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[pisskop]

What's a cannibal copse then?

The opposite of The Giving Tree

What's a cannibal copse then?

a group of cannibals?
Canniballistic trees?

Like those vines that grow roots into everything they touch?

[Naturegirl1999]

What's a cannibal copse then?

The opposite of The Giving Tree

What's a cannibal copse then?

a group of cannibals?
Canniballistic trees?

Like those vines that grow roots into everything they touch?

That’s a Dodder vine. They put roots in varying species, I’m not sure if they do it to other Dodder vines.
Cannibalism is when species eat the same species. If there’s a group of Paper Birch trees that only grows on and gets nutrients from other Paper Birch trees, those would be cannibalistic trees. Similarly if a Dodder vine grows on another Dodder vine, that would be a cannibalistic Dodder vine.

[MaxTheFox]

I saw somebody propose that gamers should be held accountable for in-game crimes such as murder and theft in "particularly realistic games, such as Dwarf Fortress". I knew that person for a while so they're not a troll. But, like, we're not even close to the level of realism, even in DF, where we could consider NPCs to be alive and in possession of rights. I, for example, use DF as an anger outlet a lot. Why should we enact nonsensical laws like that, and how would we enforce them?

[bloop_bleep]

I saw somebody propose that gamers should be held accountable for in-game crimes such as murder and theft in "particularly realistic games, such as Dwarf Fortress". I knew that person for a while so they're not a troll. But, like, we're not even close to the level of realism, even in DF, where we could consider NPCs to be alive and in possession of rights. I, for example, use DF as an anger outlet a lot. Why should we enact nonsensical laws like that, and how would we enforce them?

Yeah. That person has some major confusion. A single DF creature has about 4 KB or so of information, maybe 5 KB or so. That's not enough to store most pictures of real-life people.

[hector13]

If that law gets enacted I’ll get the death penalty, or millenia in jail.

[Yoink]

I think most everyone who has so much as picked up a gamepad would, assuming they've played anything more violent than Animal Crossing.   

[pisskop]

Thats only the first problem with the idea that people should be punished for their 'virtual' or 'thought' crimes.

Most games are designed to allow murder.  Shouldnt that be illegal, since we can stop murder if it can never happen to begin with?

[Iduno]

Is 'copse of trees' redundant?  Because I feel like it is.

No more so than a murder of crows or a streak of tigers.

What's a cannibal copse then?

Trees in A Skeletal Domain? That, or The Wretched Spawn of those trees.

I saw somebody propose that gamers should be held accountable for in-game crimes such as murder and theft in "particularly realistic games, such as Dwarf Fortress". I knew that person for a while so they're not a troll. But, like, we're not even close to the level of realism, even in DF, where we could consider NPCs to be alive and in possession of rights. I, for example, use DF as an anger outlet a lot. Why should we enact nonsensical laws like that, and how would we enforce them?

Yeah. That person has some major confusion. A single DF creature has about 4 KB or so of information, maybe 5 KB or so. That's not enough to store most pictures of real-life people.

And, as any fule kno, you need a picture to contain a human soul.

[Mathel]

I saw somebody propose that gamers should be held accountable for in-game crimes such as murder and theft in "particularly realistic games, such as Dwarf Fortress". I knew that person for a while so they're not a troll. But, like, we're not even close to the level of realism, even in DF, where we could consider NPCs to be alive and in possession of rights. I, for example, use DF as an anger outlet a lot. Why should we enact nonsensical laws like that, and how would we enforce them?

That makes no sense on several levels.
A) This is not actually enforceable. How do you police everyone playing single-player games for doing crimes?
B) In many games where there is crime as such, there is also some kind of legal authority in the game, punishing characters that commit it.
C) In games where crime is one of primary goals, why punish players that play the games, rather than the game developers that allow such crime by publishing the game?
D) Who is the harmed party? Normaly in a crime, there is a harmed party, be it a person, company or state. But say that you steal apples in ES IV: Oblivion. The harmed party is a merchant. The Hero of Kvatch could be punished for stealing from the merchant, and if he is seen he will be. But the player who controls the Hero also owns the merchant. The only way you could punish them is to give human rights to virtual characters. But then you would have to punish anyone who owns a simulation with virtual characters for slavery.

[bloop_bleep]

I was making the point that a picture of a person encodes a subset of that person's appearance, and a person's appearance is a strict subset of that person, so the fact that a DF unit cannot even store a picture of a person means that DF units are not equivalent to real beings.

[Reelya]

Really, the only way DF entities resembles real creatures is that there are labels applied to them.

Like, if you make a paper cut-out doll and cut it in half, you're just as guilty of murder as if you "kill" a creature in DF. Any connection with the real world is just labels.

For example, draw the letter 'd' on the screen and tell people "the d represents a dog". Then give the dog a single numerical value: hunger. The 'dog' now consists of three values: x, y on the screen and a 0-100 for hunger. Then, put food in a different cell, and say if "dog_hunger > 50%" then the 'dog' moves towards the food. Now, some people would say that "killing" this dog is actual murder, and that it's for-reals "cruel" to not let the "dog" reach the "food". Those people are idiots. All that actually happened was a letter 'd' didn't get to overwrite the letter 'f' on a screen. It's just the letter 'd' being moved around based on some extremely simplistic math. DF dwarves aren't different in design to what I just described, they just have more "values" in them, and a wider range of hard-coded if-then statements.

When a Dwarf becomes "unhappy" all that happens is that a linear "happiness" value drops, and a log is generated "dwarf X is unhappy because <trigger>". The reason for the unhappiness is not even coded into the dwarf's state, so how can be "unhappy" "because" that thing happened. As far as the dwarf is concerned all that happened is one of their arbitrary stats decreased. The dwarf doesn't "know" that it's their happiness stat, that's just an interpretation that's externally applied after the fact.

EDIT: What we're really talking about with real-world sanctions would be outlawing imaginary violence. If you imagine yourself killing someone, the model of the entity you're killing in your imagination is far more detailed than the model of entities in Dwarf Fortress. Your brain is a far more powerful simulation device after all. So we should ban thinking about killing or cruelty then, because by doing so we create simulations of the victims in our minds, and it's cruel to have the simulations go through that. So the crime of Dwarf Fortress would be that it allows you to create simulated beings in your own mind, which then suffer and die, so that would be banned not because of the suffering of the creatures actually "in" your PC, but because it creates simulated suffering in your own brain. And then we'd have to effectively ban anything that mentions suffering whatsoever.

EDIT2: so in effect, it makes no sense to ban DF for simulated suffering up until the point where the modeled creatures exceed the level of complexity of things you can imagine in your own actual brain. Imagine a dwarf with a big bushy beard in his workshop, he's thirsty, picks up his axe and goes to get a drink. Out in the corridor he's suddenly accosted by goblins who have over-run the fortress. "Help help, I'm being disemboweled" says the dwarf as the goblins set upon him with their nasty daggers and short swords. Now, I've created a simulation of a dying dwarf in your brain far more detailed than any DF character: there are detailed 3D entrails being ripped out, which I've just enhanced into HD definition by merely mentioning them. If 40 people read this I should get 40 life sentences. If you each read that twice, I should get 80 life sentences because you can kill dwarves over and over again by reading that again.

[Cyroth]

This reminds me of something that happened back in 1996 or so back when the first Creatures game was released.
Some people over here in Germany were arguing that the Norns are so realistic that abusing them should be punishable under german animal cruelty laws, at least.

[Naturegirl1999]

I looked up Norns and they are creatures in Norse mythology that control the fates of gods and mortals

Then I put creatures in google search and found what you were talking about. Do those same people say Mario should be illegal because much of the game is jump8ng on and killing creatures and getting them in lava?

[pisskop]

Dont go to mario

[Reelya]

This reminds me of something that happened back in 1996 or so back when the first Creatures game was released.
Some people over here in Germany were arguing that the Norns are so realistic that abusing them should be punishable under german animal cruelty laws, at least.

By that argument merely turning the game on should be punishable. For example, if you let dogs breed in your yard and throw food in for them periodically, doing nothing else for their welfare, you can't then claim it's not animal cruelty because you didn't "actively" harm the animals. If the animals in a game can suffer, and the game models their births, lives and deaths, then merely having the game running would be animal cruelty even if you ignore the animals.