Ess-Eschas

That’s some unusual behaviour you’re seeing, n_clock. You’re quite right that the exit to the rest of the outdoors should open after you’ve passed through the Lair of the Ursagi and gone out the back entrance. Have you accepted a quest from Delenn in Golddale to deal with the Ursagi? The title of the quest is ‘Clean Out Ursagi Cave’. Alternatively, have you fought a boss battle around the altar in the north-eastern part of the cave? The boss is the leader of the Ursagi, who goes by the name of Hrrackar. The party has a short dialogue with them before the battle starts, so it should be fairly clear if you’ve fought them or not. I know you said that you've fought everyone in the cave, but there's a possibility that the boss fight hasn't yet spawned for you. I have a slight hunch as to what might be causing your problem. If I’m right, I might be able to open up the exit for you from where you are now – although I’d be more confident if you had a save file which is still in the Lair. Alternatively, there’s another solution which will definitely help you. I’d like to see if my hunch about the cause is correct first – knowing the cause might help other players in the future! However, if it turns out your problem is due to something else, I’ll give you the more general solution, and let you know what you need to do to move on!

I think perhaps there might have been another misunderstanding here. That may well be due to a failure on my end to fully explain my reasoning. Let me see if I can’t try to clear this up! To begin with, it’s always been my understanding that a straw man argument was a deliberate choice – that a person had to decide to poorly represent an argument in order to set up a straw man. A misunderstanding, on the other hand, is just a misunderstanding! If I’ve misrepresented your argument, then it’s not an attempt to straw man you. I’ve just misunderstood! My aim has never been to state that my proposition is in some senses true, all the more so because I’ve not produced in-game evidence for it. My motivation for introducing my proposition was precisely in response to another person claiming a different proposition as being true, one also stated without evidence. If I didn’t accept one such proposition, it would be unreasonable for me to produce another in the same vein. Also, if you check over what I’ve written, you’ll see that I never actually stated that I preferred my proposition, merely that I was arguing that it was a valid one. I think perhaps part of the issue comes down to the the meaning one attributes to ‘follows from the game’. Let’s see if I can shed some light on that. In my earlier terminology, I referred to View A and View B. Let me make these explicit: View A: Information about a creation’s mind may survive absorption by a Shaper, and be passed on to a new creation made by that Shaper. View B: A creation dies on absorption. New creations have no mental links to older creations. The problem I have here is that I find it hard to see how either of these Views ‘follows from the game’. These Views differ in their description of what happens to the creations’ minds. So far as I’m aware, the game makes no comment on this point, even tangentially. The game has nothing at all to say about the minds of the player’s creations, if my memory serves. So how can any comment about the mind of the player’s creations ‘follow from the game’? Your criterion for considering a theory, as I understand it, is that it follows from the game. If neither View A nor View B fulfills your criterion, then you cannot consider either as being valid. Both Views are lumped into the same category – ‘invalid’ – and your criterion cannot distinguish between them. But that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to argue for! I’m not trying to say that View A is better, or more true, or more correct than View B, merely that it is equally valid. Saying that both are equally invalid amounts to the same thing! Now, that’s largely what I said before. To illustrate this point, I think a further example might be helpful. So, let me propose two further Views: View α: Artilas are vegetarians. View β: Artilas eat meat. The game says that creations eat, but doesn’t give much detailed information about what creations eat. I don’t recall the game mentioning anything about what Artilas eat specifically. If I’m remembering correctly, then the game has nothing to say on this point. Both View α and View β don’t follow from the game. Using that measure, both are equally valid/invalid. This is where I find myself somewhat confused by your statement about your default position. If a given View Y does not meet your criterion for validity, then I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that Not Y is any more valid. Not Y must also be assessed under your own criterion, surely? For example, in this case, View α does not follow from the games. So, if I understand you correctly, you would state that Not View α is your default position. Not View α is equivalent to View β, as I understand it. So your default position has you support View β. But how would this argument had gone if I had started with View β first? In this case, since View β does not follow from your criterion, then you by default accept Not View β, which is equivalent to View α. In other words, it seems to me that you default position assumes both View α and View β to be simultaneously true and false, which is a logical inconsistency. So, either my interpretation of your default condition is wrong, or your default condition is inconsistent. How does that compare to your flight example? Here are two Views related to that: View γ: Shapers can fly. View δ: Shapers cannot fly. Using the same argument I proposed above, both of these views would seem to be equally valid/invalid. But is there more to this example than that? Yes, of course, because otherwise you wouldn’t have chosen it! The difference here is that the game does have something to say on this point. Flying is a method of movement, and the game does talk about how Shapers move about. It shows Shapers walking, and running, and riding on boats, and so on. Since the game shows these means of locomotion, but doesn't show flying, it seems fair to say that the latter methods of locomotion follow from the game, but that flying does not. So, using your criterion, View δ passes. View γ does not. So how does all this relate to Views A and B? The issue, I think, is whether View B passes your criterion or not. If it does, then this criterion can be used to cast doubt on View A. But if it doesn’t, then, as I undesrstand it, you’re largely back at square one. You can say nothing about either View, and it seems to me that you can’t say that one is somehow better than the other. So does View B pass your criterion? To me, it doesn’t seem to. Geneforge says nothing about the minds of the creations the player creates, if I remember correctly, so any statement to that effect is supposition. It does not follow from the game lore. As you yourself said, “there’s nothing to suggest it works like that”. If I am mistaken, and you can show me that View B follows from the game lore, then please do so. That would add support to your viewpoint, and I’d be interested to hear it! Otherwise, I find myself a little confused as to how the application of your validity criterion can lend support to one of these Views over another. If your criterion cannot distinguish between these Views, and my measure of validity cannot distinguish between them either, than I feel we’re arguing for the same thing. Am I making a mistake somewhere? On the contrary, I believe it does. I’ve touched on this point before. If there is no evidence to suggest that a theory is true, but no evidence to suggest that it is false, then it is potentially true. It is valid. If there exists no theory which can be supported by evidence, then we must look to theories that are potentially true. Our potentially true theory then holds equal validity with all other theories that have no evidence in support of them or against them – and that are internally consistent, of course. In that case, all consistent theories are indeed equally valid! For an example, consider Supersymmetry and M-theory, as two possible candidates for explaining phenomena that can’t be described by the Standard Model. These theories are self-consistent, but there is currently no experimental evidence for or against either of them. So both should be equally valid – experimentally, there’s nothing to distinguish one from the other! This Kickstarter should be started immediately.

With apologies for the nitpicking, but that’s not quite the case. Dexterity can refer to skilled use of the hands, but that’s only one use of the word. It can also be used to describe more general skilled use of the body, as seen in RPGs, sport and other areas. It can even be used to describe other things, such as the mind – one can be dextrous in navigating an argument, for instance. All these usages are valid, and none is more technically correct than any other. The root of the word, and ‘ambidextrous’, is not the latin word for ‘hand’, but the latin word for ‘right’ (i.e. the opposite of left). Strictly speaking, ambidextrous means something like ‘both sides like the right’, that is, both sides of the body being used equally. Dexterity, likewise, means something like ‘having the property of dexter’. In other words, having the property of the right side of the body (which, in a society dominated by right-handed people, would come to be associated with skill). So, if you’re looking at its root, the word dexterity just means being skilled in some general physical sense! The word ambidextrous is a little different, and it would be unfair of me to neglect that! That word does tend to refer to hands in the modern day, since one usage of ‘dexter’ is to describe the right hand. So, in modern times, ambidextrous has come to be associated pretty solidly with hands. However, in my experience, the same is not true with dexterity. It has many uses, for hands and for other things!

That’s alright! Everyone makes mistakes, and in games of this size, it’s easy to misremember details sometimes! Most of the names of the unique items you mentioned are mysterious – the game doesn’t give any context for most of them. ‘Thralni’, though, we do know a little about. Thralni was the leader of one of the groups of the First Expedition, the one that explored the lakes around Sss-Thsss’s castle and eventually met their end in a dangerous cave in the Waterfall Warren. We don’t know much more than that, although conversations indicate the Thralni might have been a mage, and that he ‘forced’ members of his group to continue the expedition whether they wanted to or not. Some people have speculated that Thralni took over the entire Expedition after its first leader, Karzoth, died, but that’s not entirely clear. In any case, we at least know that Thralni was not a god, but a mortal. You know, I always liked the idea that ‘Vorb’ was an action word. For instance, you could cast a ‘vorb’ on something, which could be referred to as ‘vorbing’. Like a Wand of Fire launches fire at a target, a Wand of Vorb ‘vorbs’ something. Given the behaviour of the wand, ‘vorbing’ probably isn’t a good thing! That’s just my own instinctive reaction to the word – there’s no evidence that that was what Spiderweb intended! That quotation you remembered (and actually partially quoted yourself!) was from Linda. Lest we forget that Linda did have things to contribute besides the whole issue with the Tower! Here’s what she says: “These adventurers had a wide variety of magic items: several weapons, several peculiar items, and finally a scepter. They were all killed, to a man and woman, and the items were scattered.” Note that she says they had a wide ‘variety’ of items, rather than a large number of them. At least to me, the repeated use of ‘several’ implies that there really weren’t that many items, just that there were different types of them. The ‘scattering’ part is vague, so it’s open to interpretation. As you’ve seen, I’ve assumed that to mean that the groups were scattered throughout Exile – so the First Expeditions items are found in the handful of locations where the groups met their end. But it could also describe the sort of situation you’re talking about too! Incidentally, for reference, Linda gives a short list of items that came down with the First Expedition. It’s not clear whether it’s meant to be exhaustive or not, but here are the items she mentions:

I’m not trying to be deliberately contrary here, but I do still think your comment here is a little misleading. The majority of uniquely named items in the game, whether with a person’s name attached or not, are perfectly alright. Harmful and cursed unique items are in the minority. I’m afraid I need to point out that that’s the case even in your list of examples. Most of the items you’ve listed in your post, if memory serves, are neither harmful nor cursed, but are entirely beneficial! To be clear, there certainly are dangerous items with unique names in Exile! But they’re not in the majority. If a player finds an item with a unique name that they’ve not encountered before, chances are that it’s a perfectly useful item. That’s why the trap with the Mace of Augvah works! Trapped items are unusual, so players might be tempted to assume it’s valuable! If the game handed out trapped items all the time, it really wouldn’t be as effective. I’m not trying to be critical, Almighty Doer of Stuff! But it’s important to be clear on issues like this. A player who read your comment, and assumed that all First Expedition items were cursed, for example, could be forgiven for not bothering to put together Demonslayer, or leaving Smite on the ground, believing they were both cursed. That would harm another player’s experience of the game. That’s why it’s important to be clear on these issues whenever we can – we don’t want to spread information that could potentially harm the experience of these games for other players! Your comment about the First Expedition in general is more open to debate! Exile I is quite clear about the actions of the Expedition. We know where they all went, and the player can follow each group. When you reach the end of each trail, you find where they met their end, including the nice items they were carrying. But the game doesn’t provide any evidence I can recall that says these items were moved or scattered around. Most of them, I believe – with the exception of Demonslayer and one of the Brooches – just stayed where their owners fell. I don’t believe there’s a record of any of the teams of the First Expedition going so far as Grah-Hoth’s fortress. It’s also worth remembering that Exile is full of creatures! There are sliths, ogres, nephilim, liches, the aranea, demons, and so on, not to mention the nation of Exile itself and the ruins of Vahnatai civilisation! A mysterious magical artifact could have been made by a number of different races and peoples, and we have evidence that many of the races do just that. Just because the party comes across a magical artifact doesn’t mean it was brought down by the First Expedition! Incidentally, which of the First Expedition items isn’t encountered in Exile I? I thought I had accounted for them all, but I’m probably forgetting one or two – there are a fair few!

Okay, that was a useful thing to check. It rules out one possibility! What’s supposed to happen is that you find an item in one of the chests in this room. Unlike many other quests, this isn’t a special item. It’s a perfectly normal item that you carry around in your pack, along with your charms, potions etc.. If both chests are empty of items, then something unusual is happening. This might sound a little trivial, but it might be worth checking through the packs of your characters, just to make sure you didn’t pick up the item with an accidental button press. It’s a unique item, so you should be able to spot it rather quickly if it's already in your pack. I’m sure you would have noticed if you did, but when dealing with problems like these, it’s worth covering all bases! There is one other possibility. This relates to a bug in older Spiderweb games, one that’s resisted most attempts to tie it down. To my knowledge, it hasn’t been seen in Queen’s Wish, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there! To see if you’re experiencing this problem, I’d like to ask you to go and have a look in a chest somewhere, one which you know should contain items. If you’ve placed items in chests in any forts, for instance, you could check those. Alternatively, you could keep an eye out for chests in any new dungeons or forts that you visit. What you’re looking for are any chests that you know should be full, but are actually empty. If you find something like that, let me know! It would be useful to know if this bug has persisted into Queen’s Wish! Incidentally, I have a way to fix this issue for you, but it would be useful to try and track down the source of the problem first. If none of the above suggestions work, I’ll let you know what you need to do to get around the problem, and how you can progress with the quest!

I think this could be a useful exercise. It might help to demonstrate how I think confusion can arise in arguments like this as a result of slightly different meanings being attributed to words. I might extend that in this case to meaning ascribed to actions, too. I’ve quoted your recap of this point of the argument above, as seen from your viewpoint. Below is exactly the same structure, which I present from my own viewpoint: To recap: 1) You asserted that the game presents shaping as basically just genetic manipulation plus some synthesis/growth action. 2) I said this could not explain shaped creations being able to function without having to learn first – bringing up the speculative Wesley experiment. I proposed a few different types of behaviour that I imagined would cause problems for an adult brought into existence without a childhood – such as this speculative Wesley – including breathing. 3) You agreed in part, but stated that one of my examples, breathing, was an example where genes alone are enough to ‘teach a brain’ how to do something. 4) I agreed with you on that point, and explained that I included breathing in my list as a result of a misunderstanding of how the process started in human babies. I then went on to say that I believed your objection to the breathing example did not apply to the other behaviours I had listed. In agreeing with you, I described the brain’s capability to cause breathing to occur as ‘knowledge’, simply because that’s how I understood the term. 5) You objected to my use of the term ‘knowledge’, but made no comment on my continuation of the argument. 6) I explained why I thought the term applied, and asked you for your own interpretation. 7) You did not provide an interpretation of the word, but instead raised some doubts about my method of arguing. 8 ) This strand of the argument begins to stall. In a sense, the problem here seems to stem from a different interpretation of my motives. You seem to be saying that I included the word ‘knowledge’ as a deliberate tactic to try to prove my point. As I understand it, you’re saying that I’ve been trying to redefine the meaning of words to provide ammunition for my own views. I am saying that that wasn’t my intention – I was just innocently using a word according to my understanding of its meaning. Furthermore, I was using it in a context in which I was trying to concede part of the argument to you, acknowledging your own viewpoint. I assure you, I’m not a Machiavellian figure, cackling in my secret lair as I try to undermine your views through any approach I know how. I’m just trying to express my viewpoint as clearly and honestly as I can, in a style of argument to which I believe I am not as well accustomed as yourself. That’s why I’ve been asking for your patience, and some help from you. An unfortunate consequence of this seems to be that this strand of the argument has focused squarely on this misunderstanding, leaving the meat of what was being discussed behind. I would say that’s unfortunate, but if it leads to a greater understanding of the processes behind the argument up to this point, then perhaps the outcome is a positive one. But that’s great! One thing perhaps that can be taken from the flow of the argument up to this point is that the game seem to provide no clear indication of what happens when a player absorbs and creates a creation. If there were some clear indication, there wouldn’t be the level of ambiguity necessary to debate these points – the interpretation would be obvious, and entirely described, so there wouldn’t be much need to argue alternatives. Having done some checking through the games myself, I have found no description at all of what the player does when they absorb or create a creation. Furthermore, there appears to be no description of what any other shaper is actually doing when they do these things. The game simply says that absorption and creation take place, offering no description of what the player, or other shapers, actually do to cause these actions to come about. It seems to me that, if you’re cleaving to the descriptions of the game world, that’s all you can say. You can simply say that absorption and creation happen, but you can’t provide any more information about them. Any further statements you make are, by definition as I understand it, not cleaving to the game world. If you use the existence of a book of genetic code, say, to make any sort of argument about creation or absorption, that is extrapolation. You are no longer basing your information on descriptions of the actual processes, but are pointing to a piece of information that the game does not directly link to the processes of creation or absorption in any way. The existence of the book does not explain how it is used, merely that the book is probably useful to someone somewhere. In that light, it would seem that you are taking information from the games, and building supposition on top of that to explain something which the games themselves do not explain. From that perspective, it might appear as if you’re employing the same style of theory as my own: a theory based on supposition. I don’t have any problem with you cleaving to the game world! I am perfectly fine with you accepting my Calibration Problem as a fundamental property of the magic as presented in the world of Geneforge, and looking at it no further. But, by that same argument, as I understand it you must also need to take absorption and creation as a fundamental property of the magic of Geneforge, and go no further. Those processes occur by magic. Saying anything more than that, it seems to me, is inconsistent with your own argument. Unless I’m being an idiot and misunderstanding you, that’s all fine, and I have no problem with you holding that view. But, if so, what is your motivation for arguing with me? The reason I’ve been arguing my point, as I’ve said a few times – and has also been mentioned by others in this thread – is this. A poster said that they viewed the game mechanics in a particular way, let’s call it View A, but provided no evidence for that view. A second poster came along and proposed View B, also without any evidence. They said that View A was completely wrong, and that View B was the correct interpretation. I responded to this by arguing that View A and View B are both based on no evidence, and so were equally valid – that even though View A is less popular than View B, it can still explain what happens in the games as well as the more popular View. But this is an argument which your viewpoint doesn’t cover, does it? Since neither View A or View B are based on evidence from the game world, they are both unacceptable from your point of view. So far as I see it, you can’t then lend support for one idea or the other, because they are both equally invalid. Both go beyond ‘it happens by magic’. I don’t have a particular problem with that – it shows that the popular View B is invalid, so the poster who proposed it is unjustified in claiming its unique validity. In a sense, that’s exactly what I’ve been arguing for, but you’ve just approached it in a different direction. If I’m arguing that View A and View B are equally valid, and you’re arguing that they’re both equally invalid, doesn’t that amount to the same thing in the end? So long as one is not somehow better than the other, I think it demonstrates the point I’ve been trying to argue. Could we perhaps reach consensus that way? But if I’m being stupid, though, then let me apologise right now. I’m still trying to understand, and that might take a little work!

Yes, that’s right. The Mace of Augvah is a trap! It’s a cursed weapon, and it has some fairly hefty penalties attached to it. It’s not completely terrible – it’s actually one of the best cursed weapons in the game – but you’re far better using more conventional weaponry. A little point about the Mace which you may not have noticed is that it is, if memory serves, an edged weapon, liked a sword. I suspect that’s deliberate, too, to encourage people to give it to a party member that’s specialised in the wrong sort of weaponry. The Almighty Doer of Stuff is mistaken on a few points, I’m afraid. There are a number of fine weapons and artifacts that were associated with the First Expedition, and they’re all accounted for – and none of them are cursed. The Mace of Augvah isn’t a First Expedition item, but has different origins. Generally speaking, if you find an item with a unique name, go for it! It’s likely to be useful and, so long as you’re cautious when demons try to give you presents, or helpfully leave weapons lying around (such as the Mace), you’ll be fine! It can be implied from Exile II that the Mace of Augvah is a demonic weapon, which could explain why it’s not very useful. There are a few similar weapons that appear in Exile II – in a shop run by an imp, no less – that have similar penalties. Interestingly, these trapped weapons largely disappeared in the Avernum remakes. Exile is the only place where you get to see weapons such as the Mace of Augvah and the (actually rather useful) Loki’s Broadsword. That’s why I pointed you in the Mace's direction. If you don’t see the it in Exile I, you’ll never see it in later games!

That would certainly be in keeping with Spiderweb's style. However, just to be safe, you should know that the second spirit is behind two secret passages. The one to the west of the totems is only the first one. If you've not found a special dot yet, you've not found the right location! Wound is an excellent spell, and your approach seems like a sound one to me. Amongst other things, I believe Wound partially ignores some creature resistances and immunities, so it can be a very effective way of damaging foes. Notably, it later games, it can actually be used to harm 'invulnerable' creatures, without enough patience!

A wise person once said, and I paraphrase: "Communication is a two-way process, and any failure of communication is also a two-way process." I fear that part of the problem here is that we speak two different languages, to some degree. I speak a language that derives from the culture and location in which I live, as do you, and these languages can be surprisingly different from one another. I know that can be something of a trivial observation in the internet age, but it’s something I’ve observed myself from my own interactions – sometimes, cultural differences in interpretation can cause unintended confusion. This can arise not only from location, but also from personal areas of specialism. Generally, I’ve been approaching this argument from a more scientific standpoint, and you’ve been approaching it from a more philosophical standpoint. There’s nothing at all wrong with that – I think such a mixing of ideas is a really good thing, myself, and should be encouraged – but that can sometimes mean that the definitions and meanings we place behind words can be subtly different. That can sometimes lead to confusion. Again, I know these are obvious statements, but I think they’re worth making. While the words and concepts you are employing might be crystal clear and well-defined from your perspective, they might not always be so to me. I do my best to try and interpret and understand what you are saying, but I might sometimes get that wrong. That’s one reason why I’ve tended to be a little discursive in my style in this thread. I was worried that my concepts might not always translate to other viewpoints, so I’ve tried to go into some detail in my arguments, and to sometimes use multiple different examples or ideas to support the same point. My hope was that that would make my ideas a little easier to interpret. If that is not the case, then I am sorry. So, please understand that I’m not ‘choosing’ to redefine words here. I am honestly using the words and concepts as I understand them. I’m sorry if my understanding is limited, or does not always match with your own. I do my best to try and see things from your viewpoint, but it might take some prompting from you on occasion to help me with that. One of the problems is that this type of confusion can get in the way of the argument itself, which of course I’m sure is not your intention. For instance, in this case, we were talking about a specific facet of a problem we’ve been discussing for a few posts now: the problem of how a new creation can act effectively as soon as it is created. Specifically, we were talking about whether or not this sort of behaviour is seen in nature. However, this part of the argument was sidetracked because we understand different notions of the word ‘knowledge’, even though I only used the word once – and then only to point out a mistake I had made. That’s unfortunate, since this is an interesting part of the argument, and there’s probably more to say on that point. So, please try to be patient with me. I do my best to try and understand your meaning, but I am fallible, and may sometimes make mistakes. I think this might be another point of misunderstanding. On this point, I’m not particularly worried about the level of mechanical detail of the explanation. I’m just interested in some sort of explanation. If it has to be based on supposition, then so be it. If there is an explanation that is based on concepts thoroughly grounded in the game world, though, then that much the better. If there is a simpler explanation than mine, then that much the better too! I am happy to apply Occam’s Razor to my own ideas! Let me try and explain this issue as I see it. I have come across some behaviour in the game that is odd, and which I don’t understand. It doesn’t seem to make logical sense at first glance, nor does it seem to have an analogue with the physical laws and processes of natural selection we see in our own world. In order to try and understand this problem, I applied my own theory of absorption/creation to it, and I found that it happens to explain the problem in terms that I understand. In this case, it provides an explanation that fits with the physical laws of our own universe. To make sure I don’t keep referring to this problem ambiguously, let’s give it a name. How about calling it the Calibration Problem? The issue regarding my solution to the Calibration Problem is that this is the only solution I have found. Posters in this thread have provided other alternatives to my absorption/creation theory, such as the ‘only-genetics’ explanation: that shapers produce creations solely by magically creating organic material with a particular genetic sequence. But I haven’t been able to use this theory, or any of the others, to solve the Problem. To me, coming from a scientific mindset, this is worthy of attention. If, in a scientific context, I am presented with a bunch of different theories that attempt to explain a system, and only one of them is able to explain a certain feature of that system, then – all else being equal – that one theory is considered a better model of the system than the others. Now, I don’t think going that far is helpful in this context. But it seems to me that, by providing what is currently the only solution to some odd behaviour seen in the game, my theory should at least be allowed a similar standing to other theories. To reiterate, I would be happier with an approach that did not rely on supposition. But since I cannot produce such an approach at present, and since I have not been provided with any other solutions, that is all that I have available to me. I’m saying all this because I want to try and explain my reasoning on this. I don’t want you to think that I’m being glib, or deliberately aggravating. My madness does have some method in it, I assure you. Again, I’m sorry if I misunderstand your objection, here. If so, please do try again. I am happy to try and learn, and also happy to try to reach compromise. Maybe all that would take would be acknowledging the problems with our own approaches – my lack of evidence stemming from the game world, and your lack of solutions to seeming logical inconsistencies in the game world? But is not evidence of ambiguity important? The existence of ambiguity implies that any one of several interpretations could be correct in a particular context. I’m not intending to use it to say that my interpretation is better than others, meaning that it is an equally good interpretation when compared to others in this context. Taken on its own, that might not mean much, but when taken together with other examples, all of which show that my interpretation does not fail to describe what is going on, my feeling is that that might add some weight to my interpretation. Again, to stress, only weight that it is as valid as others – not that it is somehow better or more correct than them. What worries me here, though, is that you seem to be saying that I am trying to be deliberately deceptive. You seem to be saying that I am stating things as fact when they are not. That is honestly not my intention. So, to help my understanding, making reference to the quotation you used to argue your point, could you point out to me those places in which I appear to be stating opinion as fact? I’d find that helpful. Here it is again, for reference: I’m not intending to use different standards, so I’m sorry if it comes across that way. If you’re referring to the Gibbons quotation, it seems to me that the interpretation of that resolves around the meaning of the word ‘bit’. That’s a word which is more ambiguous, to me, than something more specific like ‘copy’, as used by the Thahd. That may be the result of some language differences, though, so I’m sorry if that caused some confusion. “The word P’aedt translates roughly as ‘he who climbs the tree of knowledge, only occasionally falling’, a surprisingly apt metaphor for scientific advancement in human history.” – from the description of the planet P’ar Aed, Escape Velocty Nova.

Of course. Since this is a useful community resource, I’ve uploaded a version of Samcast's Geneforge 4 Mods here. You can download it from the link below. Just be aware that you’ll need to be logged on to your account for the download to function correctly! Geneforge 4 Mods.rar

Alright, a useful first check would be to make sure you’re looking the right place. You probably are, but there are a few different locked rooms in the Castle, so there’s a small chance you might be checking the wrong one by mistake. Load up the game, and stand next to one of the chests you’ve been checking in the basement room. Hold ‘shift’ and press ‘d’. A little text input box should appear. In this box, type: location This should bring up a little bit of text in your command window, similar to the one I’m going to post below this paragraph. If you can’t see the command window, press ‘c’. Are your coordinates close to the ones below? X = 12, Y = 19 (Town = 40) If you find that your coordinates are very different from these, you might be searching in the wrong place. Find the coordinates above, and you should be able to proceed! However, if you are indeed searching close to these coordinates, then something else might be happening. Let us know in that case, and we’ll try to find out what the problem is!

Hello Traute, You didn’t find the totem because you’ve been looking in the wrong place! The clue you’re provided with is a little vague, and requires the party to do something that’s a little counter-intuitive, so it can be a little confusing. I recall it taking a little while to figure out on my first go through, too. Here’s the clue the spirit gave you in the outdoors near the Fortress: “One of us went spying in his tower. She is hidden due west of the totem. Go to her. Good luck.” Note that the spirit says ‘went’ rather than ‘is’. In other words, the spirit was spying in the tower, but she isn’t any longer! You can find her in the same part of the outdoors as the first spirit. Look around there for the totem, and follow the instructions in the clue. The slightly counter-intuitive part is this: Also, I hope you found the Mace of Augvah! It’s a unique weapon, one that’s only present in Exile I – it never appears again in any future game, or in any of the remakes. You can find it in the same part of the outdoors!

I doubt I am suitably equipped to argue you on an epistemological point, so let me at least explain my thinking to you. My reasoning is merely that the brain, whether consciously or otherwise, interacts with the muscles to cause them to perform a certain task. That interaction can be done correctly, or incorrectly – if when trying to breathe, the brain sent out entirely random signals, nothing would happen. So could it not be argued that the brain ‘knows’ how the breathe, in the sense that it can send the correct signals that cause breathing to occur? I know this is a bit of an aside, but since this isn’t an area I am well versed in, I’d be interested in your thoughts. I do have something of a vested interested in this particular example, myself. I know from experience that breathing is a strange bodily function – it is largely unconscious, but it’s seemed to me from past experience, during illness, that it’s possible to slightly alter that ‘unconscious’ process by force of will. Of course, without measuring it, it would easy enough for that to be a trick of the mind, or some other feedback system in the body compensating. But I’m not sure that breathing is as ‘totally divorced’ from consciousness as you claim. Okay. So you’re saying that there are are at least two different types of shaping: Type A, which the player uses, and Type B, which was used to construct the Battle Betas I was thinking about. That would certainly answer quite a few questions. But it raises some further questions which I think are worth commenting on. As I understand it, you are saying that there are two main differences between the two types of shaping we are talking about. One is that Type A ties up the essence of its creator for as long as the creation exists. The second is that Type A produces a creature that can react immediately to an environment in an effective way, while Type B produces creatures with a mind like that of a child, and require a development period in order to become fully effective. How is it, then, that Type A produces an effective creation immediately, while Type B does not? TheKian proposed one answer to this: that the player’s creations are controlled directly by the shaper that created them, and so in some sense need no mind. I have a number of problems with this explanation. For starters, the game seems to indicate that there are situations where the player doesn’t have any sort of control over their creations. The example that springs to mind is creating a creation that has an intelligence of less than 2. In these situations, the creation isn’t controlled by the player at all; it functions entirely using the game’s AI. Since the player doesn’t control the creation, I would argue that this indicates that the shaper also doesn’t control that creation. If intelligence were a factor in controlling creations in some way, my feeling is that lesser intelligence would make control easier, rather than impossible. However, there’s a more fundamental problem here. I’ve argued that one of the issues of Type A shaping is that the creation can function immediately upon being created. This is a problem, because any behaviour of the creature which involves some form of feedback with its environment (e.g. standing, walking, talking, fighting etc.) requires some calibration of that feedback. That requirement for calibration remains no matter who is controlling the creation. Either the creation needs to learn how to do these things, or the mind controlling it does. It doesn’t matter how mature the mind controlling the creature is – the necessity for calibration remains. To illustrate this, think of a measuring device, one which outputs a signal S to measure some quantity Q. To properly measure the quantity, you need to know what values of S signify which values of Q. It doesn’t matter how clever you are, or if you’re operating the device remotely through a robot, or if you’re being controlled by hostile creatures from Ux-Mal – without learning the calibration, you can’t accurately make the measurement. So the question is, how can it be possible for the player’s creations to act immediately without some form of childhood? It seems that such a process could involve the use of essence somehow, but it what way? Here is what I propose. The creatures made by the player can act immediately because they’ve already made the calibrations. If a shaper creates a creature that has already existed in some other form, then it will already have learned how to interact with the world. If it is recreated in exactly the same body, it will be able to function as effectively as before. If it is recreated in a new body, it will need to adapt – but if the body is similar enough to the old body, it may be able to do this very quickly. Of course, the problem then becomes this: if Type A shaping can do this, why not Type B? Why waste time with childhood at all if there are ways to get produce creations that can act immediately on creation? I would argue that childhood is not necessarily wasted if the shaper has the luxury of time. Perhaps creations that go through a natural childhood are better learners overall, and become more efficient creations than if they had been bootstrapped straight to effectiveness. For example, consider the effectiveness of an adult learning a new language compared to a child. An adult can do it, and do it quickly, but if you have time, a child will most likely do it better. In other words, I would argue that the childhood is actually not an essentially difference between Type A and Type B shaping – it comes from something else entirely. The main difference in terms of the mechanics of the Types is the essence drain from the shaper. Such an explanation resolves the problem. Now, Slarty, I have a feeling that you’re going to argue that this is supposition, and not based on any evidence from the games. However, I feel that this problem requires an explanation, and I have provided one. I don’t think I’ve come across any convincing alternative explanation in this thread just yet – so it seems to me that my theory is the only one at present to explain this issue. I’m sure there’s an explanation that could arise from the genetics-only school, so please do provide me with one, or point out something I'm missing! I am only too happy to oblige, honourable Slarty. However, I couldn’t find any information of relevance in the dialogues associated with that first Fireball canister in Geneforge 1. There doesn’t seem to be any comment at all about how the player knows how to cast Fireball. All that seems to happen is as follows. The player uses the canister, and a tutorial window pops up. If you walk past the encounter, a little way into the zone your character ‘feels a bit woozy’, and then has a distinct impression that they’ve been changed somehow. The player then simply causes fire to come into existence on their hand. No comment is made about how this is done – the player just does it. From the way the game is structured, though, it may be that the information is hidden somewhere later on. Perhaps the second canister says something more. When I have a moment to dig into this a little more deeply, I’ll see if I can find what else, if anything, the game has to say on this point. Canisters are an interesting mechanism, one that could be used to support or undermine my theory, I suspect. That’s a good point. There’s no reason why those changes couldn’t be modular, so Gibbons could select and choose at will. That makes a lot of sense. So let me retract that part of my objection to Gibbons using only genetics to create his canisters. I would still argue that Gibbons’s description is ambiguous. He is passing on the property that allows canister-users to improve themselves, but it’s not clear what that property is. It could be a change in genetics, as you say. But it could also be knowledge gained through experience, learned from some other shaper, that happened to be poured into the Geneforge-Lite. In this case, Gibbons would be passing on that knowledge, even if he didn’t learn it himself. Of course, that’s not evidence, which is what you asked for, but it’s a possible interpretation. Let me see if I can drum up anything more for you! I'm tempted to cry ad hominem here, but I find your comment a little vague. So I'll hold off for now. So, let’s assume that the Thahd’s language use is poor. Presumably, it wouldn’t be able to generate much language on its own – it would, then, generally rely on reiterating words and concepts which it had heard before. So, for example, it might talk about the other Thahd using words it might have heard used by shapers in response to Thahds (e.g. ‘useless’, ‘broken’, ‘lesser’ etc.). That argument would imply that the Thahd would only refer to the other Thahd as a ‘copy’ if it heard the word being used by a shaper to describe the Thahds. In other words, if you’re saying that the Thahd is too poorly versed in language to understand what it is saying, it needs to get the very words it uses from somewhere. I can’t see at a first glance where such a Thahd might get the concept of ‘copy’ from, except for the instance in which the Thahd in the other room is a copy. Uh, I appreciate that’s probably a silly argument arising out of my own ignorance. So, again, please do be patient with me! I’m interesting to learn about the flaws that can pop up in my reasoning!

Excellent! I’m glad that I’ve managed to see your point here, and sorry that it took me a while, a whole bunch of questions, before I could grasp your argument. Here indeed is proof that we can indeed come to reasonable agreement! That wasn't so painful, was it? You make a good point there about breathing. I listed it with my other examples because I was under some false pretences about how breathing came about after birth. As you point out, it is indeed an instinctive behaviour, not a learned one. Of course, this is an excellent demonstration that knowledge can arise in a brain solely from genetic information. However, I would persist in my argument that all the ways in which a creature directly interacts with its environment are in some way learned, or at least calibrated in some way. The brain can do its best to try to make the necessary learning as quick and easy as possible, but I can’t see how it would be possible to calibrate a creature’s responses to the world without actually having access to that world. As I see it, anything the creature does that requires some feedback from its environment will take some finite time to learn. You mentioned creatures that emerge from the womb in a state where they are capable of defending themselves. There are indeed creatures that can defend themselves, and hunt and crawl and swim and fight, on their first day in the world. There are many reptiles that can do exactly this, and most of the examples that spring to mind for me are reptilian. I’m thinking, for example, of crocodiles, who can hunt for food shortly after they are born, or turtles, who after birth dig their way out of their hidden nests in the sand and crawl to the ocean. However, my feeling is that these are situations where the brain is doing the best it can with limited information. The brain has come up with a model that will just about work for most situations, so it can work without the sort of calibration I’ve been talking about. That allows a creature to function immediately, but not very well. It’s like using some sort of measuring device without calibrating it properly first – yes, you can get some crude information from it (is measurement A larger than measurement B?) but you’re not going to get anything much more than that. If you look at such instinctive actions of newborns, they are crude and clumsy. Yes, the turtles can crawl over sand, but they’re not very good at it – they are slow and inefficient. If you look at newborn crocodiles hunting for food, they’re really bad at it. It takes quick learning, experience and a little luck for the tiny creatures to get the food they need. Sadly, in both cases many youngsters die because they can’t act efficiently enough fast enough. I would argue that these situations are very different from the ones that confront new creations in Geneforge. A creation can be made and expected to fight immediately. A creation can be freshly spawned and be not just strong, but dextrous. They can avoid blows from an assailant through quick, fast movement alone – exactly the sort of movement that requires careful calibration of muscle movement with respect to the environment. That sort of ability is unlike anything I can think of in nature for a newborn. I could be mistaken, though, so do give me examples if I’m missing something! So, even though genetics can provide a brain with information, I would argue that such information is only on a very basic level. What we see in Geneforge are new creations with advanced behaviour and reflexes, and I am still unconvinced that genetics alone can explain that. Stumbling baby crocodiles will not cut it when faced with a small army of Drayks, even if I wave my hand and give them adult bodies! Interestingly, there’s something in the Geneforge games themselves about this. Here’s some text from the Illya Safehouse in Geneforge 4, something I stumbled on when looking for something else: “There are two newly made battle betas here. They stare around blankly trying to understand their surroundings, like gigantic, extremely muscular toddlers. Fortunately, their brains are designed to mature quickly. In a few days, they will have developed enough to be able to understand their first orders.” The implication here is that new creations do need to learn in order to become effective. But, if so, how is it that the player’s creations can act immediately without this growth period? Is there something that distinguishes the player’s creations from other creations in some way? If there is, does that not imply that something else is going on outside of purely genetic information? After all, if everyone is using the same template for Battle Betas, wouldn’t Battle Betas all have the same sort of growth period, not just some of them? If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that knowledge passed on by canister creation can always be accounted for by some sort of muscle memory, some information about how the body itself works, rather than directly writing information into the brain. I have a slight conceptual difficulty with this, something that actually relates to the previous point. I would argue that a creature has their own set of calibrations for how their body responds to the world, and that these are different for each individual. The distribution of the muscles, the height, the weight, the strength of individual muscle groups will be more or less different for everyone. The problem I have with your explanation is that it tries to rewrite a body without access to these calibrations. How can you make someone interact more efficiently with their environment if you don’t know in detail how they’re interacting with the environment in the first place? Isn’t this the same problem as faced by newborns, just expressed differently? Let’s say that I make a Dexterity Canister. I can see how a slight change to how certain muscles are stimulated might help make one person more dextrous. But I can also see how applying exactly the same change to another individual might have very different results, simply because their musculature would be different. This actually leads neatly into a comment I wanted to make about canister creation. For Geneforge 4 has something interesting to say about this: “You and I have both been reshaped, changed so that magic is part of us, so that our power is as natural as lifting a finger. And when I make a canister, a copy of that bit of me goes into it. Then, when someone uses the canister, it reshapes them, giving them the ability contained within.” These are the words of Gibbons, who creates canisters in the Illya Safehouse. You asked me for evidence that shapers can copy the material of a creature and, specifically, “any aspects it gained through experience (and which cannot be predicted or duplicated solely with DNA) rather than growth/generation/shaping.” I think this may be an example of that. As I read it, Gibbons is copying part of his knowledge, and wrapping it up with the material inside the canister. This knowledge than passed on to the person who uses the canister. The question is whence this knowledge came. Is this knowledge that Gibbons learned in his ‘reshaped’ state, or was it knowledge passed on to him during the reshaping process? If the latter, then where did the knowledge originate from? If you’ll permit me to paraphrase Asimov, machines that give people knowledge are all very well, but someone has to program them. Someone, at some point, would have had to have learned that knowledge, and then passed it in. Even if it wasn’t Gibbons who learned it, someone at some point will have learned it by experience, I would argue. This knowledge is then copied until it reaches the canister. So, I would argue that this is an example of a shaper creating a copy of knowledge gained through experience. But is there another explanation? Could this arise purely from genetics? Let’s suppose that Gibbons is only passing on some genetic change brought about by his reshaping. In this situation, though, wouldn’t passing on the change pass on all the changes brought about by reshaping, not just some of them? Replicating a complete genetic change seems feasible, but pulling the change apart into all the various ways in which it changes the body, and then picking only one of them to put into a canister, seems a bit more of a stretch. I’m not sure there’s enough information in the problem to pull off a stunt like that – it feels a little like trying to accurately state how many red and blue balls there are in a bucket when you can only look at one ball. Uh, I’ve been rambling a little, but here’s one more little point. There’s a little encounter in the Testing Halls in Geneforge 5. Here, you speak to a Thahd, who says: “You are student. You choose good. You fight me, killed by me! I give quick, clean death, not like lesser, useless copy of me in next room. Lesser copy! Broken copy!” Since we’ve been arguing terminology, you’ll not that the Thahd says ‘copy’, rather than clone. Of all the words the Thahd could have chosen – brother, sister, cousin, twin – the Thahd says copy. As we’ve said, clones are not copies. Use the same genetic material, and you don’t end up with a copy – you end up with something that is merely similar. To produce Thahds that are actually copies of one another, you need to go further than mere genetics, I would think. Does that seem reasonable?

I have some experience of this myself. I appreciate I’m getting a little off-topic here, so I’m going to put this in a spoiler section to avoid snarling up the topic too much. However, here’s a little anecdote on this point, just in case it turns out to be helpful:

You’ve mentioned before that Homeland is big, and you’ve given a lot of information about how big it is, from the huge numbers of towns you’re working with, to the vast size of the outdoors. But, at least to me, it can sometimes be the smaller details that really put things into perspective. That little comment you made about the special spells/abilities helped drive home to me just how big Homeland really is. In the first two chapters of Homeland alone, you have nearly as many spells and abilities as the whole of Exodus. And that’s not even in the first half of Homeland. Wow. That there are so many new spells/abilities is good in its own right, too. Given that, historically, special spells and similar mechanics seem to have generally been used for scenarios involving high-level parties, I’ll be interested to see how they play out for a low-level one. I imagine that having all these new mechanics available early on will slightly change the feeling of low-level play, both in terms of the gameplay itself and in terms of the atmosphere, and I’ll be interested to see how that plays out. It makes a lot of sense, after all. The Homeland will have access to a different pool of knowledge and specialisms compared to those that have been developed in Avernum. Seeing that is one thing, but actually having that directly affect the party is even better! And, in danger of sounding too much like a broken record, I’m still impressed by your holistic approach to this scenario. Yes, it’s slow going now, but you are going to be saving yourself so much time in the long run. I can only imagine how much of a nightmare it would have been changing all of the rewards around on a case-by-case basis during alpha testing proper, and yet here you with it all sorted before the testing of chapter 2 has even started! If you keep on putting such good work into solving these problems, you’re not going be giving your beta testers anything to do! As for this, I would much rather have the slight inconvenience of missing something than have the plot jarringly interrupted by the game mechanics. After all, a player can always just reload if they find they’ve missed something. Hey, I did that with Exodus after my first run, and then ended up playing through most of the scenario again afterwards just because I was having so much fun. So it’s not really a problem! A progress warning in such a situation should be more than enough.

I really like the sound of this. That’s a great idea! One of the potential difficulties of creating a game in the style you’ve described, where there’s a lot of content outside of the main plot, is that it can sometimes be difficult for a player to know how much they’ve really explored. Having a periodic indication of how much extra material the player has seen gets around that quite neatly, particularly if some of the quests take a little digging to find; I know I for one would find it helpful! In fact, I’d argue that this would give you a little leeway to make some of the quests slightly more difficult to find than usual. In some sense, these update screens are hints in their own right, albeit it vague ones, that at least point out to the player that they need to look around a little more in a given area. Allowing the player to backtrack after the first update screen in Chapter 1 is a nice touch, too; as you say, it gives the player an indication of how much they’re exploring the game’s world. Given that Chapter 1 is a little shorter than other chapters, though, I wonder whether there might be some merit in extending this ‘grace period’ a little? I get the feeling this might not be possible given the game’s structure, but I wonder whether there might be some way of presenting the summary given at the end of Chapter 2 just before the point where the player gets locked in to Chapter 3? You could perhaps combine that with a classic Spiderweb ‘be careful going any further, since you might not be able to get back’ style of message. My thinking is that this would give the player a much better indication of how much material they’re seeing before they get locked in to the self-contained chapters. It also gives the player a little nudge that the remaining chapters are self-contained, something which isn’t perhaps made obvious by the free boundary between the material of Chapters 1 and 2. That’s just a thought, and it might not be practical to implement. I could see it really getting in the way of the drama, for instance, if events happen the way I think they do. In any case, it’s great to hear things are going well! All the best for moving your spell code chunks around. Hopefully that won’t be as messy to fix as you think it will – your coding has always seemed pretty clean, so hopefully the chunks should move around without too much material getting tangled – and at least the outcome should still save a lot a work compared to a non-centralised solution!

Yay! That’s good to know. At least I can try to learn and improve how I debate, all the more so if you’re happy to give me a hand, and point out when I make silly mistakes like that! Alright, I think I understand your point now. Your comment about the variety of observations we can make being so broad as to appear infinite was particularly helpful. As I see it, you are saying that there is a broad threshold of complexity above which an empirical approach can yield meaningful results, and below which it does not. Our universe is vast and complex, so measurement can yield meaningful information about it. Geneforge, on the other hand, is a tiny world, to such an extent that we can arguably list all the measurements we could make on it. In that sense, the information space is so restrictive that the results of any measurements would most likely be meaningless. Since we already ‘know’ all of the information, and have observed all the data, there’s nothing left to make a prediction on. That makes a lot of sense, and I think I buy your argument. In which case, my interpretation of events cannot be demonstrated by experiment or prediction, by only by an explanation of pre-existing events. So it’s not a science, but perhaps more of a description! (Or, as Rutherford would say, stamp-collecting.) What I like about this explanation is that it doesn’t preclude a world of a video game from being analysed with a meaningful empirical approach simply because it is a video game. In theory, it would be possible to create a video game that is large and complex enough to pass whatever threshold of complexity you applied, so that empirical measurements would yield valuable information about it. I suspect we cannot do that with our current level of technology, but perhaps that is something that will be possible in the future? Presenting Geneforge: 2999 – the latest remake of the 20th century cult classic, updated, reengineered and remastered for the ‘90s! Set across a fully simulated virtual continent, populated with millions of fully realised characters, Geneforge’s unique setting explores a world during the dark ages of genetic research. Spiderweb’s advanced creature synthesis software means that all our characters act of their own volition – every game is different! Will the world erupt into war, or will a modern utopia arise? And how will your actions change the world’s future? Available October 2999 for all Mental Link™ devices. Sorry for being a little jumpy here. My concern came more from the context than from the strong nature of the assertion. From my perspective, it seemed as if you’d been quite careful about not making any strong assertions of your own stance up until this point in the argument. You then appeared to suddenly make a very powerful denial of my own stance, explained with what looked like a strangely flimsy argument compared to your other, well-argued points. This was what I found a little worrying. From what you’ve said afterwards, and thinking about it further, I don’t think your argument is flimsy at all. I think it’s quite detailed, and I'd like to perhaps focus on it a little more. While there are some points that might be ‘very clear’ from your perspective, I’m not sure they’re so immediately clear for me. That’s why I’d like to explore them in a little more detail. It will help me to understand your viewpoint, and it could be a good way to dissuade me from my views – particularly if these details support your descriptions much better than my own interpretations! I hope you’ll permit me a slight diversion. Your statement, I think, is that the techniques of the Shapers arise solely due to a combination of genetic manipulation and synthesis of organic matter. Part of the problem I have with this approach is that I don’t think it provides a complete explanation of what we observe happening in the games. There’s a fairly crucial part of the puzzle that I don’t think it fully explains, and that again comes down to brains and complex living systems. Let me try and show this in an example. Suppose I give myself the powers of the Shapers as you’ve described them here. I wave a hand and, in a flash, generate an adult version of Wesley Crusher from nothing more than his genetic material. The problem I have with this is that, as I understand it, genetic material only includes information about the base structure of a being, not any information that such a being would have learned through interactions with its environment having been born and gone through a conventional childhood. The genes tell you how to make a living brain, but they can’t put much more than the most simple information in it, nor can they teach a brain how to interact with the world – it seems to me that such information arises through a learning process as part of some sort of childhood. As I see it, this Wesley Crusher might look like an adult, but his brain would be that of a newly born child. He wouldn’t know how to walk, how to talk, how to even stand. He probably wouldn’t even been able to breathe without a helping hand. These are learned behaviours, as I understand it, not behaviours that stem directly from genetics. The brain isn’t the only part of the body where learning is vital to survival. The immune system too learns and adapts during childhood. The genetics of the system only tell it how to function in a broad sense – but it doesn’t give the system antibodies. An immune system generated out of thin air would, I think, have to learn about all infectious intruders from scratch. So, in addition to not being able to function on a level greater than that of a newborn, this Wesley Crusher would probably get very sick very quickly. I can’t see him rushing into battle in such a state. I may be misunderstanding this, but what we see in Geneforge to me implies that something more must be going on. The minds, knowledge and defences of these creations must come from somewhere, and I don’t think they can come from genetics alone. So where do they come from? I’m proposing one possible solution. As it currently stands, I’m not sure if your explanation provides one just yet. But I may be wrong, or perhaps misunderstanding some of the details! I can’t think of any good piece of evidence off-hand, but I didn’t want to neglect this part of the conversation. It's important! I’d like to look at some ideas I have in more detail, and see if I can come up with anything. I didn't want the rest of this post to wait on that. However, there is something interesting that’s come to mind right away. It doesn’t offer evidence for my theory particularly, but it does show something rather odd happening, something relating to what I talked about above. What I’m thinking of is the encounter with the Drayk Syros in Geneforge 1. In this encounter, you can trade with Syros for information, skills and items. These come with a price. In terms of the game mechanics, Syros absorbs some of your skill points. In terms of what Syros actually does, though, we have a little more description. He says: “I feed on meat. But, more than that, I can feed on life. Energy. Life force and potential. My magic is strong, and I can use it to draw the life from a being. Not a lot, you understand. Just a tiny bit. It barely hurts. If you let me feed on a little of your life, I will give you great assistance.” Whatever it is that Syros is doing here, it relates specifically to ‘potential’. He refers to skill points as ‘potential’ when the player doesn’t have enough to offer: “You do not have enough potential in you. Return when you have gained in experience.” It seems to me that something interesting is happening here. This is an example of detailed knowledge being passed from one creature to another, permanently, knowledge that arises from experience rather than directly from genetics. After all, skill points are one of the three properties you mentioned as not being generally passed on when a creature is absorbed and ‘recreated’, along with experience points and level ups. But skill points are being passed on here, showing that at least some transfer of information of this type is possible. It’s not clear what the information is being used for – I’ve tended to interpret this as Syros directly gaining skill points of his own as a result, but there’s no evidence for that. He could just as easily be consuming the potential as some form of raw energy for all we know. But I think at least indicating that transfer of this sort of information is perhaps possible in some form is a good start. It doesn’t really back up my theory in any way, but I might need to refer back to this later. I’ll see if I can dig up anything else! For now, let’s take a moment to indulge Syros in some more of his wisdom: “You were delicious.” Like many technical terms, ‘cloning’ has a number of different definitions depending on the situation in which it used. While this can sometimes lead to confusion, my feeling is that that’s usually more of a general issue with language than an issue with the term itself. Generally speaking, I feel that the definition of the word is usually fairly clear in the context – or if there is any confusion, it can quickly be cleared up just by checking definitions. As you mentioned, cloning can be used to refer to copying of genetic material. But the term can also be used in other contexts with different connotations. For example, cloning a sheep genetically is a very different thing from cloning a pattern, which is again a different thing from cloning a quantum state (something which is impossible according to current theories). Because the word can mean different things in different contexts, there is no one ‘actual’ definition of cloning. This would be a little like stating that the ‘actual’ definition of ‘orange’ is ‘a colour’, or that the actual definition of ‘dragon’ is ‘a school’. In this discussion, Slarty and I have been using ‘cloning’ in one particular context, I believe consistently. You’re using it in another, and that’s fine, since you’ve defined your use of the term! But I don’t think you can say that your use is any more correct than ours. The idea of cloning to mean reproduction of the self, in the ‘science fiction’ context you mention, is far from nonsensical. It’s just a different definition of the word, applied in a different context. At present, it is an idea restricted to thought experiments, and that in and of itself has value. However, I don’t believe there’s anything to indicate that the idea is something that must forever remain theoretical. As I understand it, there’s no physical reason why that sort of cloning is prohibited – there isn’t a no-cloning-theorem for macroscopic objects. As Slarty said earlier, a brain is a physical object. There’s nothing I’m aware of that would prevent exact duplication of a physical object with the right tools. Arguably, all cloning in this context needs is a sufficiently detailed scanner, and a sufficiently detailed ‘printer’. We might not have the appropriate level of technology now, but the actual concepts behind the technology are not beyond us, I think. Compare this, for example, to a stargate. While we can propose the sort of science that might allow us to string a wormhole between two points in space, how exactly one might do that so far out of our level of experience that it’s pretty much anyone’s guess. So the idea is by no means nonsensical – it’s just a different definition applied in a different context!

Well, I’m glad it’s of some interest. There are some good ideas in this thread, and it’s made me think about some things I’d previously taken for granted, or not really explored properly. If it’s given food for thought for others too, then that much the better. I can assure you my intent wasn’t to deceive anyone. I honestly thought that it was an obvious objection, one that my mention of a counter-example would directly imply to the readers of this topic. One of my motivations for repeatedly asking for counter-examples was to drive home the point, to make sure that readers thought about counter-examples and came up with the one I thought was obvious. I assumed that people hadn’t mentioned it because they didn’t think it applied for some reason, or because there were other parts of the argument they preferred to explore. That’s a danger of making assumptions based on what appears to be obvious. I feel bad for falling into that trap. It also seems that this has caused you to lose significant faith in me, and for that I am really very sorry. Okay. So as I understand it, you’re saying that the important factor is the finite nature of the system being studied. The thing I find confusing about that is that I find it difficult to see why that distinguishes Geneforge from the universe at large. The second law of thermodynamics implies that all information in the universe decays irreversibly into heat energy over time. I believe the further implication is that, at some future time, the universe will consist entirely of a homogeneous, unchanging bath of heat energy. If all information slowly decays to heat over time, then it would seem that the end result would be all heat and no information. Studying a system in such a state seems a little like staring at the final screen of Geneforge 5 forever, thinking that it will provide you with more information the longer you look at it. In some senses, one could think of that final state of the universe as its ‘end’. Since the universe is then bounded by time, it would appear to be finite in that sense. Of course, the universe could still be infinite in spacial terms, but that doesn’t matter for an observer. The limit on the speed of information transfer – c – means that an observer needs infinite time to study a space that is infinite in extent. If there is not infinite time, the amount of information an observer can collect is necessarily finite. So, it seems to me that the universe – from the point of view of an observer – is finite. It’s big, but it’s limited. Isn’t that the same as the world of Geneforge, just on a much, much bigger scale? Again, I don't mean to be difficult here. I feel I'm missing something really obvious, and I'm not sure what that is. Uh, Slarty? I can’t help but be a little concerned by this. Perhaps I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying; I know it wouldn’t be the first time. I also know I’m not the sharpest tool in the box when it comes to this sort of argument. But, from my perspective, this part of the argument seems to come down to you pointing at me a saying ‘Ya boo sucks, you’re wrong’. Despite claiming that you’re not employing an interpretation of your own, it seems to me as if that’s exactly what you’re doing here. You’re pointing to a couple of examples of pieces of information from Geneforge 1, and then extrapolating from these examples to produce an interpretation of what’s going on. For instance, I feel that the magical microscope I think you’re referring to in Geneforge 1 simply shows that Shapers, at one time on Sucia island, could see down to the level of genetic structure and manipulate it. It doesn’t say how the Shapers used that technique, so any statement to that effect is your interpretation, isn’t it? It seems to me that this argument involves you constructing an interpretation, comparing it to mine, and then saying that this gives you concrete proof that my own interpretation is fundamentally incorrect. Am I missing something obvious? Again, I want to stress that I'm not trying to be difficult. I just want to try and understand your position. As it is, I find myself getting a touch worried as to where this argument is going.

I think you might be slightly misremembering this encounter, alhoon. Very little is said in connection to the ornk at all, and nothing is mentioned about brain complexity, so far as I can recall. I believe the entire description of the special nature of the creature is this: "The Shaper I served under had developed a new sort of ornk. A smart ornk." As for the experiment itself, we are told: "The Shaper said it was just experimenting on different sorts of brains." This line says very little. It just mentions that the Shaper was experimenting on brains, not that this research was difficult, or revolutionary, or even particularly new. They’re just studying brains. That’s it. All these two phrases really says is that a Shaper developed an ornk that’s smarter than other ornk, as part of some study into brains. I don’t see any particular reason why that shouldn’t have been done using my approach. Why couldn’t this Shaper have absorbed the brain of some other creation, and then just shaped an ornk around it? That’s an interesting experiment, and I can perfectly well envision shapers wanting to keep the creature around for study, to see how an intelligent creature adapts to life as an ornk – and then presumably dissecting it later to see how the nervous system coped with the interface between brain and body. That’s an experiment on a brain – just not the sort of experiment you were thinking of. I'm not sure your example is really 'strong evidence' in this context. New areas of science don’t always emerge because someone finds a way to do something difficult. Sometimes, it’s because someone does something no-one thought to do before! Perhaps this ‘new sort’ of ornk was only new because no-one had thought to make one before? As my source herself says about such an ornk: “Why would we need that?”

Okay, that makes sense to me. As I understand it, you’re saying that the disciplines of astrophysics and cosmology are meaningful because the systems they are studying evolve over time. For instance, astrophysical systems produce new data as time evolves, presenting new data. Also, the size of the visible universe also increases with time, presenting new systems that can be studied. It is therefore possible to propose some sort of hypothesis that can be applied to structures that, at the time of the construction of the hypothesis, don’t yet exist. So, if you’ll forgive me, I’d like to probe this a little further to improve my understanding of your point. If the world of Geneforge were not closed, but instead showed change over time (by which I mean time experienced by those of us making any theories/measurements), could a mechanism/hypothesis approach applied to it become meaningful? I ask this because I’m trying to figure out what constitutes change over time. For example, if I had made this argument during the development of the Geneforge series, would the world of Geneforge at that point be considered as ‘closed’ or not? Let’s say that I proposed this theory of mine after Geneforge 2 had been released, and while Spiderweb was working on Geneforge 3. If I could, at that point, have provided some form of prediction of what would be included in Geneforge 3 as a result of my theory, do you think that approach would have been a meaningful one? In a strict sense, the world at Geneforge was evolving over time at that point – but I’m not sure whether it’s the sort of evolution that would make this approach meaningful. Perhaps another example to consider might be the (now rather forgotten) game Galapagos: Mendel’s Escape, which provides a situation perhaps a little closer to real-world behaviour. In Galapagos, you guide a creature, Mendel, through a 3D environment by manipulating the environment itself. Mendel is a simulation of artificial life, and explores the environment of their own volition. The creature learns about the environment as it interacts with it, learning what is dangerous, what to avoid, what is safe, etc.. For example, if the player causes Mendel to fall off platforms repeatedly (say by being clumsy), Mendel will start to fear platforms, and will try to avoid them. Since Mendel is constantly learning and adapting, it strikes me that this is a good example of a video game system that does evolve over time. Mendel's learning causes the system to change as it is run, constantly providing more information that could be studied. It also seems that there’s an additional positive for this system, since the indirect interaction of the player with the learning system allows a level of testing which isn’t really possible in Geneforge. If I applied a mechanism/hypothesis style approach to Galapagos, would it be valid? I must confess to some slight subterfuge. When I first asked for counter-examples to my theory, I was hoping someone would mention this; it’s something I had in mind. I didn’t mention it myself – or imply that I’d thought of it – because I didn’t think it was a perfect counter, but it’s strong enough to be important, I think. This isn’t a perfect counter, because I can make additions to the theory to counteract it. Essentially, it’s similar to what you yourself said at the end of that part of your argument. If a shaper ‘recreates’ a creature which is significantly less skilled that its ‘former’ version, this can be argued away by suggesting that the shaper isn’t skilled enough themselves to recreate the original version exactly. I mean, that’s sort of what the game is saying anyway – the original creature improved itself on its own, and the shaper’s skill points aren’t enough to reproduce that. In my version of events, the shaper might keep the brain and complex systems intact, but skimp on some details of the body itself, or the connections between the brain and body. As a result, the creature might be the same mentally, but they might not have as strong a control over their new body as they did the previous one. While they learned to adapt to it, they’d be weaker, more feeble, slower etc.. In other words, they’d look like a less skilled creation. Conversely, if a shaper recreates a creature that is more skilled than its former version, that could simply be indication of their own innate skill. They shape the creature, but this time improve the body and connections to the mind. The result is a more skilled creature. Now, before you start dissecting this, let me. Bolting on ideas to a theory to make it weather bad predictions is fine from a validity point of view, I would think. The new theory still ‘works’ to explain what it’s trying to explain. But it adds complexity to the model, and that complexity is a problem – it weakens the model by, for example, meaning that it could more easily be superseded by simpler theories. For instance, let’s go back to geocentrism. A simple model of geocentrism can’t account for retrograde motion of planets. To get around this, you can adapt the theory by adding epicycles for planetary motion, essentially having the planets orbit in little circles around a point that traces out the full circular orbit. That’s fine – it fits the data. But it adds complexity to the theory. The mathematics of epicycles (and extensions requiring epicycles of epicycles of epicycles of ...) is one of the main contributions to the intractability of the theory, and why heliocentrism is much more useful in certain situations. In other words, bolting on additional material to the theory weakens it in comparison to others. So, I can produce a theory which is not counteracted by the game mechanics, but that theory is a weaker one. Before you raise the spectre of lack of evidence, onwards ... I am happy to make an argument in that way, but I would like to make one more stipulation. I would like to add a clause saying, ‘and I believe there is no evidence to suggest that it is not’. In other words, I would want to say: ‘If it is possible to create a creation or a brain that is identical to one previously absorbed, and I believe there is no evidence to suggest that it is not, then it could work like this ... Now, before I start annoying you too much, let me be clear here. I know that absence of evidence is not proof. Far from it! I want to include that stipulation not because it strengthens the argument, but that it provides some information to the reader that I have considered ways in which the argument could be rebuffed. I think a simple way of counteracting an argument that says ‘if a system has property X, then’ is to provide an example that shows that the system being considered doesn’t have property X. By adding this clause I feel like I’m making life easier for the reader. Is this sufficient justification for adding such a clause, do you think? There is a further reason why I would like to add such a clause in this particular case. My reason for coming up with this theory was to respond to something already written in this thread. With apologies for paraphrasing the original posters, but the initial exchange went something like this. Vinlie stated that they role-played their creations as evolving over time as they were absorbed and created in different forms. alhoon said rather categorically that this was not what happened, that that way of thinking was entirely incorrect. This was stated without any proof. I wanted to submit a theory that showed how Vinlie’s interpretation could take place. Since alhoon’s response contained no proof, I felt that it is important to emphasise the lack of proof of contradiction of my own theory. In other words, it’s a way of saying ‘your statement of fact is not fact, and does not in any way diminish this alternate explanation I have devised’. Does that make some sense? I suspect it might not, which is a motivation behind my asking this! I want to try and understand things more clearly! Fixed Your Typo.

Please do forgive me for being a little slow here. I’m trying to understand the position you’re arguing from, and I think I’m getting there, but there are still some things I’m unclear on. I’m going to ask some questions that might seem a little simplistic, but this is just to help me understand your reasoning. I’m really not trying to be difficult, so please bear with me. The issue I have here is that I’m finding it hard to appreciate why this argument might not apply to other systems. For example, would this argument apply to, say, the domains of astrophysics and cosmology? After all, these are specialisms which study systems which we largely cannot physically access: for example, the universe outside of what mankind has explored. While there are of course exceptions, generally speaking these sciences study phenomena without being able to experiment on them directly. All that is available is analysing whatever data are available, and using that analysis to form consistent theories. These sciences study systems from afar, using whatever data we can pick up from them. At least to me, this sounds rather similar to studying the world of Geneforge, using whatever data we can pick up through the small windows into that world that we are given through the games. In what way are these two types of study different? One obvious difference is one of scale. The visible universe contains an enormous amount of data, the Geneforge games a laughably small amount by comparison. I don’t think that on its own should be much of an important distinction, since I don’t see why the amount of data should change how meaningful different approaches to studying it are. I think that can’t be the only difference, though. I have a feeling there’s something much more fundamental that I’m missing. I’m not sure I quite follow your reasoning here. I don’t think I’m proposing a new output here, nor even really proposing a thought experiment. The experiment is a very real one, one that we can easily perform in the game engine. I, as player, absorb one of my creations, and make another one. That’s a situation firmly grounded in the game world. For the sake of completeness, I just went ahead and did it myself. Am I not then proposing a function alone, a process that connects two different states in the Geneforge world? It seems to me as if I am making a theory about what links two pre-existing inputs and outputs, using your terminology. Since I’ve performed the experiment, these are not abstract states – they exist in some way within my own game files. I’m simply taking the game state at some time, and the game state at a later time, and proposing a theory of what could be happening within the contexts of the game lore to link them. Is the issue that you think my ‘mechanism’ affects the outcome in some way? I don’t think it does. As players, we don’t have the opportunity to know anything more about the shaping process except that a creation is shaped by us. That’s all. We don’t have the data to know whether or not a new creation has any links to an old one – or, if there are such data, no-one has been able to provide me with any. Regardless of whether or not these links occur, the final state in the game remains the same: the new creation exists. To me, it seems as if I’ve come up with a theory that explains what could be happening in the processes that link two states in the game: absorption and creation. It just so happens that this theory has an interesting side-effect that newly created creations can inherent memories from older ones. What am I missing? I’m smiling a friendly smile here, just to demonstrate that I’m not trying to be annoying – I just feel a little ignorant! In my defence, I tried to be careful in stating that I thought these were valid conditions for my theory to stand, not that they were valid. I wasn’t stating them as concrete, merely as suggestions for what could constitute a valid theory in this case. (At least I didn't condemn myself to a cricular argument with only two points.)

An interesting choice of quotation. Let me persevere with this in mind – I shall not invoke other interpretations without explicitly stating why I think that is helpful. Since I still feel that what I’ve been saying is a touch ambiguous, I’d like to try put together another little summary; not of one detail of the argument this time, but of the argument as a whole. I think it would be helpful to recount exactly what it is I am arguing, why I think my interpretation is valid, and why I think comparison to other explanations – any others, not necessarily ‘yours’! – would be helpful. (With apologies to Hume for how I structure my argument.) I am interested in the following situation. Some time in the past, a Shaper created Creation A. Later, this Shaper absorbs Creation A, and then creates Creation B. I am interested in the mechanism that produces Creation B. Where does the information that creates Creation B come from? How does the detail that makes up the brain of Creation B arise? What would it be like to be Creation B; does their memory extend only to the point at which they are created, or does it extend to some earlier point in time? To answer these questions, I propose a mechanism. I state that the information about Creation A, when it is absorbed by the Shaper, remains accessible to the Shaper. When Creation B is created, Shaper B calls on this information, and uses it as an aid to make the creation. If Creation B is the same type as Creation A, then the Shaper can just spit the information out again – no creation in the strict sense is happening here, just a reversal of the absorption process. If Creation B is significantly different from Creation A, the Shaper uses the complex details of Creation A as a basis (e.g. the brain, the nervous, respiratory and circulatory systems, etc.), and builds the rest of Creation B around this, if necessary slightly modifying the complex details to account for the new body. To account for the very first creation made by the Shaper, I state that this information is obtained from an outside source. The information could be contained in a Canister, for instance, or passed on directly from shaper to shaper. The original information was developed carefully and slowly over time, from the first shapers creating the simplest life possible (say bacteria) or quasi-life (such as prions) and slowly adapting it over may centuries until creating something as complex as a Fyora. This mechanism offers an explanation for what is happening, and provides answers for the questions I posed. This is a mechanism used to explain pre-existing data. In order for such a mechanism to be valid, I believe it needs to have three properties, and three properties only: a) It explains the data, and any subsequent data relevant to the situation being described. b) It is self-consistent. c) It doesn’t violate any physical laws, or it replaces these laws with different laws that do not violate the successful predictions of the old laws. I believe my mechanism has all of these properties. It describes the situation, it is consistent, and I have gone to some lengths to try and show that it doesn’t violate the physical laws of the universe we’re looking at (stated rather euphemistically as ‘lore’ earlier on). Note that a mechanism isn’t required to follow on logically from general observations made in the universe it is trying to describe. If a mechanism is not directly indicated by the data, or the world at large, that’s not a problem. My mechanism doesn't have to be derived from the Geneforge universe, merely explain it adequately. As an analogy to this, consider Special Relativity. This is a theory that aims to explain some bad predictions of the earlier theory of Newtonian Relativity in certain very specific situations. One of its premises is that the speed of light is the same in all reference frames. From the point of view of Newtonian Relativity, and the universe we observe in our day-to-day lives, that premise is utterly absurd. We know full well that how fast things seem to move depends on how fast you are moving yourself, and to say otherwise is obviously nonsense. Why should light be different from anything else, and why should it alone behave so strangely? And yet, when this premise is applied, Special Relativity becomes a more general model than Newtonian Relativity, making better predictions in more situations. The mechanism is a better one, despite not being implied by the data itself, or from the world itself in a broader sense. I claim that my mechanism adheres to the three points above. I have given examples which show the mechanism adhering to these points. That’s all the burden of proof that is needed, I think. If I show this, then my mechanism must be valid. I believe the only way you can discredit my model is to challenge it based on these three points. If you can show that my mechanism violates points a), b) or c), then my mechanism becomes invalid. Otherwise, I believe it stands. Of course, it’s not quite that simple. Just because a model is valid doesn’t mean that it’s useful. This is where direct comparison becomes important, I think. As an example, consider the geocentric model of the cosmos, the model in which the earth is fixed in place, and the universe revolves around it. The model fulfils all three of my points. It explains the data, it’s consistent, and it doesn’t break physical laws. It’s a perfectly valid, acceptable mechanism for explaining the universe. If you have any doubt about that, recall that we use this model most of the time in experiments. If you’re dropping cannon balls from the Tower of Pisa, the last thing you want to do is to start modelling the earth spinning around the sun; there’d be little point. You just assume that the earth is stationary. That’s geocentrism. However, the mathematics and descriptions of the geocentric model become extremely complicated and tortuous when you start looking beyond the confines of the earth. The further away you look, the more and more complex the predictions become, until using them at all becomes tricky. Consider, by contrast, the heliocentric model, which takes the sun as the centre of the universe. This is an equally valid model. But, when you’re looking at the solar system, the predictions are much, much simpler than the geocentric model. So it’s a more useful one to use for describing that system. That’s why the model is used. Not because it’s more correct, but because it’s more useful. That’s why I think comparison can be helpful. If I’m proposing a valid mechanism, you can discount it by providing another one that is equally valid, but is somehow more useful – perhaps it is simpler, or it helps to reveal some underlying information about the world which mine does not. So, to summarise, I think I have adequately shown that my model is valid. To challenge it, I believe you need to show that it is invalid, by demonstrating that does not adhere to my three points. Alternatively, you can provide a model of you own which is clearly superior. Otherwise, I would like to think that my model stands. Incidentally, that's a nice little argument you use about the similarity of functions. I'm perfectly willing to buy that, and happy to accept my statement on that point wasn't a helpful one! Aw, you flatter me! Sometimes, though, being infuriating is half the fun

I think part of the difficulty here is that we’re arguing from slightly different perspectives, perspectives that include slightly different, slightly contradictory terminology. I think that’s leading to a little confusion. So, let me try and cut through the confusion a little, try to explain my reasoning in a slightly different manner, and show why I’m arguing this way. We’re arguing about what might happen to the mind when a creature is shaped. I’m trying to argue that a Shaper can copy a mind it has previously created, and you are saying they cannot. To demonstrate my point, I pointed to a situation in the game itself, one in which Rhakkus effectively changed creation type through magical means. I used this as an analogy, saying that if a creature could maintain a sense of self through continuous shaping from point A to point B, then this sense of self could be maintained simply by skipping the intervening steps – absorbing point A, and using the energy to directly create point B. You argued that the analogy was flawed, since the two mechanics were fundamentally different. Because of this, I altered the example slightly, producing an example in which the two theories produced identical results. You said that this new argument was still invalid, since comparing two very different mechanisms was meaningless, regardless of whether they produced identical results or not. Hence my mathematical example. What I was trying to show here was that two very different mechanisms could nonetheless produce the same outcome under certain conditions, and that a comparison between them could yield interesting information about both of them. I wasn’t trying to say anything more general than that – and I certainly wasn’t trying to say that similar outcomes imply similar processes in general! I’d like to answer your objections about my example, but I worry that’s losing sight of the bigger picture somewhat. This whole example of mine was designed to show by analogy that the theory I’m putting forward is physically possible. It could occur, and it could lead to situations that look like those in the games. I’m not trying to say how plausible or otherwise it might be – merely that it is allowed by the physical laws of the universe we’re talking about. I still think this example demonstrates that, but more on that in a moment! So, a brief departure to mathematics! I’ll put this in a spoiler section, so it doesn’t snarl up the rest of the argument. By the way, as another aside, I put together a rather spurious ‘proof’ of my position based on metaphysics alone. It’s not an acceptable proof at all, given its basis, but it’s a fun little exercise nonetheless. So, for a bit of lighthearted building of castles in the sky: Anyway, back to the main point. Let’s see if we can’t disentangle this argument a little. Your main objection, as I understand it, is that there is no in-game basis for the theory I am trying to put forward. I have done my best by providing an analogy to in-game events, to demonstrate that my theory could produce similar outcomes, but that’s all so far! However, I did ask you earlier to provide me with examples that demonstrate your interpretation, and I don’t think you’ve yet done so. At present, I don’t think either of us has really put forward a good piece of in-game evidence supporting their view. Given that your explanation of events is far, far more common than the one I’m putting forward, I’m sure there must be a strong basis for it – there must be a reason why this interpretation is the norm – but I can’t think of any example off-hand that provides a really strong case for it. If you are arguing that my theory is not supported by in-game evidence, at the moment your argument is in the same boat. So prove me wrong! I really do think I’m missing something obvious, which is why I’m asking! Right now, alhoon’s gotten the closest with his Geneforge 4 example. I don’t think that example is a general one, but surely there are some others. So, can you provide me with one or more examples from the game text, mechanics or history where it’s made clear that information about creations is lost forever when they are absorbed, or that all new creations a Shaper makes are a blank slate in some way? I’m totally expecting flowers in the post now. Just so you know, haha