Shadowrun Shadowrun Returns - Dead Man's Switch Original Campaign

[Heroic Liberator]

dragonfall was a game about saving a dragon from poachers

A dindu hippie dragon no less.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

funniest part of this discussion is that odds are, if you play dragonfall now, you'll never get to see the ending. The fight with the AI is completely fucked.
the only ending you get is the AI one

 

[Roguey]

And yet that's the whole point. If Roy gave a shit about his own fame he'd have given any indication of it at any point in the movie. Which he did not. He could have thrown emperor roboto from the window. He could have written Roy was here. He could have acted like a terrorist. Instead he's just a bad guy going around comitting crimes so that maybe he'll get to live forever. He's lashing out at this engineered condition. Survival is his motivation, not fame.

"Fame" and "being remembered" aren't synonymous. He's a short-sighted sociopath with no capability for long-term planning. When he's on the roof with Deckard, he realizes his time is up and then gives that speech about how all the cool things he's seen will be forgotten, coming to the conclusion that he doesn't want that for himself.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Delterius is an innocent lad, seeing the good in everything.

 

[hivemind]

shadowrun is the most retarded setting in existence, not even the premise - the execution is garbage

hong kong is fun tho

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Cyberpunk + full on fantasy with Tolkienesque races is just corny tbh.

 

[Delterius]

To be honest I don't see either hypothesis clearly. If the replicant was driven by narcissism he would have shown it before. If he was acting with empathy, he would have said so. The only thing that last scene gave me is the sense that replicants can feel sadness. Roy is sad, about to die, and no longer sees a point in anything but pontificating about his end. There is no greater meaning to any of this because the future humanity created has no room for that sort of thing. The real joke isn't the inhumanity of the dystopia. It's Jeff Bezos telling William Shatner to shut the fuck up about all his boomer esque greater meanings about the beauty of space.

Who the fuck creates an army of robots that can't simulate empathy. The cyberpunk future should learn from my Stellaris campaigns.

 

[Lacrymas]

And slave owners just wanted slaves to work and not run away.

It's unsavory, but building a sentient creature out of parts and expecting it to work for you is a bit different than buying a human being and expecting it to work for you.

Replicants are sociopaths according to the people tasked to hunt them down for escaping their slavery.

They're sociopaths according to a test that humans pass and all replicants fail, even Rachel who took a lot longer to fail it.

The authorities intentionally dehumanise them in order to justify killing them without trial.

Well, yeah, they're not humans. They're made out of organically-grown parts and assembled as fully-adult beings and live for only four years.

RE: Voight-Kampff test - even if we uncritically assume that it is 100% accurate and no human can ever fail it (which is not true, put a pin on it), its only function is to determine whether a person is a replicant or not. Humans, specifically authorities, claim that makes them sociopathic and so unworthy of respect and life. Blade Runner actually casually suggests the question of whether a human can fail this test and be killed as a result. Which, to me, is a very possible situation. This test is made by a specific group of humans who ingrain certain cultural notions and references into the test, there is the risk that not all humans can get these cultural references and be able to react "appropriately". Corporations like Tyrell control the bounds of culture and as such they shape the attitudes of the public to some extent. It's not a stretch to assume they deliberately created and shaped the test as a tool to justify slavery for profit. There are countless examples of pro-slavery "science" and philosophy that does the exact same thing.

RE: Are replicants human? - If it looks like a duck, it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... Why exactly do you think they aren't human or aren't worthy of the same treatment as a human? There are many possible answers to the question of whether they are human and why, that's why it's easier to ask this first.

To be honest I don't see either hypothesis clearly. If the replicant was driven by narcissism he would have shown it before. If he was acting with empathy, he would have said so. The only thing that last scene gave me is the sense that replicants can feel sadness. Roy is sad, about to die, and no longer sees a point in anything but pontificating about his end. There is no greater meaning to any of this because the future humanity created has no room for that sort of thing. The real joke isn't the inhumanity of the dystopia. It's Jeff Bezos telling William Shatner to shut the fuck up about all his boomer esque greater meanings about the beauty of space.

Who the fuck creates an army of robots that can't simulate empathy. The cyberpunk future should learn from my Stellaris campaigns.

You uncritically assume they are incapable of empathy, which is not what Blade Runner or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? allude to.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

RE: Are replicants human? - If it looks like a duck, it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... Why exactly do you think they aren't human or aren't worthy of the same treatment as a human?

Because...

 

[Nicebrain]

So is the game (dead man's switch) working now?
I have some really bad memories of corrupted save games and constant crashes when they added the new save system way back.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

I'd just skip over it and go straight for DF, then onto HK and only then go for DMS if you want more regardless of quality, Nicebrain.

 

[Delterius]

You uncritically assume they are incapable of empathy, which is not what Blade Runner or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? allude to.

you know i'm mostly working from memory here and i watched bladerunner years ago. how often do they make that case? is it really just the ending?

 

[Nicebrain]

I'd just skip over it and go straight for DF, then onto HK and only then go for DMS if you want more regardless of quality, Nicebrain.

Yeah, but the first one is the one "that got away", due to not being playable at all...

 

[Ninjerk]

You uncritically assume they are incapable of empathy, which is not what Blade Runner or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? allude to.

you know i'm mostly working from memory here and i watched bladerunner years ago. how often do they make that case? is it really just the ending?

Off the top of my head, the first guy Deckard kills (IIRC) asks him if he knows what it's like to live in fear (attempt to solicit empathy, at least). I haven't read Androids in almost 20 years.

 

[Roguey]

RE: Are replicants human? - If it looks like a duck, it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... Why exactly do you think they aren't human or aren't worthy of the same treatment as a human?

They're sentient beings, but they're not human. Replicants are "born" with adult bodies, have four year lifespans, and can be engineered with strength and intelligence greater than any human possibly can.

 

[Delterius]

Replicants are "born" with adult bodies, have four year lifespans, and can be engineered with strength and intelligence greater than any human possibly can.

Having a low lifespan is not really a disqualifier for humanity. Being 'born' as an adult is strange but wouldn't mark someone as anything other than an adult human. And being that stronger makes them threatening, but not inhuman. A human foetus who's genetically treated to be stronger than anybody else is still human. In what way the replicants can be considered outright inhuman however - namely their lack of empathy - seems to be engineered as such. Now I could simply say that everyone in the world of Bladerunner is a shortsighted idiot or, which I consider more likely, replicants were engineered to be as inhuman as possible lest someone starts asking ethical questions about the whole thing.

 

[Lacrymas]

RE: Are replicants human? - If it looks like a duck, it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... Why exactly do you think they aren't human or aren't worthy of the same treatment as a human?

Because...

But that circles back and gives us a variant of the same question - what is consciousness? How can you prove the replicants don't have this?

you know i'm mostly working from memory here and i watched bladerunner years ago. how often do they make that case? is it really just the ending?

First, we must ask ourselves what would "having empathy" mean in this case. They empathize with one another and help each other out escape their shared misery, but would that "count" as empathy? You can easily say they are narcissistic and doing it out of necessity. Is Roy saving Deckard a show of empathy? Roguey already presupposed their lack of one and found another plausible explanation. Would the allusion to Christ (the ultimate empath) with the stigmata count? So how do you actually meaningfully differentiate between genuine empathy and a number of other things? The Voight-Kampff test is perhaps designed to do that, but its efficacy is propaganda and how you interpret the results it gives is up to the people in power at worst and subjective human experience at best.

 

[Lacrymas]

They're sentient beings, but they're not human. Replicants are "born" with adult bodies, have four year lifespans, and can be engineered with strength and intelligence greater than any human possibly can.

Intelligence - no. It's very much implied they can't be smarter than the person who created them. The actual quote is something like "they can even be as intelligent as the people who create them". Strength - that's a slippery slope. Is the strongest human alive now inhuman because he's stronger than anyone else? Is there a meaningful difference between a sentient being that looks and acts like a human and a "real" human?

 

[Heroic Liberator]

RE: Are replicants human? - If it looks like a duck, it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck... Why exactly do you think they aren't human or aren't worthy of the same treatment as a human?

Because...

But that circles back and gives us a variant of the same question - what is consciousness? How can you prove the replicants don't have this?

Because that test, if we take it for granted, rules out empathy and the like. And I tend to take it for granted since a fully matured brain of an adult brought forth from a vacuum is basically the overgrown equivalent of a toddler who hasn't gotten past that early stage of mental development in which one is more or less 'solipsistic' (in a psychological, not philosophical sense). Yet since the brain is already biologically fully developed as to account for the mental acuities specific to an adult, I'd assume that it no longer retains the biological plasticity specific to a normal sized and normally (under)developed infant brain which would be required for the subsequent development of emotional functions that in a normal human develop in tandem with the rest of the mental faculties throughout childhood and adolescence as a result of interiorized experiences both with one's broader environment and with other people in a social capacity.

But meh, this is just theorycrafting on my part with no basis in the work itself neither against it nor in its favor (beyond the fact that in-setting the accuracy of that test is never doubted).

 

[Heroic Liberator]

And since neither of us are neuroscientists, this sort of discussion is Star Trek technobabble tier.

 

[Lacrymas]

This is not a scientific question, it's a philosophical one. No neuroscientist can prove consciousness, only brain activity.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

This is not a scientific question, it's a philosophical one. No neuroscientist can prove consciousness, only brain activity.

Consciousness perhaps not, but empathy yes (at least in-universe, but presumably in real life as well given that we have a psychiatric diagnosis for sociopathy). Likewise with other emotions.

 

[Delterius]

if the replicants are so smart why won't they help the fucking turtle

 

[Lacrymas]

Consciousness perhaps not, but empathy yes (at least in-universe, but presumably in real life as well given that we have a psychiatric diagnosis for sociopathy). Likewise with other emotions.

I'm not a big fan of psychology and psychiatry and I don't put much stock in their diagnoses or methods. I'm not so sure about empathy being provable without a shadow of a doubt with a brain scan by a neuroscientist or psychiatric test. The tests are created and the result interpreted by subjective minds who have decided what the appropriate response in the brain to certain stimuli is. What if they show me a person suffering for example, but the person looks eerily close to the person who killed my mother (my mother isn't dead, it's just an example)? Would I be classified as a sociopath if the "right" portions of my brain don't "light up" in that case? In that line of thought, can I myself be sure that I'm not a sociopath based on this result? Perhaps a "real" empath would have empathy for the person who hurt them profoundly. That is an extreme example, but the infinitesimal ways culture and personal bias can shape the tests and interpretations of the results are impossible to account for. It's the same with the Voight-Kampff test.

All of this assumes psychopathy is a thing that provably exists and is well-defined. Which is certainly not the case.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Psychology is more of a social science than a hard one, but psychiatry is up there with any other branch of medicine. There's only a subjective academic consensus when it comes to defining something as a psychiatric illness or not, but otherwise you can objectively map whatever brain signal or chemical composition there is that corresponds to a given mental state. To argue against its validity is as silly as arguing against the validity of an ophthalmologist giving you a diagnosis for a given eye disorder and in particular parameters (e.g. diopters for far or short sightedness). You can subjectively judge that it is not a disorder, but the data itself is factual in measuring concrete physical particularities pertaining to your body (eyes in this case).

As for empathy, if you can pinpoint it exactly as manifesting through signals in the brains, then you could possibly have persons for whom those signals never light up regardless of circumstances. And in the Blade Runner universe, presumably that silly test indirectly confirms that without putting one's brain under a scanner just as a rheumatologist can indirectly confirm some muscle problem by beating you over the kneecap with a small hammer to see if a reflexive movement triggers or not without having to cut your leg open.

But to not stray too far from the original topic of conversation, your guess is as good as mine. First time I watched the movie I took that test for granted as being valid and I still tend to see it that way when judging the film on its own with no interest in directorial trivia or what have you.