Yes your correct racism did not exist in middle age Europe. Who cares. I want all the differant possibilities. This is DF not a historical documentary.
Look GoblinCookies, you the derailer, someone wanted torture added in to get information out of people or as punishment. You said I dont want it in because it hurts my sensibilities stop talking about it your derailing. He said he wanted it in the GAME as a SYSTEM AND FEATURE TO GET INFORMATION AND PUNISHMENT. YOU said no becuase of REAL LIFE implications you did the derailing if anything.
Any way who derialed what aside. The idea that we shouldnt allow violence in games becuase a violent person might do something violent is stupid. Becuase the kiddie winks poor little malleable minds. Look this game has ASCII graphics I dont a violent child will be that interested in it. Very few children even play this game. And they most likely wont get the kick they want vs playing school shooting sim. Besides these sorts of children who just want to watch the world burn like Elliot Rogers was imagining doing awful things in his head anyways. Having a kid play Doom wont have any effect like making them commit murder. Having mental illness becuase of shit parents or abuse or social deprivity is what causes this. And the idea if you play as a tyrant you will emphasize with them and turn into some evil horrible person is absolutely ludicrous. So I want your honest opinion should violent games be banned?
Things really are not as simple as you make out. There is plenty of evidence that things work exactly as I described they do, evidence from people who are actual neuroscientists and not just the regular lying press. See
here and
here.
Some work looks at the causal effect of game play by asking some individuals to play violent games in the lab, while others play non-violent games, then measuring the behaviour of each group in social tasks afterwards. These studies have shown that playing violent games results in immediate changes to behaviour[v]. For example, after playing violent games participants are more likely to ‘punish’ unseen opponents in a task with loud noise bursts, compared to peers who had played a non-violent video game. Young adults also show physiological desensitisation, as measured by less of an increase in heart rate and skin conductance, to scenes of real life violence[vi]. Individuals who had played violent, compared with non-violent, games were also less likely to report hearing a fight staged outside the laboratory, judged the fight as less serious, and were slower to respond when they offered help[vii]. Desensitisation to violence is thought to link violent game play with later aggressive behaviour[viii].
The effects vary across individuals
The effects of violent games don’t seem to be equal for everyone, however. Short-term effects in the laboratory are found to be larger for undergraduate men than women[xi], and younger children are more likely to be affected by violent games if they have a high score on the personality trait ‘neuroticism’ and a low score on the traits ‘agreeableness’ and ‘conscientiousness’[xii]. In terms of the game, playing with a personalised avatar has been found to result in more arousal and more aggressive behaviour than when playing with a generic character[xiii].
The bolded part is crucial to the initial point I was making about oppressive systems. Not only is there plenty of evidence that doing bad stuff in video games makes the player more likely to do bad stuff in the real-life, this is also proportionate to the extent to which they personally identify with the character that they play. That means that if we create a deeply oppressive society and allow the player to assume the role of one of the oppressors, they will start to see things through the eyes of a bloody tyrant and that is not a good thing and will ultimately result in bad stuff in the real-world.
Also gooblincookie torture is not only used as punishment, sometimes as enjoyment, sometimes to gain information. It is a highly debated topic and brushing it off with one sentece like harsher than I want punishment you are indeed misdirected with your thinking, as you showcase that you are dismissing such a delicate issue while vehemently fighting for another quite similar issue... I mean if you feel that way it's good for you.
Punishments are also handed out by cruel people with little justification for the sake of fun. You don't do what I say so I punish you, vs you don't do what I say so I torture you; it really is a matter of degree. The only point I was making is that what constitutes torture has to be defined by the civilization culturally, it is quite possible for a civ to consider the other civ's punishments to be torture, even if both civs agree torture is bad in general.
"Yes your correct racism did not exist in middle age Europe. Who cares. I want all the differant possibilities. This is DF not a historical documentary."
Exactly this. People want certain stuff in you don't like, so the middleground is people start creating united visions to actually make all people somewhat happy. In my opinion concepts such as classes and other social issues that humanity faced should be included to an extent that the simulation feels wholesome, and still playable and fun. I would have fun to free slaves from a slaver civ and then leading them to create a peaceful settlement from the ashes of their oppressors. Or imagine a woman wrestler who saves a young cheese maker in distress and they fall in love... These stories happen because of conflict, so therefore there should be levels of conflicts for these similar to the real world, unless they overcame them by ingenieuity of history gen.
I believe many people would love to play underdogs. I for one play demi-god but I heard of many who start as peasent outsider, which is a underdog story for itself.
Maybe most social classes shouldnt be portrayed so rigid more lenient than in real life though...
My only point was that the nonexistance of racism in the middle-age implies the nonexistance of racism in DF would not be unrealistic. When we have thrown out the need to add oppression for the sake of realism, the question is why add it in at all? That in turn overturns a lot of assumptions about the topic of this thread, which is governments (not violence in video games).
My general position is that civilizations that are very oppressive should be non-playable, unless you choose to play on the wrong end of the bootheel as it were, which should be very hard. If you successfully liberate a civilization, it could then become playable as a result of your actions while if you corrupt a civilization enough it should become unplayable.
All you really have to do is wander off when nobody is looking and don't get caught. If you can make it to somewhere you won't be recognized, you're basically an outsider peasant.
But now you are not really part of the civilization are you?
-Snip as I don't want to dig into that rabbit hole further-
The amount of text that needs to be written off to revive a drama that was closed in the 90' is just staggering.
There is a board for concerns about the ethics and gaming in this very forum. It's called "other games" or "general discussion". I believe the suggestion board is not the place to write an essay about feelings and concerns about how other people play their game.
Except in this case the question of ethics is very much relevant to what should be added into the game to begin with. Because the video games cause violence folks are correct, we have to pay attention to what roles we are giving the player, especially when we are encouraging him to adopt those roles by the mechanics. We know the video games cause violence folks are correct, not only because of evidence but because the consequences of them NOT being correct are one or several of the following stupid and extreme statements being true.
1. Human personalities are absolutely fixed and immutable.
2. Human personalities do not exist, all behavior is in response to the immediate environment and responses of all humans are the same given the same environment.
3. Human brains can clearly distinguish the difference between real and fictional stimulus, despite the evolutionary novelty of this distinction and the fact that they respond emotionally (and neurologically) in a similar fashion.
Only one side here has a clear reason to believe what they do. The other simply likes playing computer games and seldom bother to actually consistently apply the actual conclusions that follow from violent video games *not* making people more violent.
I'd like to stress that this isn't necessarily a problem. Dwarf fortress is a very detailed game, but it is not even remotely realistic. Furthermore, it will never be realistic, as the core premise of the game is unrealistic (i.e. Dwarves building subterranean kingdoms and fighting megabeasts, etc). At one point the most feared creature in the game was a giant sponge, for goodness sake.
Sure, we can rationalize thing like magma smelting away by arguing that they are somehow feasible in the fantasy setting, but we could do that for ANY game mechanic, including run away slaves starting their own isolated colony (or running off in adventure mode). Thus, not being realistic isn't a convincing counter-argument for me. I do understand where you are coming from though.
One way around the moral hazard of discrimination would be to make it come at a price. Say you are founding a new fort ruled by some horrible fascist regime. You're starting 7 won't be high ranking officials, they'll be ordinary dwarves looking for a new shot at life. Great. You get a few immigrants. That's great too. You're fort grows nicely and everyone is happy. Then the central government send an official to oversee your fort. Your legendary armoursmith turns out to be a secret worshipper of the Goddess Delga, so he gets put to death and your Mayor gets hammered for allowing it. Your Delga worshipping doctor suddenly disappears one day too. You're not sure what happened, but since there's no body you just assume he ran away before he got caught. You then find only the Pureblooded are allowed to perform any crafts, and lesser dwarves must clean fish and haul. And the local administrator has a nasty habit of sentencing anyone to death he likes, irrespective of how useful they are. Then the persecuted dwarves attempt an insurrection. Guess who the player is going to side with?
Is that realistic? Perhaps not. But it addresses the problem with discrimination while allowing for the mechanics tp drive narratives. And if the player doesn't want to be tlruled by racist a-holes, they can choose another civ.
Slaves running away and setting up their own outlaw settlements is very realistic. All of the slaving powers in the new-world had a problem with exactly this situation, though of course those colonies were not in DF terms really part of their civilization. I do think that if we add oppressive systems in the game then we should be prevented from playing as members of the elite in those civilizations *or* as a loyal government. Playing as the oppressed should be allowed, but the mechanics should make having an enjoyable game rather hard if you remain a part of your own civilization. An idea is to procedurally generate oppressive systems to degrees of severity dependent upon a token that defines how oppressive they are. So for instance.
[HERO_CIV] = Dwarves : Pretty much what we have at the moment, no real oppressive class divisions. Means we get to found loyal settlements and all characters are playable in adventure site.
[NEUTRAL_CIV] = Elves : No real oppressive class division, but a number of oppressive, morally dubious practices which cause certain individuals to sometimes suffer. We cannot found loyal settlements but we can play as all characters in adventure mode.
[SEMI_VILLAIN_CIV] = Human : Oppressive class divisions can exist, there are oppressive morally dubious practices that cause particularly the lower-classes to suffer. We cannot found loyal settlements and can only play as characters that do not hold political power in adventure mode.
[VILLAIN_CIV] = Goblin : Very oppressive society in all aspects that make sense for the creature and it's values. We cannot found loyal settlements and can only play as oppressed characters in adventure mode.
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Topic: Government Types (Read 31863 times)