Like many of the skeptical and sciency community, I'm also irritated at Randi. He Did Not Do the Research and posted an opinion. When experts - not even strangers, but friends and acquaintances - called him on it, instead of Doing the Research he did a song and dance. Poor.
That got me thinking. A lot of denialists for any given scientific theory are driven by religious or financial bias, but some, especially young ones, are actually just clueless. How difficult is it to Do the Research, from scratch, without a long history of reading and researching sciency stuff?
Well, me, my first stop is Wikipedia. But while Wikipedia is an excellent resource for me, it occurs to me that it's a painful thing for folks who aren't science geeks. Scientific Wikipedia articles are generally pretty close to accurate, but they are dry as dust, and have so many blue links that lead to other places that are dry as dust. Easy to choke on a Wikipedia entry.
Fortunately, there's an alternative! Youtube! Instead of us reading the research, we can have the research read to us. Some really excellent teachers using really excellent visual techniques can teach even a schoolchild the basics of both the science and controversy surrounding any theory!
Unfortunately, none of these folks are on the first page of a search. Or the second. Or the fifth.
Let's pretend we're James Randi in an alternate universe, and we want to know about global warming. Searching for global warming gives us a stack of ancient videos, conversations by politicians, and Glenn Beckites. We don't want the controversy yet, we don't even know what a greenhouse gas is.
Maybe we'll watch a few of these, with the understanding that these are the same people who would side with spoon-benders under different situations. We've spent 114 years of our life fighting this kind of nonsense: ever since we retired from magic shows. At the age of 72. Okay, I'm making old jokes. I'm upset with Randi.
Anyway, we want something with science to it. We could just pop off to Potholer's channel, but the point is to get to something like that from scratch.
Let's change the search terms. Science of global warming.
Okay, now it's 90% denialists.
Suddenly I, the author, amn't as upset as I was. It does appear that science is fractured, that there is a debate.
This is, unfortunately, not true. The problem is that Goog-era search engines function on some measure of popularity rather than usefulness. Great if you want cats riding bicycles, terrible if you're looking up something with an objective truth.
Don't be fooled, our fake Randi in an alternate dimension! There must be science here somewhere! These videos we're looking at now are cherry-picked from a wide, wide field. Just because they've been promoted to the front doesn't mean they deserve to be there. It certainly doesn't mean they are representative of the science!
"Global warming explained" is no better, youtube doesn't know what "explained" means, and returns basically the same videos despite their lack of the word "explained". "Global warming skeptic" is even worse, of course.
No, no... none of these searches lead anywhere!
I, the imaginary James Randi, give up! Why I don't ask any of the tens of thousands of experts that would happily spend the day explaining it to me, I don't know. But limiting ourselves to anonymous explainers - IE Youtube - is a failure. Because Youtube's search is SO BAD.
What you want is there, but Youtube search doesn't know that.
This is not optimal.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Monday, December 14, 2009
Hand me that Apple Crate
I'm gonna talk about something besides game design. You probably don't want to read this post.
Some of you might realize that as I've gotten older, I've gotten steadily more anti-corporate. I think this is probably the opposite of a normal progression, where a college student is anti-corporate and, as he gets older, he realizes corporations are an important part of blah de blah de blah.
I'm the opposite. I thought that they were part of blah de blah in college, and now I think corporations are tied for the second worst thing on the planet. The reasons I think so are complex, and since it's such a common sentiment, I won't go into them. But I will talk about the issue most people have with naive, anti-corporate college students. That is, that they are naive.
After all, we all use corporate goods every day. The clothes we wear, the water that we drink, the computer you're reading this on, everything is brought to us by our complex web of corporations. So how can you be anti-corporate?
But that's a bad argument. After all, it's the same argument slave owners made about their slaves. How can a slave be anti-slavery? Everything he has is provided by his owner. He would be starving and dying of malaria in Africa without us! How hypocritical!
The question is not whether or not I use corporate goods, but is whether or not there is a better solution. Not some pie-in-the-sky solution that requires all humans to act inhumanly good and caring and perfect. Some solution that understands that even decent humans are dicks.
I think there are a variety of partial solutions. Like any paradigm shift, I think the future will be made of a patchwork combination of these new solutions burning away the old guard.
One solution is that it is growing ever more possible for corporations to transform into very transparent entities. For some corporate-like entities, this is a huge advantage. The recent climate change email scandal would never have happened if the scientists were publishing all their emails publicly at all times. Not because they would have avoided conspiracy - there was no conspiracy. But because the emails would be part of a clear context chain that is openly available to anyone. The "conspiracy" vanishes when you realize that these emails are cherry-picked, out of context, and rely on a misunderstanding of scientific terms and data sources.
Other corporate entities would be slaughtered by this change, or at least whine. For example, a transparent news room would reveal the sordid underbelly of what stories get shown in what light, and why. A transparent bank would reveal what advantageous trades they're going to perform, when.
But these are businesses that exist specifically in the cracks of imperfect information. They make money not by providing value, but by wedging themselves into any gap they see and pulling as hard as possible. In many ways, they make money specifically by reducing value. This is not a method of doing business I find ethical or sustainable - the steady increase in connectivity and information processing has put them on a path of leveraging ever smaller and riskier information gaps to make their money, since the largest gaps have been erased due to other people's enhanced information processing.
Obviously, transparency is a difficult thing. If a government required emails to be published, then a lot of people would simply gather in person to discuss their shady deals. But I'm not suggesting that the government step in. After all, governments are tied for second worst thing on the planet, and are already too buddy-buddy with these monsters. I'm simply suggesting that in the upcoming years, some small corporations are going to begin publishing a lot of details about the internal workings of their company and technology, especially in fields where leveraging information inequalities isn't the point of the business. These businesses will be more successful for two reasons. A) talking about stuff openly always generates more good ideas and more energy. B) your prospective customers and clients will feel they can trust you.
Because these open businesses are more successful, they will begin to dominate their field, slowly spreading a "transparency movement" where any business that does not publish is considered untrustworthy.
I think this is very likely as we enter a world where information is so easy to discover, so tightly integrated, and so carefully parsed. Imagine walking into a store and looking at fifteen brands of toilet paper. Up pops your AR: this brand is a company that is rated as 57% transparent by DougsTransparencyIndex, that one is rated 12% transparent. While neither have any grossly immoral acts proven, Doug says, the one that is more transparent will have fewer swept under the rug. Which toilet paper will you buy?
No need by the consumer to actually go out and research these companies. The computer collects and displays information automatically.
And if you think that's unlikely, stop reading this blog and go start reading on technology trends, because you're about to become painfully obsolete. It's not only going to happen, it's happening already.
That's just one solution - transparent companies. I think it's important to remember that the growth of this information web in which we live in also enhances several other methods of creating wealth.
The most famous is the start-up, which is a risky proposition but can be extremely lucrative. A relatively small group of people pitch in to deliver a new product that makes them all rich. I think that start-ups are just starting to enter their really powerful phase, and I think that over the next twenty years, start-ups will be the name of the game. After that, I think that they might start to decline, because start-ups actually operate on information inequality, and I think that twenty years from now we'll start to see the information web becoming so efficient that even the kind of inequality start-ups use will be corrected away.
That's a little hard to imagine, so let me explain. Remember that this is in your old-and-gray years.
I've worked for three start-ups now. Each was built on the expert knowledge of two or three people, leveraged together to create a product that provided value that didn't exist on the market. For example, the one I currently work for is leveraging a combination of solar thermal expertise with data mining expertise to provide some ridiculously overpowered and easy to use analysis systems for green energy installations.
The reason that the start-up is possible is because the expertise can't be effectively applied without a start-up. Once we've done this, the expertise will be available for anyone to see and use (and duplicate). However, we'll have developed further expertise we can leverage and so on and so forth. That's the theory. But the point is that start-ups exist specifically to make your expertise/genius/skill available to the market in an efficient manner.
In twenty years most of us will be deeply immersed in an ambient data network. Distributing expertise will be extremely easy. I think that start-ups will begin to find more and more of their opportunities are made too trivial by the network. You don't need a start-up to do something if you can just go out and do it.
In addition to the transparent-corporation and start-up paradigms, there is one more method I can think of that supports my theory that being anti-corporate is viable. That is the personal work theory.
As mentioned, our network is getting stronger and smarter every year. It is getting easier for an individual to self-employ. Or, if the product she wants to distribute is too big for her alone, she can form a temporary group to release a single product. You see this enabled by the network more and more. We have things like Etsy and Kickstarter that are just coming into their own. I can foresee a time not too far in the future where the structure and safety a corporation provides will be replaced by the ambient structure-forming nature of the network.
This will make things like ZipCar obsolete. I love the company, but it exists on a mountain of data imbalance. Specifically, it exists because there aren't loads of cars just lying around for you to borrow. ZipCar will find itself competing with a steadily rising number of free and easy solutions that help people find rides/cars just out of nothing. The advent of a widespread set of reputation systems and a connective "friend-net" will give us the power we need to automatically determine whether someone can borrow our car or tag along for a ride. The seeds of this required data underlayer can clearly be seen in things like Facebook.
Now, to some extent it might sound like I'm talking about some kind of socialist fuzzy-wuzzy paradise, but I'm not. I think life will be better and richer because, historically, life has been getting better and richer with every generation, although not always by the same measures. That doesn't mean there will be no hardships. I expect reputation will come to be as important as money for many people, and that raises its own sticky questions. Depending on what kind of projections you make, it could be that many of the people in question will be pretty poor, although somewhat alleviated by their strong network of connections that they rely on.
I'm trying not to make any specific predictions about the future outside of the ones specifically related to my anti-corporate stance. I don't want to predict the world will be glorious. I just want to point out that the rise of a dense and intelligent data network is making the staple of corporate evil - maintaining and abusing information imbalance - increasingly tenuous. Simultaneously, it is promoting some alternate ways of getting things done. I expect the transition will not be sudden, and it will probably be economically bloody. But it's going to happen.
Some of you might realize that as I've gotten older, I've gotten steadily more anti-corporate. I think this is probably the opposite of a normal progression, where a college student is anti-corporate and, as he gets older, he realizes corporations are an important part of blah de blah de blah.
I'm the opposite. I thought that they were part of blah de blah in college, and now I think corporations are tied for the second worst thing on the planet. The reasons I think so are complex, and since it's such a common sentiment, I won't go into them. But I will talk about the issue most people have with naive, anti-corporate college students. That is, that they are naive.
After all, we all use corporate goods every day. The clothes we wear, the water that we drink, the computer you're reading this on, everything is brought to us by our complex web of corporations. So how can you be anti-corporate?
But that's a bad argument. After all, it's the same argument slave owners made about their slaves. How can a slave be anti-slavery? Everything he has is provided by his owner. He would be starving and dying of malaria in Africa without us! How hypocritical!
The question is not whether or not I use corporate goods, but is whether or not there is a better solution. Not some pie-in-the-sky solution that requires all humans to act inhumanly good and caring and perfect. Some solution that understands that even decent humans are dicks.
I think there are a variety of partial solutions. Like any paradigm shift, I think the future will be made of a patchwork combination of these new solutions burning away the old guard.
One solution is that it is growing ever more possible for corporations to transform into very transparent entities. For some corporate-like entities, this is a huge advantage. The recent climate change email scandal would never have happened if the scientists were publishing all their emails publicly at all times. Not because they would have avoided conspiracy - there was no conspiracy. But because the emails would be part of a clear context chain that is openly available to anyone. The "conspiracy" vanishes when you realize that these emails are cherry-picked, out of context, and rely on a misunderstanding of scientific terms and data sources.
Other corporate entities would be slaughtered by this change, or at least whine. For example, a transparent news room would reveal the sordid underbelly of what stories get shown in what light, and why. A transparent bank would reveal what advantageous trades they're going to perform, when.
But these are businesses that exist specifically in the cracks of imperfect information. They make money not by providing value, but by wedging themselves into any gap they see and pulling as hard as possible. In many ways, they make money specifically by reducing value. This is not a method of doing business I find ethical or sustainable - the steady increase in connectivity and information processing has put them on a path of leveraging ever smaller and riskier information gaps to make their money, since the largest gaps have been erased due to other people's enhanced information processing.
Obviously, transparency is a difficult thing. If a government required emails to be published, then a lot of people would simply gather in person to discuss their shady deals. But I'm not suggesting that the government step in. After all, governments are tied for second worst thing on the planet, and are already too buddy-buddy with these monsters. I'm simply suggesting that in the upcoming years, some small corporations are going to begin publishing a lot of details about the internal workings of their company and technology, especially in fields where leveraging information inequalities isn't the point of the business. These businesses will be more successful for two reasons. A) talking about stuff openly always generates more good ideas and more energy. B) your prospective customers and clients will feel they can trust you.
Because these open businesses are more successful, they will begin to dominate their field, slowly spreading a "transparency movement" where any business that does not publish is considered untrustworthy.
I think this is very likely as we enter a world where information is so easy to discover, so tightly integrated, and so carefully parsed. Imagine walking into a store and looking at fifteen brands of toilet paper. Up pops your AR: this brand is a company that is rated as 57% transparent by DougsTransparencyIndex, that one is rated 12% transparent. While neither have any grossly immoral acts proven, Doug says, the one that is more transparent will have fewer swept under the rug. Which toilet paper will you buy?
No need by the consumer to actually go out and research these companies. The computer collects and displays information automatically.
And if you think that's unlikely, stop reading this blog and go start reading on technology trends, because you're about to become painfully obsolete. It's not only going to happen, it's happening already.
That's just one solution - transparent companies. I think it's important to remember that the growth of this information web in which we live in also enhances several other methods of creating wealth.
The most famous is the start-up, which is a risky proposition but can be extremely lucrative. A relatively small group of people pitch in to deliver a new product that makes them all rich. I think that start-ups are just starting to enter their really powerful phase, and I think that over the next twenty years, start-ups will be the name of the game. After that, I think that they might start to decline, because start-ups actually operate on information inequality, and I think that twenty years from now we'll start to see the information web becoming so efficient that even the kind of inequality start-ups use will be corrected away.
That's a little hard to imagine, so let me explain. Remember that this is in your old-and-gray years.
I've worked for three start-ups now. Each was built on the expert knowledge of two or three people, leveraged together to create a product that provided value that didn't exist on the market. For example, the one I currently work for is leveraging a combination of solar thermal expertise with data mining expertise to provide some ridiculously overpowered and easy to use analysis systems for green energy installations.
The reason that the start-up is possible is because the expertise can't be effectively applied without a start-up. Once we've done this, the expertise will be available for anyone to see and use (and duplicate). However, we'll have developed further expertise we can leverage and so on and so forth. That's the theory. But the point is that start-ups exist specifically to make your expertise/genius/skill available to the market in an efficient manner.
In twenty years most of us will be deeply immersed in an ambient data network. Distributing expertise will be extremely easy. I think that start-ups will begin to find more and more of their opportunities are made too trivial by the network. You don't need a start-up to do something if you can just go out and do it.
In addition to the transparent-corporation and start-up paradigms, there is one more method I can think of that supports my theory that being anti-corporate is viable. That is the personal work theory.
As mentioned, our network is getting stronger and smarter every year. It is getting easier for an individual to self-employ. Or, if the product she wants to distribute is too big for her alone, she can form a temporary group to release a single product. You see this enabled by the network more and more. We have things like Etsy and Kickstarter that are just coming into their own. I can foresee a time not too far in the future where the structure and safety a corporation provides will be replaced by the ambient structure-forming nature of the network.
This will make things like ZipCar obsolete. I love the company, but it exists on a mountain of data imbalance. Specifically, it exists because there aren't loads of cars just lying around for you to borrow. ZipCar will find itself competing with a steadily rising number of free and easy solutions that help people find rides/cars just out of nothing. The advent of a widespread set of reputation systems and a connective "friend-net" will give us the power we need to automatically determine whether someone can borrow our car or tag along for a ride. The seeds of this required data underlayer can clearly be seen in things like Facebook.
Now, to some extent it might sound like I'm talking about some kind of socialist fuzzy-wuzzy paradise, but I'm not. I think life will be better and richer because, historically, life has been getting better and richer with every generation, although not always by the same measures. That doesn't mean there will be no hardships. I expect reputation will come to be as important as money for many people, and that raises its own sticky questions. Depending on what kind of projections you make, it could be that many of the people in question will be pretty poor, although somewhat alleviated by their strong network of connections that they rely on.
I'm trying not to make any specific predictions about the future outside of the ones specifically related to my anti-corporate stance. I don't want to predict the world will be glorious. I just want to point out that the rise of a dense and intelligent data network is making the staple of corporate evil - maintaining and abusing information imbalance - increasingly tenuous. Simultaneously, it is promoting some alternate ways of getting things done. I expect the transition will not be sudden, and it will probably be economically bloody. But it's going to happen.
Friday, December 04, 2009
Single Player Games
I don't know, every year people keep shouting that one player games are dead. What GB Games says is a bit less silly, fortunately. He talks about adding in a feature to your single-player games that let the users share stories. Thus making a single player game with a community.
This segues into two things I'm interested in that are actually just one thing.
The first thing is that he's talking less about fundamental game design and more about viral marketing. While you have to be a bit careful in your game design so that you can allow this kind of sharing (and probably content swapping), the real idea here is not to change the way the game fundamentally works, but simply to change the way that the players relate to it and each other.
The other first thing is that I feel anything that affects the player's experience should count as part of the game design, even if it isn't actually much part of the game. Dwarf Fortress has a very strong community for its size, but there are no inherent tools to help you share your experience. The players share anyway, leading this to be part of the experience even when there are absolutely NO tools, no hint of anything to help you share, in the game itself. This is capitalized on because the sharers usually take a "Lets Play" approach and add in plenty of color and flavor that is also not in the original game.
These two first things combine into one thing: the idea that a game isn't really a standalone package any more. Whether your game contains the tools or not, the players will want to communicate and interact with each other.
Even, and here's the part a lot of people don't like, even just in one-player games.
I love one-player games. I don't much like multiplayer games and loathe massively multiplayer games. I buy more than half of the single-player RPGs and first-person-shooters that come out for the consoles I own, and quite a few for the computer as well. I am Mr. Single Player.
But I find one truth to be particularly glaring: the games I play longest are the ones that I visit on-line sites, download mods, look up cheats, and read silly things about. These places I visit are very rarely associated with the game devs. They are almost always fan-sites or faq-sites. Moreover, I don't think their existence causes me to play the game more. I think their existence is because people like me play the game more.
Dragon Age is a good example. Most Dragon-Age-related sites are either A) associated with the devs, B) sharing space with other games such as Oblivion, or C) dead. Dragon Age just doesn't have the same mindshare as, say, Oblivion or the Sims, which have literally thousands of indie sites dedicated to talking about them in niche terms. Despite the fact that these games have no inherent "sharing" technology.
Well, the Sims does have uploadable "family albums". Which are, as far as I can tell, less commonly used than simply posting to a foum. And on the other side of the spectrum, Spore is specifically designed around allowing players to share. And... it's not very good. No longevity at all.
What I'm trying to say is that making it possible for players to share stories is rarely a bad idea... but if you make a game that gives your players stories to share, there are plenty of already-made solutions for the sharing that they will happily use.
This segues into two things I'm interested in that are actually just one thing.
The first thing is that he's talking less about fundamental game design and more about viral marketing. While you have to be a bit careful in your game design so that you can allow this kind of sharing (and probably content swapping), the real idea here is not to change the way the game fundamentally works, but simply to change the way that the players relate to it and each other.
The other first thing is that I feel anything that affects the player's experience should count as part of the game design, even if it isn't actually much part of the game. Dwarf Fortress has a very strong community for its size, but there are no inherent tools to help you share your experience. The players share anyway, leading this to be part of the experience even when there are absolutely NO tools, no hint of anything to help you share, in the game itself. This is capitalized on because the sharers usually take a "Lets Play" approach and add in plenty of color and flavor that is also not in the original game.
These two first things combine into one thing: the idea that a game isn't really a standalone package any more. Whether your game contains the tools or not, the players will want to communicate and interact with each other.
Even, and here's the part a lot of people don't like, even just in one-player games.
I love one-player games. I don't much like multiplayer games and loathe massively multiplayer games. I buy more than half of the single-player RPGs and first-person-shooters that come out for the consoles I own, and quite a few for the computer as well. I am Mr. Single Player.
But I find one truth to be particularly glaring: the games I play longest are the ones that I visit on-line sites, download mods, look up cheats, and read silly things about. These places I visit are very rarely associated with the game devs. They are almost always fan-sites or faq-sites. Moreover, I don't think their existence causes me to play the game more. I think their existence is because people like me play the game more.
Dragon Age is a good example. Most Dragon-Age-related sites are either A) associated with the devs, B) sharing space with other games such as Oblivion, or C) dead. Dragon Age just doesn't have the same mindshare as, say, Oblivion or the Sims, which have literally thousands of indie sites dedicated to talking about them in niche terms. Despite the fact that these games have no inherent "sharing" technology.
Well, the Sims does have uploadable "family albums". Which are, as far as I can tell, less commonly used than simply posting to a foum. And on the other side of the spectrum, Spore is specifically designed around allowing players to share. And... it's not very good. No longevity at all.
What I'm trying to say is that making it possible for players to share stories is rarely a bad idea... but if you make a game that gives your players stories to share, there are plenty of already-made solutions for the sharing that they will happily use.
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
An Article on Choice
I seem to be all about reading other people's articles this week. Here's one from Pixel Poppers on player choice. Doctor Professor is harping on the difference between "real" choice and "fake" choice, which is something I have also harped on. Out here in Boston-land we use the term "agency" as an umbrella word to refer to how much the game allow the players to express themselves and change the game world. I presume that it's not just a local term.
I agree with most of the article, although I think the Little Sister "choice" was a stupid one rather than an interesting one. The reason I think it's stupid is the same reason I think all light side/dark side choice threads are stupid. Although you are faced with the choice fifty times (or five hundred times) in your play, you only actually choose ONCE, near the beginning, and after that you're simply reassuring a skittish computer that you are still playing the same character.
That's a major problem with all these games that let you choose between two narrative options. In order to really make them even vaguely interesting, you'd have to (A) have a lot more characterization of the avatar and (B) have to have choices present very differently depending on past choices. For example, in Fallout 3, you can blow up or disarm a nuclear bomb in the first city. This is a simple "good vs evil" decision. However, blowing up the city is a rather hideously evil thing to do, just fantastically evil.
Why is it that your avatar, a man with such intense evil in his past, can then go on to cheerfully befriend the other cities and people in the game? Obviously, the choices for these other cities were scripted to be "compatible" with "every play thread", which in turn means they don't express the avatar's personality very well at all. I can see getting along with these future towns if it's played in a sleazy way, or a repentant way, but that doesn't happen.
The act of blowing up the city has profound game effects - it actually makes you use an entirely different city, and gives you access to all kinds of other quests. However, it doesn't actually change your AVATAR. Your avatar still thinks to himself, at all further moments, "well, I could be nice here, or maybe a little mean". That choice fails to have any meaning to someone who personally nuked a city.
So while I agree with the linked article, I would stress the need to drag a little attention off of scripting the world and on to scripting the characters. Funnily, the current situation is actually the reverse of the old "dost thou love me" trick. While the game does give you lots of agency, it gives the illusion that your earlier choices didn't matter. Ha!
Properly scripting the character to allow the player to define their avatar's personality is more or less impossible at the current time. But I'd be satisfied with small steps.
Anyway, just more mumbling.
I agree with most of the article, although I think the Little Sister "choice" was a stupid one rather than an interesting one. The reason I think it's stupid is the same reason I think all light side/dark side choice threads are stupid. Although you are faced with the choice fifty times (or five hundred times) in your play, you only actually choose ONCE, near the beginning, and after that you're simply reassuring a skittish computer that you are still playing the same character.
That's a major problem with all these games that let you choose between two narrative options. In order to really make them even vaguely interesting, you'd have to (A) have a lot more characterization of the avatar and (B) have to have choices present very differently depending on past choices. For example, in Fallout 3, you can blow up or disarm a nuclear bomb in the first city. This is a simple "good vs evil" decision. However, blowing up the city is a rather hideously evil thing to do, just fantastically evil.
Why is it that your avatar, a man with such intense evil in his past, can then go on to cheerfully befriend the other cities and people in the game? Obviously, the choices for these other cities were scripted to be "compatible" with "every play thread", which in turn means they don't express the avatar's personality very well at all. I can see getting along with these future towns if it's played in a sleazy way, or a repentant way, but that doesn't happen.
The act of blowing up the city has profound game effects - it actually makes you use an entirely different city, and gives you access to all kinds of other quests. However, it doesn't actually change your AVATAR. Your avatar still thinks to himself, at all further moments, "well, I could be nice here, or maybe a little mean". That choice fails to have any meaning to someone who personally nuked a city.
So while I agree with the linked article, I would stress the need to drag a little attention off of scripting the world and on to scripting the characters. Funnily, the current situation is actually the reverse of the old "dost thou love me" trick. While the game does give you lots of agency, it gives the illusion that your earlier choices didn't matter. Ha!
Properly scripting the character to allow the player to define their avatar's personality is more or less impossible at the current time. But I'd be satisfied with small steps.
Anyway, just more mumbling.
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