardship. Heavily communal organisms like ants, have strains of ant who's purpose is to be heavy hitters with big heads and jaws; unnecessary to get food and make nests, but useful to kill dangerous insects. Even within an organism, like us, the immune system has a similar division of labor with cells like Macrophages and T-cells, where one is a powerful digestive attacker, and the other is a recognizer and promoter of useful cellular behavior. In the metaphor of the Quarians, it's not like the Krogans where it's wall-to-wall dudes being manly--so the sudden appearance of quarian women doesn't mean the same thing in the story. For the quarians, the men and women seem to fight and govern together, and have similarly broad opinions and attitudes. When they bring all their soft ships to the front, their resonance with the germans, historically, and their resonance with the personal nature of fighting in most community organisms with a 'fighting' sex (apes, monkeys, herd animals like elk/deer, wolves etc) becomes part of their narrative. Fighting in front of people who are the reason you fight at all is an incredibly visceral experience. It's not like being carted off to war in another country, or even miles away and being focused on your own survival and situation. It's like a mother defending her cubs. Only she brought her cubs to the lion's den in order to make sure she fought as hard as she could. It's a manipulation that governments, societies, and organisms have used to force a decisive outcome. It's an interesting contrast to the krogans. We never know if the krogans (as the child side arc) will really be fixed or survive or integrate into galactic society. They may *seem* doomed, but it's open to interpretation and clearly outside the bounds of the story. The Quarians, though, are going to go home or die. There isn't going to be some lingering doubt about whether they're still out there, somewhere, quarianing around. How does tali's sweat taste? Bittersweet.
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Nov 5, 2014 22:47
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