Alorael at Large

Again: utilitarianism and consequentialism more generally are the branches of ethics that are explicit and forceful about saying that being concerned about the results is wholly irrelevant. The actual results are all that matters. Whether you give to charity because you're believe it's the right thing to do, because it makes you feel good, or because you're getting something else out of it doesn't matter. In fact, utilitarianism would say it's better for the giver to get more out of giving as long as no one else is getting less. Obviously mass extinction for world peace is something that'll give most people pause; generally utilitarianism defines good as most pleasure and least suffering, or something similar, and death is put in the suffering column. There are definitely eyebrows raised over how mechanical and transactional this kind of ethical reasoning gets. It's one of the charges frequently levied against utilitarianism. It can be used to justify some pretty horrific things done to a small number of people for the good of large numbers of people. Lots of philosophers have spilled a lot of ink on trying to either explain why utilitarianism doesn't allow that or why that's actually okay; whether any of it is convincing is an exercise for the reader. You can construct situations in which giving money leads to worse outcomes. You can always construct hypotheticals. But in the real world I think that most of the time most people aren't affected by someone ostentatiously giving $100 to someone else. Momentary irritation at it, sure. Maybe a fleeting thought of wanting to be more charitable yourself. But the actual effect is one guy feeling smug and another guy being $100 richer. "The ends justify the means" is by no means a universal ethical truth. Consequentialism is one of many systems of ethics. But it is a system; to say that it's wrong takes an argument, and probably throwing your support behind another system instead. No system is completely devoid of uncomfortable edge cases and constructed scenarios; it's a matter of which uncomfortable "good" and "bad" you accept. —Alorael, who thinks this post turned into a disjointed ramble in the process of editing. He's okay with that. Further editing would clearly negatively affect his utiles with minimal benefit to others.

But would you rather feel used and have a hundred bucks? Is it worth it for one recipient to feel degraded if it inspires a few dozen more people to donate less obnoxiously? —Alorael, who notes that not treating others as means to an end is a very bad thing in Kantian ethics. Utilitarians are all for using people as means as long as the ends justify it.

Whether "good" is all about the outcome regardless of motive, the motive regardless of outcome, or somewhere in between is a fundamental question of normative ethics. If by posing while giving away $100 the giver gets a PR boost but also inspires and/or shames more people into giving is the action better than anonymously giving $100 and having it end there? —Alorael, who is on the consequentialism side. Why doesn't count for much in his books, and he's not balancing karma. There are reasons to avoid ostentatious do-gooding, but there are also reasons for it. And yes, the warm glow of knowing everyone else sees how good you are is a real benefit.

Going back to the first post, I think it's very important to distinguish between being good and seeming good. You can work very hard at looking like a good person without particularly wanting to be or do good. Whether that can, in fact, make you good or not is a deep ethical question. But if you're more concerned with the facade than the reality of course the results can be bad; good isn't really the aim at all. —Alorael, who believes all ethics come down to ethical intuitionism with window dressing. An ethical system is a means of objectively evaluating the goodness of people and actions, but there's no objective way to compare the goodness of different systems. Any choice among systems comes down to intuition in the end. Everyone's trying to be good, with rare exceptions. It's just that no one agrees on the criteria.

Not that I've seen. The usual incremental improvements, not a new engine. —Alorael, who does think it may be the first time he saw Jeff Vogel explicitly say that some of the ability balance is less than ideal and will be addressed forcefully.

There aren't calendars for every game, and I'm pretty sure they don't run on the same clock even in all the games that do have one. —Alorael, who sees only one solution: get Big Brother to start surveying all gameplay.

You'll have to do it by editing graphics files. —Alorael, who would have to go back and remember how the files are even stored in the old trilogy. This might require extra software capable of making the modifications.

We appreciate your enthusiasm, but please don't post twice in a row, especially within a couple of minutes. That's what the edit button is for! —Alorael, who hasn't killed Litalia. He's not someone who does well playing through games different ways for different endings. Some endings are legitimate choices, and some just feel so wrong to him that he can't touch them.

Incidentally, it's very easy to tax income; we have an income tax. It's not so easy to tax wealth. There are a few countries with wealth taxes, but the US isn't one, and the Constitution possibly forbids it. There's no way for the government to even access that 40% of all wealth. —Alorael, who still thinks the government still almost has a license to print money through loans/bonds, and that's ignoring its actual license to literally print money. Both result in howls of outrage, but the avoidance of deficit spending in a slowly-uncrashing economy is something of a sticking point in political/fiscal/economic debate.

Duck does say this is probably a designer oversight. I agree; it's most likely something Jeff just didn't address. That doesn't mean it can be an emergent emotional moment in the game. —Alorael, who also very much likes the Ornotha Ziggurat. It's one of the bits of A2 that makes it a personal favorite, and yes, he has been known to reload and retry to ensure that are some vahnatai survivors.

I've had natto. I didn't particularly like it. I can understand why people think it's gross. But it's gross because of taste and/or texture, whereas a lot of critters and parts of critters seem gross before you even face them but are perfectly inoffensive on a plate. Scandinavia, on the other hand, has perfected foods both horrifying in concept and horrifying in execution. —Alorael, who thinks tofu is probably high on the list of foods that could be extremely off-putting to anyone not accustomed to it. It's beans that have been turned into a sort of soft, somewhat gelatinous block. Faintly flavored. Oddly dense. Depending on the type, possibly slippery and/or prone to disintegration so it can contaminate everything else.

Is there anything that can never be bad in any quantity? I'm drawing a blank. I can always concoct a scenario in which a given amount of anything is pretty much catastrophic. So... I guess the answer to your question is no, but it seems like a rather meaningless question. —Alorael, who could go deep into abstractions to answer this. An infinite amount of zero is at least no more likely to be bad than no zero at all, and for the same reason. Goodness as a quality definitionally only gives you more good as it increases.

The question in the first post could be rephrased as asking whether there's such a thing as an excess for everything. Otherwise yes, the question's basically tautological. —Alorael, who agrees that there's an obvious excess of food and drink. And most activities. Size. Number of limbs, eyes, or kidneys. All kinds of things!

Being vegetarian really limits weird food. We often get weirded out by the meat of strange animals, or by strange parts of animals, or by strange preparations even of familiar animals. But plants? I guess you can get something like a durian or some odd textures, but none of it tends to produce the kind of conceptual disgust that meat can evoke. Plant distaste is really only food preference-ish. It smells bad, or has a really weird texture. Meat invokes more visceral revulsion, if you'll excuse accidental the pun. I want to try lutefisk and hákari at some point, for a certain value of want, but I haven't yet. —Alorael, who doesn't really do favorite foods. He's on a current stir-fried bok choy binge, though.

The basic question here, I think, is whether there is anything that is not necessarily bad as the quantity approaches infinity. I think money fits here. Sure, infinite money can conceivably be bad, but I don't think it is necessarily, inherently bad in the way many things are. I'd say the same is true of knowledge or experiences. Sure, you can know or experience things that are distressing and negative, but you can also accumulate a vast understanding of interesting stuff. There's nothing inherently wrong with it. Drinking lattes in an example where excess is bad. A latte is good. A couple of lattes is probably fine. Four hundred lattes in an hour will kill you, by sheer volume of fluid to be consumed if nothing else. There's the economic idea of marginal utility, where (roughly) the value of n+1 compared to n of whatever goes down as n increases. This doesn't necessarily make more bad, just less good. The difference between zero dollars and ten dollars is, in practical terms, huge. The difference between $1,000,000 and 1,000,010 is negligible to the millionaire. Money classically fits that pattern, as do most goods and services; that's why it's an important economic concept. I have some problems with the idea of excess happiness. As an extreme, euphoria is very pleasant. It's an emotional state, not necessarily a symptom. It can be due to mania or intoxication, both of which have problems of their own, but there's non-pathologic reasons to be euphoric too. Permanent, baseless euphoria is probably a problem, but it's a problem because all the reasons you'd feel like that are bad and come with other severe issues. But even mania, the classic state leading to euphoria, isn't really dangerous because of the euphoria. It's dangerous because of impaired judgment, potentially delusions, and often bizarre or dangerous behavior. Drugs that induce euphoria have risks of overdose, risks of withdrawal, health consequences, and costs. If someone made a pill that caused a euphoric state for a few hours without other problems, without tolerance or withdrawal, it would make for a very interesting day for the FDA and legal system. —Alorael, who writes this within earshot of a man yelling about how he is the president of the hospital and will sue everyone. That's not good mania. To be fair, he's also not euphoric.

Despite the old saw about the root of all evil, I don't think you can really have too much money. You can misuse it, sure, or let it warp you, but it doesn't necessarily do that. You can use money for good, and you can always use more money for more good. Excessive pursuit of wealth to the exclusion of other considerations is bad; but having wealth is fine. —Alorael, who can see an argument that money isn't particularly good in excess. That's fine and quite possible. That still doesn't make it bad in excess.

You don't get the gap in the Great Walls, and you also don't get Erika's help in the last fight. You have to reach the platform with the control three or four times, and each time Rentar teleports you back. The last time she's too tired and you can save the day. Erika is never present, gets in no fight, and doesn't get killed by sunlight. —Alorael, who does think it's interesting to consider what might have happened in subsequent games if Erika's survival remained canon. Erika is, after all, a first-rate power in the caves, and there's unlikely to be another time when she'd be so directly endangered. Would she bother to deal with shades or find them beneath her notice? What would her distant relatives think? How would she and the other big magical players in the later games get along?

Burning Wheel is best game. It's sadly lacking in very clear and explicit instructions on how to set up and start a game that will be good, not terrible. It's easy to screw that part up, and then the game will be no fun, and it will seem like Burning Wheel is no fun. Not true, but that part of the manual just isn't there. Once the game gets off the ground you're probably fine; BW is a game that's great to play and very easy to run. It won't work great for people not willing to learn rules or track numbers, and it won't work if you want a thousand cool abilities out of the box, although that can be arranged with some work. For the thousand cool abilities World of Darkness is still my go-to. —Alorael, who will take off his fanboy hat and sit back down. No, his schedule won't let him even remotely commit to anything.

Jeff's in his mid forties, and even if business is good now I doubt he's planning imminent retirement to his gold-filled lair. I don't doubt that Geneforge remakes are on the horizon, but I'd also be very, very surprised if we didn't see some completely new games as well. As far as taking over, I think you overestimate how easy it is to make games as a group. It can be done, but it's hard. And it's especially hard because most people who have the coding skill and design skill to pull it off don't want to tell someone else's stories, they want to tell their own. —Alorael, who has even more doubt that a "big company" would want to buy out Spiderweb. IP is only worth its customer base, and Spiderweb's is tiny.

Angband, yes. ToME I haven't played since it was Tales of Middle Earth. —Alorael, who found it too complicated for his roguelike desires. He wants to autopilot like Tetris. If he wanted that many choices and details he'd play a different game. Just his preferences.

Jeff has said that neither sold well and both were very painful to make, so I wouldn't expect more tools to make your own Spiderweb games. Make the most of the ones we have! —Alorael, who can clarify that Blades of Exile is in the style of Exile 3 and Blades of Avernum in the style of the original Avernum trilogy, specifically Avernum 3.

The politics of Mordor aren't much explored in LotR that I can recall, and I haven't read the vast supporting Tolkien material. But Sauron's military, at least, combined orcs, trolls, Haradrim, Easterlings, and Corsairs of Umbar. Maybe an alliance or federation of some kind, but given Sauron's proclivities I'm tempted to label it at the very least soft-power imperialism. —Alorael, who sees a lot of good in Sauron's multiculturalism. Everyone can be equally subjugated under tyranny!

I think this is actually a demonstration of how insufferable New Yorkers are. Damn Empire State. —Alorael, who believes the US currently operates on trickle-down academics. And trickle-down facts. It works about as well as trickle-down economics.

But is the idea that empires are evil, especially as opposed to kingdoms, older than that? That's what I haven't been able to satisfyingly answer for myself. —Alorael, who recognizes that the actual phrase is a fair marker. But there's a more subtle sense in which empires may be, if not evil, than generally worse than upstanding (constitutional) monarchies.

For something to make it into our literary discourse it has to have the right terminology and the right flavoring. The German Empire (Second Reich) ended with WWI, and was an enemy but never really evil the way the Third Reich was. But the Third Reich also never persisted as an imperial power, nor did it have an emperor. The Mongols could have been an evil empire to much of Asia. I'm not sure they got much of a value judgment in Europe, though. There were a bunch of Persian empires and then caliphates and sultanates of all sorts, and Europe definitely had conflicts, but they were seen as religious enemies in a way that the evil empire often isn't. Maybe it's all of these elements put together. I'm not really sure how far the evil empire as a trope can be traced back. It might all be a creation of Tolkien. —Alorael, who isn't even sure about FF6, It has an Empire, and the Empire is the enemy, but to what extent it's evil is something of a question. Emperor Gestahl is not a nice guy, but he doesn't seem to be a monster. Generals Leo and Celes are both good people. It's the emperor's right-hand monster who makes the Empire more than just a military enemy, and he in fact gleefully fails to care about the destruction of the Empire. Then he doesn't build a new one, he just spews random destruction from on high.