![]() ![]() ![]() Yeah, humans have a long-running history of finding ways to turn new technologies into weapons and blasting ourselves and each other into tiny little pieces as a result. Most importantly, of course, they certainly wouldn't have dreamed of dropping such a weapon on civilian targets if they had. And nobody was stupid enough to weaponise the technology. That "atomic age" thing went off without a hitch, right? No big reactor meltdowns that irradiated huge sections of a major country. There's a lot of fear going around about the potential of "playing God", and "things man was not meant to know", and so forth, not because anything bad has actually happened in real life, but because people are used to having fiction writers and unscrupulous journalists go "scientific research is about to make scary things happen". PoczÄ…tkowo opublikowane przez Velorien:The same applies to science in general. But in this case, the story is actively working against my enjoyment, and it's all because the developers decided to give it a bad ending (in both senses) for no good reason. The better the gameplay, the more OK I am with the story being just a pretty backdrop, or only there as a framing device (after all, I'm a lover of classic roguelikes too). I'm the kind of person who plays games as much for story as for gameplay. "All right, another mission complete! I'm one step closer to having my agency betrayed and shut down by a tyrannical AI more powerful and less human than the megacorps I was fighting against!" It turns a story of plucky underdogs fighting back against evil into a grim, steady trudge towards apocalypse. On a more personal level, it makes it harder for me to enjoy future runs when I know that all of my accomplishments merely hasten my and everyone else's doom. And then you can kiss your funding for advanced AI research goodbye, for no other reason than lazy storytelling in popular fiction. So you get, for example, politicians going "hmm, what do I know about advanced AI? Only that there's a bunch of stories about it taking over the world". ![]() The problem with this is that when people don't have enough conscious referents to make sense of an issue, they tend to unconsciously draw on fictional ones instead, and there are studies supporting this. Seriously, count the number of narratives in which super-powerful AIs *don't* turn evil or harmful in some way. It also adds to the unhealthy attitude of "advanced science is dangerous" that is prevalent in our culture. The whole "apparently helpful AI decides it knows better than humans and takes over the world" trope is common, boring and uninspired. I was really disappointed with the ending. Since this thread has been raised by the dread powers of necromancy anyway, I'd like to add my two cents. ![]()
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