SMAX technology tree improvement

[Trenacker]

There’s a difference, I think, between each of the characters having a particular area of expertise and focus and providing the most insight or saying something meaningful. “Doctrine: Mobility” is most relevant for its military applications despite being a Growth technology, and yet it’s Lal who offers the quote, in which he posits that movement is actually a form of learning. This ability to do non-standard things with narrative and game design really appealed to me. It gave Alpha Centauri layers because it invited the player to draw connections. In any other game, then or now, Santiago would simply pop up on the screen to go, “Vroom, vroom, [complaints or disagreeable women; may be a verb, may indicate management of prostitutes]!”

It’s no mistake that they present Lal as cerebral and contemplative. But I think they do the same for all the characters. Doesn’t Morgan also keep a diary? If I’m not mistaken, Yang writes poetry.

The quote isn't about Lal having a fascination.  It's about Lal feeling there's a dire urgency to "save Planet", that we can die if we don't.  It's a straight paraphrasing of the deforestation and global warming threats of the 1990s.  He is deeply vested and he's gone Green.

I think global warming is a problem. Does that mean I’ve “gone Green?” (And are you sure we’re talking about Centauri Psi, which deals explicitly with mind worms, a deadly menace to every faction?)

And you know what?  He is right.  Mindworms do suck.  I'd definitely have "exterminate Planet" on the table as a game ending.

One of the new factions included in my game, The Shapers of Chiron, explicitly aim to kill Planet.

I've now figured out what's going on.  They wanted to simulate the effect of dialogue between the characters, even though they never talk to each other when voice acted.  They're exchanging op-eds or blog entries.  This is so Deirdre won't be seen as the only one who ever contemplated being a nature looney.

Possibly dialogue, yes, but engaging somebody in talks about nature, or mindworms, isn’t the same thing as traveling with them on their intellectual journey.

So no, the factions don't all do research.  The University, the Hive, the Gaians, and the Morganites do the research.

Of course all factions do research. There’s a difference between not doing something and not talking about something in leader quotes. The game itself shows us that every faction does research, some better than others.

He actually said nothing.  He's like the serious version of Yang saying nothing, "North without South, Pleasure without Pain...."

Every faction leader quote can be lampooned like that. “Buy Morganite!” “Science is so cooooool!” “I don’t care. Go ahead and die.”

Here's how you can approach a narrative.  You can either go with what they actually tell you a character did, or you can let your imagination run wild with all kinds of stuff.  Zhakarov has nothing, nada, zip, that's monstrous.  Morgan has one hospital incident, as well as some ethical challenges about what you do with Recon Rover Rick.  Yang has lots.  Santiago clones people, and also births them to the slaughter (Children's Creche).  And surprisingly for a mindworm manipulator, Deirdre doesn't have any.  That flies in the face of what the Gaians would actually be doing in combat, but we seem to be left to make our own inferences.  She's all like, pet the lovely mindworm, like it's a puppy.  Sing kumbaya with Planet.

Morgan’s ethical problems are prefaced in the faction psych profiles, where he’s presented as a corrupt war profiteer. And it requires only the mildest skeptic to perceive that a capitalist society is probably going to have its fair share of the oppressed and malcontent. Per his quotations, everything with Morgan boils down to profile and control. And Morgan’s “one hospital incident” literally involves his conclusion that the easiest way to deal with somebody who could expose controversial research is to lobotomize them.

Step back from what is explicit and think about what is implicit. Despite our very different takes on the world of AC, we both perceive that Skye has her own share of ethical challenges. By virtue of the other factions explaining how terrified they are of Mindworms, we can extrapolate that her harnessing of them as a weapon of war involved some ethical breaches.

Those people think war is an ethical train wreck.  And they're not usually rational about what level of armament actually keeps the peace.  Compare Mutual Assured Destruction.  Not that scaling back the number of nukes everyone's holding onto is a bad idea, but they do stop world wars from happening.

If you’re going to insist that we take your personal ethical compass as the guiding light, then yes. It’s the No True Scotsman fallacy. “There are people who think this is unethical.” “Yes, but their system of ethics isn’t really credible to me.”

It informs anyone's design in the real world.  Just because Brian Reynolds or whoever threw some stuff in a *.txt file in the game's installation directory, doesn't mean that material is shaping most people's knowledge and awareness of things in the game.  A few diehards will chase it down out of obsessive interest, and most people won't.

I’m not interested in what most people in the audience will do. I’m interested in what Brian Reynolds gave us to play with.

This is ludonarratively dissonant.  If you've gone democratic, you'd vote them out of office if you didn't like it.  But the game mechanics don't support democratic processes.  It supports control freak dictators, the dominant character profile of most actual 4X TBS players.  Just as most FPS players are murdering maniacs, running again into ludonarrative problems.

That’s because most games are ludonarratively dissonant. They involve allowing players to make choices about how to behave, and they very often present enough options that they can play against type.

To me, the quotations in Alpha Centauri, inasmuch as they simulate the gradual development of the factions, point to an almost parallel playthrough in which they all govern as dictators and manifest in their “played straight” forms.

Falls under the moral heading of "don't support, aid, or abet prejudiced thinking."

I don’t think the game forces you to go either way with Miriam Godwinson. I think some of the quotes intentionally rehabilitate her from a mere stereotype. Further, even though I have criticism for climate change skeptics, they do exist, and they do legitimately believe in ways I described. Acknowledging the existence of such values systems is not itself prejudicial.

Yeah it's called production reality in the publishing, film, and TV industries.  There's time lag.  Harry Potter didn't go straight to screen either.

Production times could not account for the lag in the case of ASOIAF because we’re literally talking more than a decade. You also have a huge range of media products that fit the same mould, ranging from Peaky Blinders to The Boys to Yellowstone to Breaking Bad.

There's always a dark cultural moment available.  Billy Joel's quick study: "We Didn't Start The Fire".

The 1990s and early 2000s were not that moment. Our heroes could be tortured souls, but they were generally not almost indistinguishable from the villains.

And there's the rub.  Correlation is not causality.  You are not told who performed the assassination for a reason.  It's so you can stew in your own juices, letting your imagination run wild, with whatever you personally want to make up about everything.

I didn’t lay blame for the assassination at Santiago’s doorstep, but it’s hard to argue that she didn’t hammer the last nail into the ship’s coffin. Did you read the fiction packaged with the game?

He's an inversion.  He's gonna destroy the Earth / Planet, "chewing and eating his fill".

Not destroy. As Nick Stepanovich pointed out, Morgan could as easily be tapping Planet, not destroying it. Are you “destroying” an apple when you eat it? It is a consumptive act, but is it necessarily a violent one?

No evidence that he's happy.  Only that he's greedy and wants control.

His people are lazy and over-pampered.

Yep.  "What do I care for your suffering?"  Spoke like the pure BS of a cult leader who never practices what he preaches.  Straight up Mao Tse-Tung.

Mao Tse-Tung thought he was the good guy. So did millions of Chinese.
You and I think Yang is a monster, but I’m confident Yang doesn’t see himself that way.

Nope.  Movements like the Vegan movement just want to exert a lot of control and propaganda over you.

I honestly don’t think the majority of vegans are organized into a cabal with the goal of influencing you.

Uuuh... wat?  Talk about a strawman.  Not plausible.

Of course plausible. Zakharov is all about using tools to shape his environment. Why wouldn’t he be furious over the idea that people are setting aside truths about the universe, and the useful applications that point up, because they prefer to believe that which is unempirical?

Lal isn't going to be into "religious freedom" when faced with epidemic disease.  Your rights to individual stupidity, end when the health of everyone else is at stake.  Health is seen by the United Nations as a human right.  Good grief, the amount of suffering and death at stake in the underdeveloped world... there's nothing plausible about your reinterpretation of Lal.

If you are imagining a very co-opted and corrupt U.N., that doesn't actually have any principles and only power, then you can do whatever you want.  Then Lal would be whatever got him into power.  He could have bought his way in.  Or killed the right people.  The U.N. as just a regime.

The U.N. has many facets. Even people who think of it as nothing more than a misguided, exceptionally naïve “Do-Gooders’ Society” cite problems like excessive, Kafkaesque bureaucracy; a tendency to presume moral equivalence between disputants; rank cowardice; and a tendency to place the appearance of harmony and impartiality above genuine human interests. This is the U.N. that went to Bosnia and let the Serbs massacre the Bosniaks. It is the U.N. that seats Libya on the Human Rights Council. It is the U.N. let Biafrans starve and insisted that Katangans did not know their own minds. It is possible for the U.N. to be massively misguided, but also genuinely convinced that it is doing good. I don’t think these are mustache-twirling villains, just captives of a particular worldview.

[bvanevery]

The quote isn't about Lal having a fascination.  It's about Lal feeling there's a dire urgency to "save Planet", that we can die if we don't.  It's a straight paraphrasing of the deforestation and global warming threats of the 1990s.  He is deeply vested and he's gone Green.

I think global warming is a problem. Does that mean I’ve “gone Green?”

Yep.  By American polarized political standards, most certainly.  If you don't think global warming is a problem by now, you're very likely to be a Trumpian or equivalent in your country of choice.  In the time the game was written, the polemics and polarization weren't that different either.  Same major actors opposing each other on the points.

(And are you sure we’re talking about Centauri Psi, which deals explicitly with mind worms, a deadly menace to every faction?)

As I said before, when you complete a Centauri Preserve, you get Lal's "total Greener" quote.  I also provided the quote, straight from blurbsx.txt, so I'm not sure what's being asked here.  Maybe you're just responding to comments in order, without reading the supporting evidence that follows.  There's no ambiguity in what Lal says at all.  He believes we must take urgent ecological action to save Planet, in a manner exactly identical to global warming politics of the 1990s.

So no, the factions don't all do research.  The University, the Hive, the Gaians, and the Morganites do the research.

Of course all factions do research.

That's actually game mechanically false.  You can set your LABS budget to zero, and various factions have incentives to do so.

The game itself shows us that every faction does research, some better than others.

How does it show you?  Did you watch the AI set a budget?  Did you see whether an AI faction researched something itself, or just traded for it?  Did you pay attention to the AI whose research stagnated?  "Factions don't all do research" isn't met literally, like factions never even set up so much as 1 joule of energy towards research.  It means that 4 factions are doing massively more research than the others, and the scientific contributions of the other 3 do not matter.  They are always behind.

He actually said nothing.  He's like the serious version of Yang saying nothing, "North without South, Pleasure without Pain...."

Every faction leader quote can be lampooned like that. “Buy Morganite!” “Science is so cooooool!” “I don’t care. Go ahead and die.”

How are you going to lampoon the only purpose of life being life itself?  Some quotes mean nothing, they're just communicating character and tone.  Other quotes, are saying something.  Well anyways take your best crack at lampooning "life's only purpose..." to prove me wrong by counterexample.  I think you're gonna have trouble.  Yang and Lal aren't at the same level of insight, with these 2 quotes.

And Morgan’s “one hospital incident” literally involves his conclusion that the easiest way to deal with somebody who could expose controversial research is to lobotomize them.

Nerve stapling isn't lobotomy.  The effect wears off.  In fact eventually, a drone becomes immune to it.  Nerve stapling is bad, that's why you can't do it if you have a -1 POLICE rating.

Doesn't matter anyways.  We weren't arguing about Morgan.  We were arguing about whether Zhakarov is shown to be a bad guy.  He isn't, not once, in the game.  Deforming a rat that lived, does not make him a bad guy.  Zhakarov is a dry stodgy old grump.  Who will go to war with Santiago for pursuing too much 'power' !  He's this academic liberal.  Trying to cast him as a mad scientist doing unethical stuff, doesn't actually make any damn sense at all.  If they wanted to make that character, and it's not hard to make such (just look at Yang), well they simply didn't follow through in the game's materials at all.

Most likely reason for that, is it's Yang's job and they realized they didn't need 2 Yangs.  This is like screenwriting 101, differentiating characters in a screenplay.  Whoever wrote the initial game mechanics with the diplomatic dialogue though, may not have taken screenwriting 101.

Step back from what is explicit and think about what is implicit. Despite our very different takes on the world of AC, we both perceive that Skye has her own share of ethical challenges. By virtue of the other factions explaining how terrified they are of Mindworms, we can extrapolate that her harnessing of them as a weapon of war involved some ethical breaches.

Nobody else is trying to do her mindworm cuddling job in the original game.  Although the funny thing is, we all get the Interlude if we choose to breed a mindworm in captivity.  Our first mindworm gets our first young lieutenant to go with it.  If that unit gets killed, there's the sad bit.  And then if an enemy base is captured that has some kind of relevance to the killing, I forget what, the base gets renamed in their honor.  So there's some very explicit storytelling about mindworms in captivity.  It doesn't really address the moral implications of using mindworms at all.  This is pretty much left up to you.

Those people think war is an ethical train wreck.  And they're not usually rational about what level of armament actually keeps the peace.  Compare Mutual Assured Destruction.  Not that scaling back the number of nukes everyone's holding onto is a bad idea, but they do stop world wars from happening.

If you’re going to insist that we take your personal ethical compass as the guiding light, then yes. It’s the No True Scotsman fallacy. “There are people who think this is unethical.” “Yes, but their system of ethics isn’t really credible to me.”

It's just a bigger argument than we're going to get done in this thread.  I can defend "the minimization of the loss of life" until the cows come home.

I’m not interested in what most people in the audience will do. I’m interested in what Brian Reynolds gave us to play with.

Fixating on the smallest of the small details, that weren't even put in a location where they'd be readily noticed by most of the audience, doesn't profit you for understanding the core messages of the work.

I don't think film has quite so many Easter Egg problems, typically.  Although it is possible to write a film that is obscure in meaning.  A film where you watch it and say, WTF are you on about?

An Appendix in a game manual isn't obscure, it's just badly presented.  It cannot be expected to be retained as basic material about the game.

A website isn't even part of the game.  It's extended material.

What kind of continuity assurance does the author of the game provide?  Other franchises, like say Star Trek or Star Wars, continuity and canon are big deals.  Not that they can't screw it up over the course of many seasons, episodes, and even shows, but they know they're trying to preserve continuity.  They take it seriously enough, to posit entirely different timelines to avoid interference in previous material.  Rather than just say "eh, we don't care anymore" about previous material.

Firaxis, well, not top drawer on making sure all parts of the puzzle are 'baked'.  To be expected, as they don't have Star Trek's history or production budget for working out the kinks over time.

and manifest in their “played straight” forms.

I usually don't know what you mean when you utter the phrase "played straight", because your actual usage in context, is often merely a contrast with some other way of playing the role.  I don't usually believe you when you say one approach is "straight" and another is "subverted".  I often only see you making different interpretations.

Actors, in general, would do that.  And directors, in general, would sort the actor out as far as what vision they have, what performance they're after.

Further, even though I have criticism for climate change skeptics, they do exist, and they do legitimately believe in ways I described. Acknowledging the existence of such values systems is not itself prejudicial.

Tacking it onto Miriam's religious beliefs is prejudicial.  There are no other conversations about climate change skepticism in the game at all.  Not even Morgan has anything to say on the matter.  We just know that he's going to ignore any such concern and strip mine Planet.  Miriam's 1 line description in her faction.txt is a throwaway.  So I threw it away.

If Miriam had had a lot of quote ranting about Planet, I would have kept it.  She doesn't.  She has quote ranting about cyborgs and nanorobots.

There's always a dark cultural moment available.  Billy Joel's quick study: "We Didn't Start The Fire".

The 1990s and early 2000s were not that moment.

Wat?  9/11, WTC and other buildings falling, anthrax by mail, entering Afghanistan, Iraq war, "code orange" getting on planes, then it turns out all that "yellow cake" stuff was BS....

Did you read the fiction packaged with the game?

Sure at some point.  Was totally unimpressed by Yang being some kind of jumping bug superhero type.  Didn't fit his in-game characterization at all.  Pretty much the point at which I got completely turned off and concluded this writer is very stupid, not worth listening to.  When I argue with you about the "extra game" quality of this stuff, I'm giving myself the maximum amount of rope to hang myself with.  Because I think when I finally do go back and read the material, I'm going to be completely vindicated about how we should just pretend it was bad fanfic and never happened.

He's an inversion.  He's gonna destroy the Earth / Planet, "chewing and eating his fill".

Not destroy. As Nick Stepanovich pointed out, Morgan could as easily be tapping Planet, not destroying it.

Uuuh, noooo.  I don't know who this Nick guy is, but Morgan is anti-environmental and doesn't get any points doing what he does on Planet.  Global warming happens, global flooding happens.  Mindworms come to destroy your factories.  What game did you play?

No evidence that he's happy.  Only that he's greedy and wants control.

His people are lazy and over-pampered.

We're told that, again a throwaway line in his faction.txt, but where else is it supported at all?

Mao Tse-Tung thought he was the good guy.

Your proof?  What I've read, is that Mao thought he was out for himself.  Which doesn't make his self-image that of the "good" guy, but of the important guy.  At a minimum he was a total narcissist.  This is probably a longer argument than we're going to get done here.

I honestly don’t think the majority of vegans are organized into a cabal with the goal of influencing you.

A minority of vegans have newspapers they're distributing around Asheville NC all the time.  They appear in the same kind of street boxes as apartment rental papers do.

Uuuh... wat?  Talk about a strawman.  Not plausible.

Of course plausible.

When you posit something like "suddenly people don't believe in vaccination at all, in the future" and that Zhakarov is merely reacting to this, it's your job to come up with why that circumstance is even remotely plausible.  With more than a hand wave about it being "of course" plausible.  Frankly it's pretty ridiculous.

The U.N. has many facets. Even people who think of it as nothing more than a misguided, exceptionally naïve “Do-Gooders’ Society” cite problems like excessive, Kafkaesque bureaucracy; a tendency to presume moral equivalence between disputants; rank cowardice; and a tendency to place the appearance of harmony and impartiality above genuine human interests. This is the U.N. that went to Bosnia and let the Serbs massacre the Bosniaks. It is the U.N. that seats Libya on the Human Rights Council. It is the U.N. let Biafrans starve and insisted that Katangans did not know their own minds. It is possible for the U.N. to be massively misguided, but also genuinely convinced that it is doing good. I don’t think these are mustache-twirling villains, just captives of a particular worldview.

Lal is not the U.N.  The idea that Lal is going to get elected on an anti-vaxxer, absolute religious freedom ticket, is ridiculous.  Ebola happens, the U.N. does something.  No organization has to be effective in the face of a problem.  Doesn't make Lal's moral compass blase or in denial about the realities or what's at stake.

Details Ebola Congo 2020, before COVID-19

Ebola Congo 2020, before COVID-19

[Trenacker]

You have already pointed out, bvanevery, that we are reaching impasse on various lines of this argument, so I will do a flyover that I hope condenses and focuses down our conversation so that we may continue more profitably.

I think it’s inaccurate to say that anybody who accepts the argument that climate change is a problem demanding urgent action is a Greenie on the level of Deirdre Skye. As the game illustrates so starkly, once sea levels begin to rise, Global Warming becomes everyone’s problem, even the Morganites. What distinguishes Skye and the Stepdaughters is not their acknowledgement of the reality of Global Warming, but the extent to which they propose to reorder life to address it.

I continue to believe that our differences in perspective are enlightening. You look at the game only, eschewing other material because it is not accessible. I look at that other material to help me understand what I see in the game. You take some quotations or interludes to reflect poor writing or editing more than credible character development (“throwaway” lines), while I see interpret the same discordances as depth. That’s not a dispute that has any resolution.

Generally speaking, I think the player is given the narrative tools, not just the freedom of gameplay, to take at least two roads with each of the factions and their leaders. Is Miriam enlightened like Annushka Volovodov in The Expanse, or a latter-day Hong Xiuquan? Is Zakharov a mild-mannered scientist or a Dr. Mindbender equivalent? Is Skye an eco-apologist or an eco-terrorist? Is Morgan most similar to Bill Gates or Lex Luthor? Is Santiago honoring the Spartan ethos or just a Holnist? Is Lal able to put bureaucracy and high-mindedness aside to actually do the gritty work of saving and improving lives? In Yang, do we have a philosopher- or a hermit-king? Yes, there is absolutely ludonarrative dissonance, but I think the players were expected to accept some of that as the cost for a rich tapestry, not to treat every quote or diplomatic insult as an inviolable guard rail.

Wat?  9/11, WTC and other buildings falling, anthrax by mail, entering Afghanistan, Iraq war, "code orange" getting on planes, then it turns out all that "yellow cake" stuff was BS....

The 1990’s were not that moment. There are distinctive versions of the “hero” when you compare that time period with our own, just like the music of the 1980s is qualitatively different than that of the 1990s.

Uuuh, noooo.  I don't know who this Nick guy is, but Morgan is anti-environmental and doesn't get any points doing what he does on Planet.  Global warming happens, global flooding happens.  Mindworms come to destroy your factories.  What game did you play?

Morgan isn’t putting a moral judgment out there. Earth is dead. So what? Things die. Morgan isn’t dwelling on why, or how. He thinks it’s natural. “We ate Earth. Great. We’ll go to Chiron and eat it, too. Then, when it’s dead, we will be impelled to build another spaceship so that we can go to eat another planet.” That’s a very distinctive attitude.

When you posit something like "suddenly people don't believe in vaccination at all, in the future" and that Zhakarov is merely reacting to this, it's your job to come up with why that circumstance is even remotely plausible.  With more than a hand wave about it being "of course" plausible.  Frankly it's pretty ridiculous.

Not all people. Some people. The curious case of COVID-19 in the United States is a very good (and tragic) example of how people interpret medical reality through different lenses. Zakharov would presumably look at us now and say, “Really? Are we going to let the dictates of economics or electoral politics shape our attitude toward proven interventions (masks)?”

Lal is not the U.N.  The idea that Lal is going to get elected on an anti-vaxxer, absolute religious freedom ticket, is ridiculous.  Ebola happens, the U.N. does something.  No organization has to be effective in the face of a problem.  Doesn't make Lal's moral compass blase or in denial about the realities or what's at stake.

No, the idea is that, like the U.N., Lal can (potentially) be so wedded to the idea of self-determination that the concept of good loses all meaning. By the end of the 1990s, objections to the U.N.’s failings were legion. As the “U.N.” character, Lal bears those crosses. You don’t have to play him that way, but it’s both a possibility and one of the most likely stereotypes of Lal that other faction leaders are likely to hold.

[bvanevery]

I think it’s inaccurate to say that anybody who accepts the argument that climate change is a problem demanding urgent action is a Greenie on the level of Deirdre Skye.

I don't know why you're trying to make Green the equivalent of a Planet Nazi.  Al Gore is Green, and he's clearly not a Climate Denier.  You don't have to have mindworms coming out of your ears to be Green.  Lal went Green.

As the game illustrates so starkly, once sea levels begin to rise, Global Warming becomes everyone’s problem, even the Morganites.

Details whateva lmngs

whateva lmngs

I thought I was doing them a favor.  But if they want it this way, fine!

I'm pretty sure I've had games with Morgan voting against lowering the flood waters.  I wonder if the AI tries to calculate what would hurt me the most?  The AI doesn't play like global flooding is particularly a problem.  It'll wipe a few bases, but mostly the AI factions build Pressure Domes and call it a day.  Global flooding unfortunately isn't that great a weapon against the AI factions.  It's not going to destroy them.

while I see interpret the same discordances as depth. That’s not a dispute that has any resolution.

If I expect internal support in the rest of the material, and you don't, then yes we will not see eye to eye on much of anything.  One half-baked idea doesn't necessarily fit with anything else they did.

Generally speaking, I think the player is given the narrative tools, not just the freedom of gameplay, to take at least two roads with each of the factions and their leaders.

I think it's almost impossible to make a realistic world where someone can be a complete 100% goody two shoes or a complete 100% cackling evildoer.  That said, Yang comes pretty close to the latter.  Lal is as close to goody two shoes as one could probably get, and he still is given belligerent faction diplomatic dialogue.  'Cuz, cookie cutter format.  Zingers.  Crap on your buddy.  Trash talk during the NBA game.  In fairness, they're trying to model the emotional outrage of ideologies clashing.

Anyways, this freedom you claim, does not say much.  Because, it's a somewhat realistic somewhat hard sci-fi game.  Every faction is going to do something a bit nasty to survive.  Let's say you think there were good guys in WW II.  You think cities didn't get firebombed anyways?

The AI is going to play each faction the same way every time.  That says something about narrative intent.  Sure you're the player and can choose / roleplay differently.  But that doesn't change the core characterization of the faction leaders.

Wat?  9/11, WTC and other buildings falling, anthrax by mail, entering Afghanistan, Iraq war, "code orange" getting on planes, then it turns out all that "yellow cake" stuff was BS....

The 1990’s were not that moment.

You also invoked the early 2000s and we were talking about why various franchises took a long time to become popular.  You cited some kind of special condition of stress as being necessary.  I say humanity is always under stress and it's the same old same old.  So did The Who.  "Don't Get Fooled (Again)"

Uuuh, noooo.  I don't know who this Nick guy is, but Morgan is anti-environmental and doesn't get any points doing what he does on Planet.  Global warming happens, global flooding happens.  Mindworms come to destroy your factories.  What game did you play?

Morgan isn’t putting a moral judgment out there.

Morgan gets -3 PLANET for running his favorite Free Market economics.  There's moral judgment alright, he just doesn't deliver any lines about it.  Rather, his factories mess up Planet.  Quotes aren't the only way story is delivered in this game.  When he says he's gonna "chew and eat our fill", he means he's gonna strip mine everything he wants out of Planet to live good right now.  The whole "forgotten future" thing is an inversion of the global warming "think of the children and future generations" politics of the 1990s.

Earth is dead. So what? Things die. Morgan isn’t dwelling on why, or how. He thinks it’s natural. “We ate Earth. Great. We’ll go to Chiron and eat it, too. Then, when it’s dead, we will be impelled to build another spaceship so that we can go to eat another planet.” That’s a very distinctive attitude.

Yeah it's a moral judgment that a planet doesn't have an inherent value, and neither do future generations.  I don't know how you manage to frame it as "not a moral judgment".  He's Deirdre's opposite number, he doesn't care what happens to the planet, or any planet.  He wants his coal mines etc.!

When you posit something like "suddenly people don't believe in vaccination at all, in the future" and that Zhakarov is merely reacting to this, it's your job to come up with why that circumstance is even remotely plausible.  With more than a hand wave about it being "of course" plausible.  Frankly it's pretty ridiculous.

Not all people. Some people. The curious case of COVID-19 in the United States is a very good (and tragic) example of how people interpret medical reality through different lenses. Zakharov would presumably look at us now and say, “Really? Are we going to let the dictates of economics or electoral politics shape our attitude toward proven interventions (masks)?”

Some people just end up dying.  Some people don't run Earth into the ground.  Your bitter Zhakarov only makes sense in a future where piles and piles of people succeeded in wiping out most of humanity due to disease.  And that's assuming they "didn't want vaccinations", as opposed to fighting biological wars.

No, the idea is that, like the U.N., Lal can (potentially) be so wedded to the idea of self-determination that the concept of good loses all meaning.

It's ridiculous.  Look at the photo again.  Please take pains to notice there are no white people in the picture while you're at it.  We live in an actual historical reality, with an actual U.N.  The thing Lal would get Fundamentalist about, is all the U.N. declaration of human rights stuff.

[Trenacker]

Our respective positions on whether it’s “appropriate” for Lal to comment on environmental issues probably go back to differences in the way we think about game design. I interpret Lal’s remarks as a reminder that all factions shared the planet and deal with the same set of problems. Sometimes, those problems relate to the ethics and direction of new research. Sometimes, they relate to the way the faction should interact with Planet. Sometimes, they relate to the second-order effects of industrialization, and so on.

I think we must also differ on what we think when we read or use the political label “Green.”

I'm pretty sure I've had games with Morgan voting against lowering the flood waters.  I wonder if the AI tries to calculate what would hurt me the most?  The AI doesn't play like global flooding is particularly a problem.  It'll wipe a few bases, but mostly the AI factions build Pressure Domes and call it a day.  Global flooding unfortunately isn't that great a weapon against the AI factions.  It's not going to destroy them.

The fact that the AI sometimes votes for raising or dropping sea levels may tell you more about their military designs than their perspectives on taking care of Planet (or not). The fact that everyone scrambles to build Pressure Domes, and that some cities and units get totally destroyed, is a good indicator that there are massive consequences.

If I expect internal support in the rest of the material, and you don't, then yes we will not see eye to eye on much of anything.  One half-baked idea doesn't necessarily fit with anything else they did.

This is the problem. I don’t count them as inconsistencies. You seem almost to have an implicit rule of, “I need 2 or 3 mentions of it before I admit it into my head-canon. And even then, I want sharply-cut tropes, not blurring at the margins.” That’s fine. It’s a creative difference, and therefore subjective.

The AI is going to play each faction the same way every time.  That says something about narrative intent.  Sure you're the player and can choose / roleplay differently.  But that doesn't change the core characterization of the faction leaders.

The projects I work on also demand answers to many more questions than the computer game, because a wider range of specific situations can arise. For example, what would each of the factions think about trying to make contact with Earth?

You also invoked the early 2000s and we were talking about why various franchises took a long time to become popular.  You cited some kind of special condition of stress as being necessary.  I say humanity is always under stress and it's the same old same old.  So did The Who.  "Don't Get Fooled (Again)"

It's about a particular kind of stress. The crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s created a very different expectation for policing than has the social media era of the 2010s.

Would you mind answering this simple question? If Brian Reynolds wrote Alpha Centauri today, would he use the same factions?

(I hope you find it fascinating that I saw him say, a year or two ago, on one of the AC blogs, that he left no discarded faction ideas on the cutting room floor. He began with 7, and he ended with the same 7.)

Yeah it's a moral judgment that a planet doesn't have an inherent value, and neither do future generations.  I don't know how you manage to frame it as "not a moral judgment".  He's Deirdre's opposite number, he doesn't care what happens to the planet, or any planet.  He wants his coal mines etc.!

I think we agree on the end state: Morgan is disinterested in Planet. If consuming Planet’s resources destroys it, fine. If Planet’s resources were inexhaustible, he’d be fine with that, too. Contrast Morgan’s agenda with that the custom Shapers of Chiron faction, which literally proposes to replace Planet’s biosphere with that of Planet Earth.

Some people just end up dying.  Some people don't run Earth into the ground.  Your bitter Zhakarov only makes sense in a future where piles and piles of people succeeded in wiping out most of humanity due to disease.  And that's assuming they "didn't want vaccinations", as opposed to fighting biological wars.

My bitter Zakharov makes sense in a game premised on the prior destruction of Earth from any of a dozen intersecting calamities.

My interest in delving into the faction leaders’ past experiences also has to do with the call from many players of my game in 2014 for insight and alignment around how Earth failed. They thought that information could help them create better characters.

It's ridiculous.  Look at the photo again.  Please take pains to notice there are no white people in the picture while you're at it.  We live in an actual historical reality, with an actual U.N.  The thing Lal would get Fundamentalist about, is all the U.N. declaration of human rights stuff.

Unsure what point you’re trying to make.

It almost seems that you value the U.N. as a force for consistent positive good. But John Bolton, former Ambassador to the U.N. and recently-departed U.S. National Security Adviser, would tell you that the “actual U.N.” has been hypocritical, complicit, and largely useless.

The U.N., like any organization that must balance the competing interests of entities more powerful than itself and yet which it must nevertheless restrain, often makes political decisions with grave moral implications. Look at how fraught African interventions have been. Who will pay? Which conflicts are amenable to intervention? Can enough political capital be obtained to intervene at all? How long should diplomacy be allowed to run before peacekeepers are sent in contrary to the wishes of the sovereign nations in play? Are the peacekeepers they send equally predatory or worse than local combatants? Will the peacekeepers use force only in self-defense, or can they actively intervene to protect civilians?

The U.N. faces the same problems the U.S. does today. “Can we force people to do what a scientist or technocrat thinks is genuinely in their best interest, or does respecting individual self-determination mean allowing people to decide that they don’t want to do those things, either for themselves or for others?”