PickTheStick

PickTheStick , 11 months ago

#Your favorite game’s “awesome story” robs the player of a basic sense of agency

It is generally not awesome for the player character to join a cult, agree to assassinate their boss’s boss, cheat on their life partner, pick a side in a major power struggle, voluntarily inject themselves with an experimental nano-fluid, etc, without the player’s consent.

Right, so…please tell me a narrative medium that allows this. Somehow movies, books, comics, manga, and literal storytelling all get a pass on this?

I can sort of nod along with everything else, agreeing that there is some truth in the spewing. This statement is so pants-on-head foolish that every other assertion you make gets dragged beneath the water and drowns with chains made of the last page of shitty choose-your-own-adventure book. And for that level of strength in the chains to work, those assertions have to be pretty crappy.

Sorry, but no medium of media allows for agency. I don’t care if you have some of the best writing in a game (whether that means Planescape: Torment, Baldur’s Gate II, Disco Elysium, whatever), or if you want to go with the old choose-your-own-adventure books, but there is ultimately little to no player agency. If you want player agency in a game, you have one choice, and it isn’t a video game: TTRPGs. Even ChatGPT can’t match what a good GM can do, because they can allow you to break the mechanics of the game or add mechanics on the fly to fit what a player wants to do. A GM can literally respond to something a game creator never imagined within seconds. I want to see Planescape or Disco Elysium react to a player doing something they thought of that the game creator didn’t imagine. Buuuulllllshit. Player agency my ass.

Also, as the OP obviously fails to mention any games that he thinks is worthy of being an ‘awesome story’, I’m calling this as a troll/bait post.

PickTheStick , 11 months ago

I have an honest question for you. Have you ever seen a bulletproof vest?

Also, the person you’re replying to gave a very frightening scenario: being hunted down at your own home. If you’re not shooting back, what do you think the enemy is going to do? Give up and go away? Molotov cocktails are an easy, low-tech solution to a barricaded enemy you don’t care about taking alive.

Now, if we assume you’re in public, there are still issues with a bulletproof vest. They’re not really all that great at being concealed. If you truly have a bulletproof vest that can fit underneath clothing, it’s not going to stop many bullets. You can look through the wikipedia page on different levels of body armor, and do a quick search to see how bulky the different types are. Police armor is rated for most handguns, and is super bulky already. Military armor can hopefully stand up to a rifle bullet, but they’re often ceramic plates, which don’t last against multiple rounds, and are very obvious and stand out. Your slim-fit vest may be able to handle a very small subset of rounds. If you go the route of more protection, you’re going to find yourself targeted by the gunman due to your visibility and because your potential as a threat is large compared to others. Even a very high quality, military vest/suit is not going to cover you well enough to make a difference if a single person is shooting at you and A) you don’t have buddies to give you cover fire and make them put their head down and B) space because you knew the shooter was an enemy before he pulled out a gun and started shooting at you.

PickTheStick , 11 months ago

1. I’ve had to wear bulletproof vests, and now choose not to because they are a massive pain. So that’s why I felt like I should explain why they aren’t a good solution. They won’t be of any help in the majority of cases, and will likely slow you down. Unlike the ABS example, the amount of help a vest that would fit underneath your typical clothing is so small that it would be next to useless. At the distance you’d have to be from a shooter in order for it to be effective against a round it isn’t meant for, the reason you’d survive is because they can’t accurately aim at you. Anywhere within reasonable accuracy distances, it would be worthless. Most individuals aren’t going to be accurate with a pistol past 10-15 yards, well within the range that a 9mm, .45, .40, etc. are effective against level I or level II armor.
2. You’re right, I looked quickly and it looked like you were replying to MrVilliam’s post, where he said he was afraid the locals would leak his home address. Obviously, on a re-look, that’s not the case. So… oops.
3. No. Concealable guns (handguns, for the most part, leaving aside the ridiculous sweatpants video) easily penetrate all but the best armor. The Ft. Hood shooter, for example, used a pistol that was chambered in .223, the ‘civilian’ version of the 5.56.

3b. Also, yes. While I wouldn’t want to use a handgun against a rifle or shotgun, I’d still much prefer to have one, especially in the situations where the majority of shootings happen. It wouldn’t help at all in the Las Vegas shooting, but in the rest? Schools, grocery stores, large chain stores? A pistol would work well. The range you’d be engaging the shooter at will likely be within those 15 yards that people can accurately aim a handgun. That kind of carries into your last, unnumbered point. Right now, non-lethal (which should really be called less-lethal, but that’s a whole thing I personally roll my eyes at) options don’t have anywhere near a large enough range. The longest Tasers reach around 40’, I think, while the 37mm or 40mm bean-bag shooters are never going to be carried around by a civilian casually. The taser almost certainly won’t be effective at that range. I think it’s an 8 degree spread between the two probes, which works out to about 1 foot of spread every 7 feet of distance to the target. At the maximum range of 40’, that’s nearly a 6 foot spread. A taser isn’t going to be super accurate either, so you’d have to aim for the head and get lucky, and also get lucky that your nearly 6 foot spread of the barbs hit the other guy’s foot. Otherwise it isn’t going to be very effective at stopping the shooter from shooting you.

As an aside, sure, I’m an American. I think I’m pretty logical about everything, though. I think societies that don’t have guns outnumbering folks are great and wish we could get there. I also think that we’ve gotten ourselves into a shithole, and it is at the point where the first person to disarm is fucked. It’s just like this stupid nuclear weapon situation. Can you really imagine America, Britain, France, etc. giving up their nuclear weapons after seeing how Russia is acting? That’s what it’s going to be like for at least a decade if we vote now to get rid of civilian ownership of guns. ‘The Purge’ wouldn’t be a good depiction of what it would be like, but I don’t want to wait 30 minutes for the police to come help when my meth head neighbor decides to get revenge for all the ‘slights’ I’ve ever given him (like asking him not to dump his tires and burn them next to my chicken coop because he thought it was funny) with his little dump gun in hand and here I am having turned over my guns to the sheriff.

PickTheStick , 1 year ago

That’s a humorous take, because I’ve known so many people who went to see crappy movies because of the movie previews for something they liked. This was way before the internet took over as a way to see videos, but still, interesting to note the opposite.