Student of Trinity

Well, dang. I knew I should have switched to Chrome.

Maybe it isn't exactly sad. Just crotchety.

Yeah, Jeff's in-game documentation has been brutally lacking for a long time. A lot of things sounds awesome but were actually nerfed two games ago, or sound lame but are actually deadly if pumped. It would be easy to revise these.

I wonder whether this is where Jeff would actually use and appreciate a fan-made contribution. I have a sort of hunch that he just hates writing these in-game descriptions, for whatever reason. I bet that if we here put together some kind of 'missing manual' for the games, Jeff might well take them over, and edit them in to the next updates, and say Thanks.

It's not sad about having Bell's palsy?

But that particular Salisbury steak is probably not going to be eaten. It's only crochet. So why should it be sad?

Doesn't the 'barrier of the winds' Awakened endgame of G2 suggest that those drakons, at least, will be able to fly? Or am I just reading too much into 'of the winds'? I always pictured them as flying, anyway. But other than that, I don't think there's anything in any of the games that even mentions flying in connection with drakons or drayks.

Wingbolts evidently fly, but for some reason they never go very high. That's kind of hard to explain. Their wings look too small in relation to their length to be generating much of a ground effect. There is that one episode in G4 where an attack by vlish over water is mentioned, though not seen. Vlish clearly float. Why can't they float higher?

This is definitely difficulty-related. On lower difficulties, it's not a big deal to waste a bunch of skill points on useless things. It's only on Torment that you really have to know the optimal path and follow it closely.

Steam engines were civilian at first, of course, but it was the fact that steam-driven locomotives could haul huge amounts of supplies, and carry huge numbers of people, that multiplied the size of field armies by about a factor of 10 between the Napoleonic wars and the US Civil war, and put the total into total war. Steam-powered factories must also have been used to mass produce weapons, ammunition, and equipment for those enormous modern armies.

One reason that military technology is disruptive is that a lot of the things that armies need to do are things that anybody might want to do — travel, communicate, keep records, keep warm, eat. So 'military technology' doesn't necessarily just mean weapons; often it's just civilian technology with the stakes raised a lot.

I'm not sure funding seemed like such a big deal in Oppenheimer's day. I don't think that he meant the Manhattan Project itself when he talked about "deep things in science", but rather about the possibility of nuclear chain reactions. Making the bomb took a lot of funding, but discovering that the bomb could be made was something that happened just because it was possible. I think Oppenheimer was saying that you can't arrange to make only good and useful discoveries, and avoid all dangerous ones. You certainly aren't forced to develop them into practical technologies, however. He of all people knew that dangerous discoveries don't just turn into dangerous technologies all by themselves. I quoted him, though, because once science discovers something, society has to react, one way or another.

Oh, good. As long as we have our priorities. Give everyone guns and dynamite!

An entirely fair point, and very important. Science does not necessarily change society purely for the better. It's just that it's a force to be reckoned with, in a way that not much else is.

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.

You're only as oldbie as you feelbie.

The most accurate answer is that I listen to what my daughters are playing, whether I want to or not.

Isn't this exactly the same thing that Scorpius posted last time he was here? Or was that thing about laying eggs in between?

Anyway, it's disappointing. Far be it from me to ask or expect anyone to move on from kawaii, but it might be good to move on from lunch.

How much of the weakness of G5 is fixed by playing on Hard instead of Torment? For me, actually, I think that the answer could well be, quite a lot.

Difficulty settings seem to have been a royal pain for Jeff all along. The best thing about his games is the story, so ideally everybody should play through easily enough to relax and appreciate the setting, characters, and plot. But some people want difficult battles. They may be masochistic wackos, but they are an over-represented class among CRPG customers. So the games need a Torment setting. The problem is that lots of people who don't actually enjoy all the grinding and reloading and un-intuitive optimization, which you really need for Torment, feel obliged to play the games on that setting, just because they can. They won't like it, because they are not masochistic wackos, but they know they can, and so they'll feel bad if they don't.

This whole issue did use to be mitigated by the fact that Jeff's combat engines had some really wicked exploits. Among his relatively small pool of customers, knowledge of the tricks got around, and people could cope with Torment by learning them. This was fun in a way, and for some of us, it was part of what Spiderweb games were about. But it was sort of silly, too. It messed with the story, really, that you could turn badass bosses into idiotic patsies by ducking round corners and double-tapping 'F'. Jeff has gradually tightened up on the exploits, but that has made the difficulty issue more acute.

If only people were more willing to play the games on a difficulty setting that's actually enjoyable for them, I think a lot of things that really detract from a game like G5 would become much less problematic, and so the good things would shine much better.

Jeff is well aware of this problem, and used to mention it often to beta testers. I think I was the one who suggested he relabel 'easy' as 'casual', so that people would feel more comfortable in actually using it. I think he should probably take this further, and re-name Torment something even more discouraging, like 'Masochistic', so that everyone but the truly hard-core would feel comfortable in passing it up. 'Hard' could be re-named 'Torment', to make it sound quite hard enough for sane people, and 'Normal' could just be called 'Challenge', as opposed to 'Casual'.

I think this is very reasonable because, as many people have always observed, Jeff's games don't really get harder in any interesting way on higher difficulties. His game engines just aren't that sophisticated; that's not what Spiderweb is about. All he can do is crank monster health and damage up and down. This works to make the casual game much more forgiving, but at the high end, it always ends up merely forcing tedious tactics, or game-breaking exploits. I don't think this is a flaw in Jeff's execution. It's inherent in the nature of what he's doing, and the best solution is for most people not to play his games on the hardest setting.

Well, but you shouldn't overemphasize the importance of gunpowder either. Lots of things besides gunpowder explode when touched off by sparks, and gunpowder without sparks is basically useless.

That's true; but:

So if you want to understand and control explosions, understanding gunpowder is only a tiny component. Understanding sparks is a much larger and more important component. Gunpowder is cool and special, but so are sparks, and TNT, and natural gas, and sawdust, and just about everything else.

This is only justifiable if you really emphasize the "understand" task. In some senses, gunpowder is simpler than sparking. But you can make sparks by banging rocks together; developmentally, sparks are not the bottleneck. And in its own way, everything is special. But gunpowder isn't just something that can explode. It's an explosive. It's got high energy density, and it's self-oxidizing; yet it's portable and stable, and convenient for all your exploding needs. Dynamite is even better that way, but it was a direct development of gunpowder, deliberately researched; as far as the analogy with science is concerned, I claim TNT as part of gunpowder. 'Natural gas and sawdust and just about everything else' are enormously less useful. Sawdust cannon ain't gonna conquer the world.

Happily, this is not just a digression. The analogy holds up, I believe. Lots of other things are just as special and interesting and difficult to understand as natural science, and science interacts with them. I think the point remains that science delivers practical technology whose effectiveness is objectively beyond intelligent debate. Objectivity isn't everything, but it's quite something, and few if any other lines of endeavor apart from natural science seem to deliver it. There's a story here that can't legitimately be spun in too many different ways: the right headline is, Science changes society. The rest of the story comes much further down the column.

They're Ferocious Arcane Casting Talking Spiders. They just don't talk much to you.

There are positive developments in philosophy ... we've gone from a kind of "divine right of kings" conception to some sort of valuing of each individual over the past few hundred years. That represents progress, and it sometimes has real ramifications in life (the spread of democracy and human rights).

Yeah, I'll buy that as progress. It may just be philosophy belatedly recognizing progress made by other approaches than philosophizing, though: footnoting the guillotine. As a defense of philosophy, it does show that at least philosophy can follow along, and that's something. Maybe it's even quite a lot.

Well, except for the part where culture was behind the invention of the steam engine (for instance, really good black dye wasn't invented in medieval Europe until after black clothing became fashionable among the wealthy), or the steam engine was invented but nobody did anything with it until culture changed (like Mendel's laws of inheritance being ignored for 40-odd years because nobody thought they were important).

Science certainly doesn't happen in a vacuum, but emphasizing this too much is like saying gunpowder's nothing special, because explosions need to be touched off by sparks.

[T]he real changes in culture come from technology, that byproduct of science. A steam engine can change a culture immensely. A cannon will do so as well. Having to accommodate disruptive technology is a big force for cultural change. Another, of course, is having to accommodate changes in philosophy and social science, but it's hard for them to generate changes without doing PR work to generate a groundswell of support. Arguing that all men are created equal, then expanding it to women and insisting that all humans count, really is argument. You don't have to argue when you have the Maxim gun and they have not. Your technology makes your point for you.

Yeah. And I guess the flip side of the disenchantment with philosophy that I reported in my earlier post is a disenchantment with science that has no practical applications. The Big Bang is a cool idea, but it's debatable. The laser is not.

For me the mistake of western civilizations is to think technology and science are the only measure of success for all humankind.

Technology isn't everything, but it might be the only thing that's really objective. That's all; but that's quite something.

@Kelandon: Yeah, I think philosophy is also good for showing you surprising ways to be wrong, and it's a good point, which I'll grant, to say that all other serious disciplines serve this purpose, too. It's just that with physics, you do sometimes have the chance of really being right, and inventing a radio or a laser, or discovering how the planets really move. Philosophy doesn't seem so strong on the positive side.

The 'cultural cages' stuff, creating reality and all: I think this mostly just bait-and-switch. It only sounds impressive when you interpret it so it's also idiotic, and if you water it down into sanity, it's trivial. So philosophy professors say it to sound radical and interesting, then defend it by surreptitiously backing down into total banality. Thinking that there's any clever point involved reflects ignorance of science: nature is not all about us, and natural law is simply too alien to have cultural bias in any significant or interesting sense.

There is an interesting discussion about science and culture, though, I think. It's how science changes culture. A culture with steam engines is totally different. Discuss.

The only thing I don't like about philosophy in general, as opposed to some particular theory, is that I think it teaches negativity. The smart move is always to criticize, never to assert. Assertion is tremendously hard. Critique is easy. So with enough philosophical education and experience, people can turn into intellectual ninjas, who know seventeen ways to kill any statement with a toothpick, but can't actually stand up for anything.

In the end most of the use I feel I've gained, from what philosophy I have, is purely negative. If someone attacks my ideas, I can attack their attack. But I always seem to end up doing it by going negative, casting doubt on everything, until both sides strike an armistice over wasteland, and agree that the other person's turf isn't really worth taking. I'm less impressed with the whole exercise than I once was.

We just had this argument a while ago so I don't want to undertake it again, but to state my contention in brief: I think the opposite is true. The Shapers are irresponsible, to the point that it looks like stupidity. They say they are careful and responsible. That's the incompetence talking. In fact their track record shows that their precautions are never enough, and yet in spite of their track record, they keep trying their crazy shaping tricks again — and claiming, again, each time, that they know what they're doing.

I know this isn't about Einstein's relativity, but hear me out. Einstein's relativity says that some thing people usually think of as absolute facts, that are the same for everyone, actually depend on how you look at things. For example, which of two events happens before the other one — you'd think that this is never a matter of perspective, but you'd be wrong. So this is a great analogy for people who want to tell you that other things, such as, say, morality, are just local jargon, and a matter of perspective.

But Einstein giveth as well as taketh away. He points out that things that people think of as relative are actually not. Like, how fast is something moving? You'd think the answer depends entirely on, moving relative to what. If you're driving 10 mph faster than me, then traffic in my lane will be 10 mph slower to you than it is to me, and oncoming traffic will be 10 mph faster. You might well think that this is obviously always true, that it's even a logical necessity, that can be deduced from the very definition of speed. You'd be wrong. If something is traveling at the speed of light, then relative to each of us it has exactly the same speed, no matter how differently we two are moving.

Order of events is relative, egad; but the speed of light is absolute; egad again.

The basic tool of Einsteinian physics is a language system in which each term automatically carries a sort of flag that indicates exactly how it depends on reference frame. So you can make a statement about a bunch of different frame-dependent things, and if they all depend on frame in the same way, then they'll all change in parallel if you change frame of reference. In this way the statement itself becomes an absolute statement, although it is about concepts whose very meaning is strictly relative. Using this kind of language, physicists very rarely make any statements that are not, in this sense, absolute. There's even a name for this subtly different way of being absolute. We speak of covariance, as opposed to invariance. The meanings of terms change, but they all change together.

In other words, in physics the whole point of relativity is to understand how things are relative. And then to construct a more sophisticated absolute theory, that embraces relativity.

So back to the topic: "everything is relative" is indeed a straw man. There are probably lots of sophomoric sophomores who will insist on it, but it's silly. But exactly what things are relative, and what things are absolute — this is a serious question, and there can be radically different answers to it. The one that's right might well not be the one that seems obvious. And by doing more than announce that things are relative — by understanding how and why they are — one is certainly going beyond simple relativism.

G1 is kind of the series hook. All the games are stand-alone, but the first one is even more stand-alone. Apart from just being the first in the series, it's set on an isolated island full of mysterious installations that mostly haven't been touched in a couple of hundred years. So the rather primitive world simulation — rooms with monsters in them waiting for you — is actually perfectly realistic. It all kind of works together, and the momentum it gives to the story makes the rest of the arc that much better.

Try to go as long as you can without thinking of Consume.

I don't think Drakons are ever referred to as flying, and since specific emphasis is placed on the Barrier of the Winds Drakons being flying ones, the implication is that that would be a big deal.

 

We have to ask why normal Drakons and Drayks even have wings now, but you could probably handwave it away with heat regulation or somesuch. They are cold-blooded.

I seem to remember that when I played the Awakened ending in G2, I got to see a big conga line of Drakons march out of the hidden Barrier of the Winds zone. If I'm not just getting my Geneforge endings mixed up, they looked just like all the other Drakons, but of course you have to add a bit of imagination to Jeff's limited graphics. Maybe only they could fly, and maybe that was important. For what it's worth, though, I always imagined that all the winged or floating Geneforge creatures could fly at least a bit if they wanted, but that like Tiggers, "they just don't like it, somehow".

All they had was Tuldaric, who was clearly going to get eaten by a demon before too long, and a pretty lame plan to grow a couple of dozen Drakons. Neither asset seemed very scalable, in contrast to the plans of Barzahl and the Takers. Both Tuldaric and the 'Barrier of the WInds' were also pretty sad departures from the supposed Awakened ideals. What they showed was that the Awakened had to either dump their original 'serviles are doin' it for themselves' thing in favor of modifying themselves recklessly and enslaving giant new creations, or else get squished under somebody else's wheels and become a mere footnote in history.