I can tell the difference between fiction and reality. Do you really think I would massacre an entire town with a knife for fun like I do in DF? The fact that I am not in jail says otherwise.
Your logic about stabbing people is rather akin to,
"My grandma lived to 105, she smoked therefore smoking does not cause cancer".*You* might be able to tell the difference, but your brain on the other hand can't tell the difference, computer games are actually built upon this fact. When we kill characters in a computer game all we are *really* doing is generally something along the lines of changing
IS_ALIVE : 1 to
IS_ALIVE : 0. I rather doubt however that most people would find manually going through the database and deleting a lot of 1s to be as exciting as actually playing the game, even though actually playing the game is really just a long-winded way of doing that.
By imaging players’ brain activity before, during and after each violent encounter, the investigators found that immediately before firing a weapon, players displayed greater activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. This area involves cognitive control and planning, among other functions. While firing a weapon and shortly afterward, players showed less activity in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) and amygdala. Because interaction between these brain areas is associated with resolving emotional conflict, their decreased functioning could indicate a suppression of the emotional response to witnessing the results of taking violent action.
When engaging in virtual combat the brain deactivates certain pathways related to *not fighting* in the real-world. Why would it do this if it knows that it is really just rearranging data in the computer memory?
The basic issue here is that the brain learns from experience and does so unconsciously, so whether the player consciously knows the game isn't real will not necessarily matter. It would be truly odd, given that the brain does not appear to know the difference between computer games and reality, for the brain not to develop according to the games you play, if I play as a bloody tyrant then the brain genuinely thinks I am a bloody tyrant and learns accordingly, that is it learns how to be a bloody tyrant if we assume the role of such a being; that is the problem with adding oppressive systems into DF.
The key issue here is methodology. To fail to determine a link between two things does not imply that there is no link, it can simply imply your methodology is incorrect to detect the link and that can be itself based upon the fact that your hypothesis as to how the two things are connected is incorrect, the two things can be connected but you did not understand how the two things actually work in order to figure out precisely how the connection would happen.
It is very difficult to make a test that would establish a direct relation between violence in video games and in real-life (not to mention unethical). The main thing our proposed unethical test has to contend with is the
Fundermental Attribution Error, video games might make people more violent but violence does not result solely from violent people. If we have our test subjects play GTA all day long and our controls play Tetris all day long and at the end of the day they all sit down to a mug of coffee with not a care in the world out study will likely fail to produce a positive result, regardless of what is actually going on. That is because the environment is sufficiently peaceful that both the test subjects and the controls will not behave violently, even if the test subjects are actually more violent people as a result of all that GTA.
In order to end up with actual violence we need a provocation. Here we run up against another problem, if the provocation is too harsh both groups might universally end up becoming violent while if the provocation is too mild both groups might end up simply laughing it off. Another issue is that of timescale, it may be that the brain is highly resistant to learning *certain things* for a good reason, that means that a single day of playing GTA might have no effect because the brain dismisses the experience as anomalous and essentially refuses to learn anything. If you were to play it for 10 years every day however, then the brain may well assimilate the game into itself, but a short-term study would pick up nothing.
The link that Cathar gave me in his characteristic *throw down the book and leave* gesture did provide me with an example of what I was describing earlier about the exact hypothesis as to how they are connected being important as the connection itself. It gave me an example of a study that fails to prove a link but whose methodology is flawed; unfortunately it has just paywalled me out since I read it yesterday
. The study attempted to improve upon the methodology of previous studies (the sound one's that showed a link) by creating two versions of the same game in order to eliminate possible other factors. They reskinned the same game so that for instance one game has people being killed while the other one has people falling down in a fit of laughter.
The whole methodology rather than being improved is completely ruined, unless we operate under the hypothesis that it is aesthetic violence (blood and gore) that is the important factor. If we work on the hypothesis that the connection is mechanical rather than aesthetic, the brain does not care if 'winning' means incapacitating the enemy with laughter or blowing them up into tiny pieces, the fact there is still mechanically a struggle and coercion means the brain reacts identically.
In any case, this has gone on long enough. I am not going to persuade the whole forum so let's end our no longer so little derail into video game violence and scientific methods. Yes it is related to the topic of social class/oppression but there are plenty of things to talk about that do not require those things to be discussed.The very idea that kings could make mendates that would be superimposed to the mendates of the mayor and local noble is extremely appealing. The liaison would give the mendate to the player in autumn, and leave him with one year to do a (substential ?) goal. Craft X amount of boots, or conquer Y territory, maintain an army of Z ammount of soldiers, depending on the monarch's personality and the state of the kingdom.
That system could be in return be used by the players to give orders to his own holdings, increasing the interconectivity between the fort and the world
I'm not too fond of the laws specifically, as I would prefer that the monarch leave this kind of decision to the local power
"I would prefer" is actually an issue. Why we continue to play only as the local government of some specific place there any centralisation (even basic things like the central gov passing laws) is going to reliably be antagonistic to the player. It is only when we have starting scenarios like palaces and the ability of the adventurer to meaningfully assume central government roles is the player actually going to support centralisation. Then again the Laws/Property/Status release is I think supposed to happen after starting scenarios and one of the starting scenarios is the royal palace.
I believe that the governments should be based on the culture. So, a culture that values tradition may tend towards a monarchy. With different cultural values, you get different governments. The government itself and culture can drift in ideology and values, say if a scholar named Urist Marks writes about the economy and the importance of people to band together, his writings may get twisted enough and influence enough people that it changes the culture enough to lead to an insurrection.
I envision governments growing decandant and unstable, and may slowly drift towards centralization. All of which could add some more spice to world gen.
I don't think they should always be different governments as such, but rather they should determine how powerful different functions of government and different levels of government are. The value of
[POWER] would tend to favour the dictatorial tendencies, giving and entrusting more power to position holders to act unilaterally. The value of
[LOYALTY] would tend to favour centralisation, with more decisions being made by the central government of the civ. The value of
[LAW] would tend to favour a more powerful legal system, so more decisions are outside of the hands of both the local and central government alike.
In these three cases we are not really talking about different governments but rather the balance of power between different elements of a consistent government layout with three key elements (local, central and legal).
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Topic: Government Types (Read 31897 times)