Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=1845https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6373There's a scene where your character basically tortures this guy you were chasing to get information from him. Apparently he stole some things you were trying to sell and he sold them for himself. He pleads for his life and is resistant to your demands for information, so you break his arm and then kill him once he tells you what's happened. I don't know how I feel about this. Sure the guy stole from you, but you go on a killing spree just to get to him and then you torture him for information before you end his life. I guess you could argue that because he stole from you, you're free from the contract but I don't know if that would give you license to end other people's lives or even break his arm just for information. In this scenario I consider breaking his arm tantamount to killing him because of the apparent lack of medical services. Leaving his arm that way is likely to cause some sort of internal bleeding and without the proper attention (there wasn't any for all you knew because you had just killed everyone), he would probably die a very painful death. That's why I think breaking his arm just to kill him is equivalent to torture. I'm not 100% certain this was justified on your character's part.Fri, 07 Apr 2017 01:16:22 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6373&iddiary=11142https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6373Although, I'm posting in the same day, this was a separate gameplay instance. You're walking around an abandoned building when you notice a guy struggling beneath some debris. He tells you his mask broke (you're in an infected area where walking around without a mask will surely give you the virus). He obviously can't escape the debris on his own and he starts begging you to end his life before he turns. This situation begs the question, "Is it ever morally permissible to kill a person?" From a utilitarian standpoint, it seems like the answer here is yes. You don't personally know what the zombie experience may be like, it might be awesome, but it sure doesn't look like it. "Turning" looks like a terrible way to live life, so killing the man now is better than allowing the undesirable turn. On top of that, you don't know if he's going to come back later and eat you because you left him to turn.Fri, 07 Apr 2017 00:54:21 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6373&iddiary=11141https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6373So I started playing the last of us today and even in the first cut scenes I noticed an interesting ethical dilemma. As you're driving away from the city, you're not entirely sure what's happening but you drive past a family that is asking for help. They've got a child with them and they're screaming for you to stop. Your brother starts to stop the car, but you tell him to keep driving away. Then your daughter says, "We should have helped them." Should you have, though? I think in a state of emergency like that, or maybe Hobbes would have been inclined to say that it was more like a state of nature at that point, then I don't think you would be morally obligated to risk yourself to help other people. In fact, I would go as far as to say the right thing to do is to not stop for the people since you also have a child you're trying to protect. The risk far outweighs the gain, and stopping for them would be completely supererogatory.Fri, 07 Apr 2017 00:49:49 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6373&iddiary=11139https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6315This morning while I was playing Witcher 3, I had another Kantian experience. Except this time it wasn't any decision I had to make, it was more of a situation your character witnesses. In the game, one of the captains of the army is taking taxes from one of the farmers. The guy was to bring him a certain quantity of food because of how big his yield from this season was. The guy lies to the captain initially about how much his farm brings in, but the captain is too savvy for that nonsense. The captain feels pity towards the guy though and doesn't charge him the full amount he could and asks the guy to come back the next day. The guy is really grateful and goes away. I ended up having to go do some other story missions where I had to kill a griffin (which was outrageously difficult), and then I came back. When I got back, the farmer was there but he had delivered spoiled goods. Which was a bit of a dick move. (That's another thing we talked about a while back). It reminded me of Kant again, where keeping promises is important to keep a society going. It also ties into the social contract theory we were talking about with Hobbes. To keep a healthy society going, we need to reasonably expect people to act a certain way, ie keep their promises. When they don't act accordingly, it makes society pretty difficult, hence punishments. If the farmer guy had just given the captain the goods he was supposed to, which were less than what was expected, the captain would have been happy and he would have been more inclined to be lenient with other farmers. But because this guy broke his promise, now the captain has to punish the guy for delivering spoiled goods, but now he can't justify being lenient with other people.Thu, 23 Feb 2017 11:59:21 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6315&iddiary=11027https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6315Today's gameplay offered an interesting moral dilemma. Quick side tangent, it's interesting how often moral dilemmas are implemented in this game. it's so full of moral questions the characters even explicitly say they should stop "moralizing." Anyway, today while I was playing, one of the side quests was to help catch the arsonists that burned down this guy's shop. Once you do find the arsonist, he offers you some money to keep it a secret. The arsonist gives youa sob story about how his mom died and he blames the blacksmith (the guy that hired you) because the blacksmith provided the army that killed his mom with swords. There's a sort of weird vigilante justice thing going on here. So here you are, deciding whether or not you should keep your promise or take the money and go. It reminded me of when we talked about Kant's Categorical Imperatives. To Kant, keeping promises was a big deal mainly because you can't universalize the idea that breaking promises is ok. So even though we've gleaned this new information about the guy's mom and we might sympathize with him, we still shouldn't break our promise. So being the good Kantian that I am, I took him back to the blacksmith. Where he was promptly executed. Which I thought was a bit harsh, but that's a log for another day.Wed, 22 Feb 2017 23:35:03 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6315&iddiary=11014https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6315So today I started playing Witcher 3. This game was a lot slower than I anticipated. There's a lot of talking and it's really story heavy. That's been my experience so far at least. I get the feeling that it'll pick up speed the further into I get. Anyway, right from the start, one of the tutorials describes life in the game's world as "nasty, brutish, and short." I thought it was pretty funny that the developers took a quote straight from Hobbe's to describe the world. I thought it was interesting that the world the developers describe is in what Hobbe's describes as the state of nature even though they have a sort of social contract going on. Supposedly, we have the social contract theory so we can avoid the state of nature. The world seems to be on the edge of the two. There's a government and the citizens explicitly say they expect protection and order from the government, but they're still not really receiving this protection in full.Mon, 20 Feb 2017 21:58:09 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6315&iddiary=10987https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6245Today i finished the game for Shadow of Mordor. I actually ended up playing for a few hours because I got sucked into the story. I spent a lot of time finishing up the side missions so I could beef up my character for what I thought was going to be a boss battle. It ended up being a pretty lame little cut scene where my character kills the main guy we've been after this whole time. That's ok, though. In one of the cut scenes, you find out that the Elven Lord that's been keeping you alive this whole time could have let you die and move on with your family this whole time. It reminded me of what we covered in Relativism. Celebrimbor (the Elf) argued that he needed Talion (you) so meet his ends. In a weird sort of way, Celebrimbor was trying to morally exonerate himself by saying that he felt it was what he needed to do.Fri, 27 Jan 2017 18:51:22 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6245&iddiary=10925https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6245Today I spent the majority of my time try to exact vengeance on a few Urukhai that killed me. Normally I'm an unstoppable killing machine, but there were a few mistakes I made in trying to murder these specific captains that finished with my demise. Either way, whenever these Uruks kill you, they have some pretty nice things to say to your lifeless corpse, which only make me want to go back and kill them some more. The problem is, every time I die by their hand, they get stronger. So it just turns into this cycle of me dying, and them getting more and more intense. Anyway, their constant insults made me think of Wheaton's Law that we went over in last class period. "Don't be a dick." Their banter reminded me of the 12 year olds that tell you in increasingly creative ways how they're going to screw your mom and more. These Uruks obviously don't follow Wheaton's Law, which (like I mentioned earlier) makes me want to murder them even more. I'm sure that's exactly what the developers had in mind when they made the game, but I still think it's interesting how we (or I) still have a reaction to dickish attitudes even from the game's AI. No one likes to be treated poorly, and it just makes us want to lash back out at whoever is being a dick.Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:12:15 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6245&iddiary=10902https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6245Today I played Shadow of Mordor again. Instead of just randomly murdering Orcs, I decided to do the story. In this part of the story, our character helps out a dwarf named Torvin hunt down a beast he's been trying to kill for a decade. As you go through the process of learning to hunt the beast, you get little clips of your character and Torvin bantering. Torvin ends up revealing that the beast killed his hunting partner, which is later revealed to be his brother. Once you finish killing this massive beast, Torvin offers his help to you in your quest, which you deny because it is a road you alone can go down. It reminded me of the Golden Rule we talked about in last class. We mentioned that one of our principles is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Torvin seems to have had this sense of morality. He saw that you helped him and decided to return the favor by doing unto you as you have done to him.Fri, 20 Jan 2017 22:08:54 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6245&iddiary=10888https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6245I've played this game many times because it's one of the best games in the entire world. I recently started a new game, but my problem is that I tend to speed through video games. For me the real fun is beating the game, not the enjoying the ride. I don't care about getting all of the extra trophies or skills, I just want to watch the boss die by my mediocre character's hands. This time around, I've been trying something a little different. I'm trying to really explore the game and take advantage of everything the developers put in there for me. So today, I spent most of my time in the second half of the map just running around killing orcs. I did a couple side missions, freed some slaves, and worked on my archery skills (archery is unreasonably difficult in this game).Thu, 19 Jan 2017 23:17:19 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=6245&iddiary=10870