site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2256 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 22, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Video game thread.

Got sucked into a week-long Space Haven rabbit hole - a spaceship survival / colony sim game that had been in early access forever and is now out. I'm sure there are dozens like it. You start with 3-4 crew, build a ship, try not to die .. profit? Comes with a moderate depth of systems + some "The Sims" elements, like the crew forming friendships/relationships, and having personality traits. e.g. one of mine has "antisocial", which gives a passive -5 mood condition "did something I dislike" every time another crew member tries to socialize with her, which is often on a tiny cramped ship, especially when another has the "comedian" background and "charming" trait.

Anyway, turns out surviving in space is really hard: too much work to be done, not enough hands to do it. My tiny crew of 3 was living hand to mouth with almost no time to do anything beyond basic needs. After a month of this, the shiny "enslavement facility" upgrade in the tech tree was looking real tempting. Fine. I guess we're slavers now.

Using the element of surprise, we picked a neutral faction, the galactic military, bribed them with the last of our money and nearly the last of our fuel until they were friendly enough to let us board their prison ship. The initial plan was to steal some prisoners, but it turns out you can use drugs on allied NPCs without turning them hostile. Probably an oversight. We come back with a load of sedatives, drug all the guards, pick them up one by one, and shuttle them back to our ship, locking each in a separate room to be dealt with later so that we can deal with each 3v1 when they wake up.

Once we've abducted as many as we can fit, we spool up the hyperdrives and jump systems. The game informs me this is "kidnapping" and will turn the military hostile. No problem. Expected. I locked them all in separate rooms for that reason. Unexpected: for some reason jumping systems resets everything, meaning the guards all wake up and, crucially, the doors on the ship all unlock, letting them group up. What follows is a chaotic and destructive ~30v3 fighting retreat which leaves our injured crew locked (manually) on the bridge, and 23 surviving angry guards on the other side of the door. To solve this problem, we open the airlock vents, causing a massive amount of damage to the interior of the ship, but dropping O2 low enough that the guards pass out. We quickly close the airlocks, don spacesuits, take the guards prisoner and put the slave collars on.

That's the start of our problems. We now have 23 nearly-dead slaves, no money, little fuel, on a ship with most of its critical systems broken. We need to, in rough order of priority: repair/build more oxygen generators to support that many people, find a source of energy cells (each slave collar runs on a specific type of battery that needs to be crafted with electronics + power), heal the slaves and make sure they rest enough so that they don't die, expand the ship and get a farming operation running so that we don't run out of food given the expanded headcount, and source raw materials to support all that - this, in an already very resource-starved survival game, and having just made enemies of a major well-armed faction.

The adventures that follow are pure emergent gameplay, riding the tiger of our slave enterprise, evading the space cops, and trying to turn enough of a profit to keep it all together. Would recommend if you have time to burn and like this sort of thing.

I've been playing Windrose. It's a pirate game. It's closer to a survival game like Conan exiles than it is to other pirate games like Black Flag.

The good

  • The base building in the game has a well working quick build mode. Usually I find it a chore to build bases in survival games but this turned it into enjoyable again.
  • Combat against same level enemies feels good. There is an element of danger and some amount of basic tactics you need to adhere to or you will get wrecked.
  • Sailing on the seas feels cool, the waves are big as hell out in the ocean. Its not a flat expanse of water. The waves add a challenge to the naval combat, where if you don't aim well your shot will hit the wave blocking enemy ships or pass over them as they ride a dip into the waves.
  • Story has a pirates of the Caribbean vibe going. With some weird magic creating the undead.

The bad

  • The combat is entirely gated by your character and gear level. You can fight maybe one or two levels up, but more is usually a slow suicide fighting a few levels down is just easy. This applies to ground combat and ship combat.
  • The map is totally blank until it is explored. And finding all the tiny islands is annoying.
  • The combat system works much better on open land. On ship boarding actions you can get screwed over randomly. The safe/optimal strategy is to take pot shots at the enemy from your own ship and let your own boarders slowly whittle them down. But that strategy is boring and takes a while.
  • The fast travel system has artificial limitations. Limited number of locations you can setup and a limit on where you can place them.

Do you have to tack to sail into the wind?

No, all the sailing is fake

ugh. I want to check it out, but it looks like it suffers from terminal camera-off-to-the-leftism

Never heard of that term, but the camera has been fine in my experience. Camera control via the mouse. Movement with WASD

trend in modern gaming to do a 3rd-person PoV with the camera offset to one side so the player has the center of the screen open in an attempt to be a hybrid of 3rd person (advantage for melee action, jumping, and narcissistic obsession with seeing what your character looks like during every second of gameplay) and 1st person (advantage for precision shooting, crafting placement, seeing stuff that is not your character).

It achieves this by sacrificing symmetry in a way that my OCD can't handle. It feels so wrong to be moving something on the left or right third of the screen. What if something comes at you from the left? You're missing that part of your peripheral vision! You're left-sided. Everything is off balance. It's not right, I say! Worst offender and probable source of the trend: Fortnite

If a game wants to have both, that's fine, but it should do it by allowing swapping between centered 3rd person and centered 1st person POV camera like the old Jedi Knight games did.

Never bothered me, but ya this game does have that kind of camera. Except when steering the ship. The forward mast thingy gets in the way.

Getting snuck up on isn't a thing. There is an on screen indicator when you have an enemy's attention. And the camera is zoomed out enough in melee that you always have enough reaction time between enemy on screen and enemy attacking.

Stealth on your part is also not a thing. Which is probably consider 'good' but I guess that's a more controversial opinion than some of my other "good" items.

It's not right, I say! Worst offender and probable source of the trend: Fortnite

My guess is that Gears of War was really the source of the trend. I recall it was a major splash back in ye olde Xbox 360 dayes as an exclusive (by Epic, the same devs as Fortnite, no less) that really showed off its power as well as the online functionality. Up to that point, I think almost every popular online shooter was first person (Halo, Quake, Epic's own Unreal Tournament), and Gears of War really stood out, and its success resulted in a spate of games coming out right after that aped its over-the-shoulder camera style.

I remember it from Mass Effect

The first story mission has one big Babylon 5 reference, your fighter is basically a Starfury, and the entire art-style reminds of me of old-school X-Com. 10/10 game, will continue playing. I just wish that you could shift perspective in the overhead view and trying to design any starship that isn't a giant flying brick is an exercise in creativity and tetris-style arrangement.

In that theme, I'm honestly surprised you wasted the time going for slave collars and didn't work toward blitzing into Robots. If anything, that's one gripe I have about the game - to really get everything up and running, you need a minimal crew of around 8 to 10 crewmembers to manage a single ship, and 4 of those are going to be dedicated toward scavenging derelicts. Granted, if you go robotic, you then run into the issue of keeping them supplied with power. So...

I mentioned X-Com earlier, and if there's any complaint I can make, it's that they didn't go all-in on the combat side of things and make it even more like X-Com, as being able to sling around det-packs at enemies and setting everything on fire would make for far more engaging combat.

As I discovered, you also can't count on the in-game AI being sessile, either. It's quite the experience to be prepping to explore a derilict, only to have another ship jump in and promptly head over to steal your prize. Granted, this CAN backfire...

I'm not sure where the mod scene with this game is going to go, but if it takes off akin to Rimworld, there's a monstrous amount of stuff we'll probably end up seeing.

I love Babylon 5. Incredible show.

I went for slaves over robots because they can do farming/industry/mining. The bots are useful for specific, narrow tasks. It's worth having some salvage bots to scrap derelicts and do simple logistics. The combat bots are hilariously overpowered killing machines, and I think optimal combat strategy might be to have a full ship of them, just point the army at what you want to die, and don't even send any crew.

Truthfully, I found slaves to probably not be worth it when factoring in the food and energy costs (demands ongoing resource intake), and I should have put a bullet in most of my captives and cut losses, but at that point, running a successful slave operation was kind of its own goal, and after sacrificing everything to get those slaves in the first place, it felt right.

for sure, the combat is a bit shallow at the moment, and I'm very interested to see where modding takes it.

I tried out Forza Horizon 6. It's sorta impressive graphically, and sorta isn't. The water in particular does not hold up to whatever you might expect from "Extreme + RT" settings in 2026.

Despite being set in Japan, there's no real exoticism. The franchise is as bland and globalized-homogenized as almost anything could be. I like the idea of driving around Japan, but it's hard to get a moment's respite from the shitty vanilla layer that covers everything. It's very very "safe". I suspect it's made for the sort of teenager who needs her parents' approval of the game to get them to buy it for her. The whole "Horizon Festival" gimmick bores the shit out of me. The characters, if you can call them that, all suck so far. I wish I could just drive around Japan and race without these characters and gimmicks chiming in constantly.

Then I returned to Slay the Spire 2. I've beaten Ascension 2 and Ascension 1 a few times over the last few days with various characters. I'm still not very good at the game (it's very much knowledge based) but I'm winning half of my runs now. When I started out I needed like 40 runs just to get my first win.

Forza fans have been begging for Japan for years now. The new game looks somewhat interesting, but I'm particularly annoyed by how they made Japanese roads to American highway standards. They're way too wide, and I think newer racing games strongly underweight how having at least some narrow track adds to a visceral sense of speed. Last Forza game I genuinely enjoyed was 3, 4 annoyed me because I couldn't run over the sheep, and 5 was just a new coat of paint.

To be fair, so is 6. It's the Place Japan meme incarnate, but the series has clearly settled into a rhythm, and one that's appealing to many. I can tell you the series absolutely murdered NFS, which was my childhood. I would have absolutely loved a simcade alternative at the time, now I don't particularly care.

The location names seem to have been americanized too. All the homogenization makes me wonder what's the point in using different settings. It defeats the purpose. Yeah, you have Mount Fuji in the background (and Japanese space rockets and fighter jets flying overhead just when you reach a finish line; because player = center of universe!!), but these are just some decorations compared to everything that's very very similar the to other settings.

They're way too wide

I might just suck at the game; I seem to find them a bit narrower than 5's. Then again, 5's set in the fictional Dei region of Mexico, and them not being able to afford paint, or more than 3 roads and one mountain, is realistic I guess. You can't run over the cows in 6 either, which is unfortunate; gone are the days of secret minigames in benchmarking programs where you could shoot down flying cows with a missile launcher mounted on the back of your monster truck (which, annoyingly, I can't find any good footage of, though you can see the aftermath of it here).

NFS Heat was very good but I haven't heard much out of them lately (I know they made a new game but I also know nothing about it). Hey, at least the AI cheats as hard as it did in those games, so you too can experience the classics, like picking a 3000 HP drag car and losing to a Beat.
Which was funny, but come on.

I'm about 8 hours into Detroit: Become Human, a sort of choose-your-own-adventure game from 2018 about near-future Detroit where AI-based androids have become normalized in society, leading to mass unemployment and such. I have been shocked (though I shouldn't have been*) by just how bad the writing and world-building are, given the generally positive reception it got.

There was basically no attempt at thinking through the implications of how a world where near-human-indistinguishable androids are common would work. E.g. one of the 3 player characters is a detective android, who creates resentment among the human detectives for taking their jobs, instead of using them as force multipliers to solve/prevent more crimes. There's also no signs of android police being deployed en masse as street-level police thanks to their greater speed, strength, accuracy, and expendability. Other issues include things like each android model being built with the same face and specialty for that model, when, with computers, it should be easy to mix-and-match (assuming each specialty requires so much data that the android only has enough data storage space for a single specialty). They also lack any sort of "black box" and must be interrogated as witnesses, and their memory is gone when they "die."

Plot points strike me as nonsensical as well, including the use of a local TV station to announce a revolution well before anyone has even conquered a single block, much less the entirety of Detroit, and even less the entire United States and the world, or a human androids-owner just standing there and yelling at them while they rebel and tear him limb from limb. There's also a clear attempt throughout the game to depict the androids as a sort of "second class citizen human," but no effort was made to depict the androids as capable of having qualia, and so the whole thing just feels like playing make-believe with dolls. This came out 2 years after the TV show Westworld at least made a valiant effort at depicting androids as having qualities deserving of empathy, and this game didn't even go that far.

I'd give it a solid 2/10 so far. Solid, because the graphics, level design, and voice acting are quite good, the former especially for a game that's old enough to be in 3rd grade. I'd be curious how a modern remake, using modern AI tech as the guide for how future androids will make decisions, would look. It may be one of the last major AI-focused fictional media before the recent beginning of the age of AI in 2022.

* I shouldn't have been surprised, because the only other Quantic Dream game I played was also awful in terms of writing. This was Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit, a sort of urban fantasy mystery game that had an absolute banger opening scene (your player character, in a trance, murders a man in a diner bathroom, and then awakens to give you control to figure out how to get out of there without alerting the cop eating at the diner) followed by a good first 1/3, a mediocre middle 1/3, and god-awful final 1/3.

David Cage is a hack. Twenty years after his first interactive fiction/CYOA thing, his writing skills don't appear to have improved one iota.

I played it shortly after launch. I think I only played the first third, which was boring enough to make me expect it could only go downhill from there.

I was also surprised by the mostly positive feedback the game received from players. The main sticking point for me was something you bring up: Why the f should we assume that these robots have a subjective human-like experience of being alive? This is supposed to be taken for granted in the game, but the qualia is never even attempted to be established. They look almost human - so they must be human inside their digital cpus? Really?

We play the game from their perspective. This is literally the necessary and sufficient condition to establish qualia, I think.

We play the game from their perspective. This is literally the necessary and sufficient condition to establish qualia, I think.

This is a bizarre perspective. That the medium in which a work of fiction is presented actually influences the facts about the fictional world is something I've never encountered and something that seems completely wrong. Controlling a video game character (or "character" or "object,") established that the person dictating the actions of the character has qualia, not that the character within the world does.

Even if we were to posit that it did work that way, this doesn't get around the problem that the game is filled with NPC androids who are treated by the game as if they have qualia. NPCs, obviously by definition, have no human controlling them, and so they fail to meet this sufficent and necessary criterion for having qualia. Thus, it would make no sense for the game to present them as having them, and likewise for the in-universe characters to do so. Likewise, NPC humans - the fleshy kind - lack a human controlling them, and thus they fail to meet this criterion. Yet the game presents them as having qualia deserving of empathy, and in-universe characters treat them as if they do.

I don't think this is a good criterion for this particular thing.

I mean, I don't know of any way to hard-prove consciousness other than experiencing it. That's the problem. We assume other people have it either because of religious dogma or by induction from each of us having it and other humans looking similar enough to us. This can extend to the NPC androids.

I don't think humans looking similar to ourselves is why we believe they have qualia. For instance, I don't believe that a wax statue has qualia, nor do I believe that a cardboard cutout of Harry Potter has qualia. I think there's something about the actual physical (biological) similarity to ourselves, not merely the appearance, that make us believe that other humans have qualia. Whether or not androids are sufficiently similar to us to justify such a belief is an interesting question that has been talked about in scifi at least since Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick, and I'd guess even earlier, and the only thing we know so far is that no one knows the correct answer.

You haven't explained the actual sufficient and necessary criterion you outlined, though. Could you explain the reasoning for why "being controlled by the player" makes sense as the one single criterion for a fictional character having qualia within their fictional universe? Would you say that, any game like a Walking Dead or Mass Effect where the in-universe characters and sometimes the game tone itself presents life-or-death decisions about NPCs as important is making no sense, since these NPCs definitionally have no human controller and thus no qualia to lose?

When I was talking about appearance I was implying also the biological similarity.

Within the fictional universe, no one but any given android can know for sure that this android has qualia. Just how a human can only know that about themselves. If you're wondering why others in-universe believe an android has qualia, I believe "anthropomorphization" is sufficient as an explanation. Some people think ChatGPT has qualia in real life. And it's not like everyone in-universe believes it, either - have you missed the entire status quo that assumes androids aren't people?

As for why the player should believe an android has qualia, that's what my argument is for. We see through its eyes and witness it breaking through its programming. That's the most evidence we could possibly get. If it's not sufficient for you, nothing is.

If you're wondering why others in-universe believe an android has qualia, I believe "anthropomorphization" is sufficient as an explanation.

I'm not wondering why this, because I do find "anthropomorphization" sufficient. It's a separate criticism I have of the game, that this explanation isn't properly told or explored. It's a very minor criticism, though, since it can largely be just accepted as part of the premise. Though this, too, I thought was poorly done in terms of world building and making believable types of people in terms of their reactions to androids that appear nigh indistinguishable from humans even in behavior.

As for why the player should believe an android has qualia, that's what my argument is for. We see through its eyes and witness it breaking through its programming. That's the most evidence we could possibly get. If it's not sufficient for you, nothing is.

I'm wondering why the player should believe that all androids have qualia. I don't see how seeing through something's eyes and having it break through the programming is such definitive evidence of the in-universe android having qualia. Seeing through something's eyes merely tells us something about where the virtual camera is. The virtual camera is not actually something that's part of the world and reflects artistic decisions rather than some underlying reality about the world. Though it certainly can indicate that the director wants us to feel that we're experiencing the same things as some conscious being within the world.

Breaking through its programming is actually evidence, though that in itself isn't sufficient, as the discussions about modern AI show. It at least shows some level of free will and agency, and notably this is one major thing that Westworld leaned on to make its valiant effort to make the case that these androids have qualia. It wasn't good enough, because, as you've stated before, nothing is or could be (the problem of solipsism, perhaps). But the effort still counted for something enough to make the idea that these androids had qualia somewhat understandable. And even then, Westworld was reserved enough not to push into our faces sob stories about raped/tortured androids as if it expected us to automatically believe there was something to sympathize with (at least until season 2, which was largely a dumpster fire).

D:BH made no such effort, and it has been not at all reserved. It could have explored how the Deviants' behaviors could indicate a sort of qualia and presented a sort of believable version of events where every android was conscious but only Deviants had free will, or if normal androids lacked consciousness but Deviants gained it through some mysterious process. Or it could have gone full Star Wars and just made androids being conscious as just a premise of the story. But it didn't do any of these things (at least in my first 8 hours, which is enough), and the storytelling just appears as if the presence of Deviants is, in itself, enough to just convince the player that androids are all in a (ironically enough) I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream situation.

As for why the player should believe an android has qualia, that's what my argument is for. We see through its eyes and witness it breaking through its programming. That's the most evidence we could possibly get. If it's not sufficient for you, nothing is.

Well, not really. Not anymore than how R2D2 in Star Wars acting idiosyncratically and agentically makes all the robots in that universe have qualia.

More comments

Why the f should we assume that these robots have a subjective human-like experience of being alive? This is supposed to be taken for granted in the game, but the qualia is never even attempted to be established. They look almost human - so they must be human inside their digital cpus? Really?

My half-baked hypothesis is that some writers just don't have empathy for other humans or consider them as conscious beings that have inner experience similar to themselves; they only behave like they do because that's the "rules of society." As such, they think that, if they set up a new fictional world where androids appear as humans, then the same "rules of society" must apply to them also.

This almost sounds like old school Oregon Trail, but in space. I love classic adventurism in video games but it seems like they’ve just gotten so damn complex these days, and Alpha Centauri was complicated enough decades ago. In a way your initial description also somewhat reminded me of the movie Pitch Black (which is one of my favorite movies). Perhaps I’ll take a look.

I've had Space Haven on my wishlist for a while, since I almost never get Early Access games. Now that it's out I'll have to try it out sometime.

I've been playing a couple games on and off, most notably I've stuck with Lobotomy Corporation. I've warmed up to it a bit since my frustration last week. It helps that I have a much better idea of the mechanics and strategies after looking up some mostly non-spoilery guides. Importantly, after you complete enough tasks and finish the requirements to complete a day, you can still keep doing stuff to grind out your people's stats. Early on I had dismissed this as a gimmick/exploit, but it turns out that this is super important and necessary if you want to avoid being under-leveled long term, as the game's difficulty ramps up much faster than you will if you're just filling the quota. After resetting my run and doing a whole bunch of grinding on early levels I'm in much better shape. And for the most part it avoids being an exploit because as the day goes on the crises that occur become worse, and also you risk wasting more of your time if some stupid RNG kills your fancy people and forces you to restart.

I'm still kind of annoyed at the volatility. Having your people level long term seems to require that you have 0 or almost 0 deaths each day so you aren't constantly replacing them with low level noobs. And the game doesn't warn you if someone is about to die, only after they're already dead. So I can be like 5 minutes into a day then whoops, you made one mistake or just had bad rng and one of your guys is dead, guess you're restarting the level! And then 6 minutes into trying again it happens again and you have to restart again. There's a certain type of crisis that happens which randomly rolls one of several boss monsters to face, and one of them just insta-kills all of your people who are sitting in their home base. You know when that crisis level is going to occur ahead of time, but not which boss, so prior to it occurring you have to select and move all of your people out of each base, just in case that boss gets rolled. It's annoying and tedious, and was super annoying when it killed me several times before I knew that was a thing you had to do AND had to do prior to it even showing up since there's not enough time to react once it triggers.

But it's fine. I like the core gameplay loop of sending the right people to do the right tasks, and without nasty threats the game wouldn't have a challenge. I just kind of wish it was more strategic maneuvering and resource managing type of threats rather than gimmicky insta-kill type things that force you to restart with no warning.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats