5087 réponses à ce sujet

[KitaSaturnyne]

First, a welcome to andysdead. You've found a good thread well worth reading.

@Mani Mani guy

You just made me imagine some kind of Harbinger-centric "day in the life" comic.

Harbinger: "WIFE, GET ME SUGAR FOR MY CEREAL. THIS HURTS YOU."
Wife: "Dammit! Stop saying that!"

[Phaedros]

"Thematically Revolting"  I like that.


Doesn't cover the half of it,  unfortunately....

[SP2219]

 Awesome post I want this guys brain

[MrRag]

Made Nightwing wrote...

And this was the analogy I made to Made Nightwing in our discussion (and which I have bored people with elsewhere): this bewildering finale felt as if you had been listening to a soaring orchestral movement that ended in a cacophonous blast, the musicians tossing down their instruments and walking away. I find it hard to conceive how the creators of such a magnificent franchise could have made such a mess of their own universe. The plot holes, thematic inconsistencies and a deus ex machina that was unforgivable in ancient Greek theatre, let alone in any modern narrative, all combine to erode the foundations upon which the rest of the experience resides. (It's a disturbing sign when apologists for such an ending have to literally hope that what they witnessed was just a bad dream in the central character's head.)

Good post, the quoted part sums it up very well.

[edisnooM]

KitaSaturnyne wrote...

First, a welcome to andysdead. You've found a good thread well worth reading.

@Mani Mani guy

You just made me imagine some kind of Harbinger-centric "day in the life" comic.

Harbinger: "WIFE, GET ME SUGAR FOR MY CEREAL. THIS HURTS YOU."
Wife: "Dammit! Stop saying that!"

Ha, maybe it's actually some kind of speech impediment. Now I sort of feel bad about making fun of it.

[delta_vee]

edisnooM wrote...

KitaSaturnyne wrote...

First, a welcome to andysdead. You've found a good thread well worth reading.

@Mani Mani guy

You just made me imagine some kind of Harbinger-centric "day in the life" comic.

Harbinger: "WIFE, GET ME SUGAR FOR MY CEREAL. THIS HURTS YOU."
Wife: "Dammit! Stop saying that!"

Ha, maybe it's actually some kind of speech impediment. Now I sort of feel bad about making fun of it.

I didn't realize high-mass ham was a recognized speech impediment...

[edisnooM]

delta_vee wrote...

edisnooM wrote...

KitaSaturnyne wrote...

First, a welcome to andysdead. You've found a good thread well worth reading.

@Mani Mani guy

You just made me imagine some kind of Harbinger-centric "day in the life" comic.

Harbinger: "WIFE, GET ME SUGAR FOR MY CEREAL. THIS HURTS YOU."
Wife: "Dammit! Stop saying that!"

Ha, maybe it's actually some kind of speech impediment. Now I sort of feel bad about making fun of it.

I didn't realize high-mass ham was a recognized speech impediment...

Reaper speech impediments are beyond our comprehension.

[delta_vee]

edisnooM wrote...

delta_vee wrote...

edisnooM wrote...

KitaSaturnyne wrote...

First, a welcome to andysdead. You've found a good thread well worth reading.

@Mani Mani guy

You just made me imagine some kind of Harbinger-centric "day in the life" comic.

Harbinger: "WIFE, GET ME SUGAR FOR MY CEREAL. THIS HURTS YOU."
Wife: "Dammit! Stop saying that!"

Ha, maybe it's actually some kind of speech impediment. Now I sort of feel bad about making fun of it.

I didn't realize high-mass ham was a recognized speech impediment...

Reaper speech impediments are beyond our comprehension.

Sovereign missed his calling as a therapist.

[Deltateam Elcor]

Krogan death metal?

I picture the drummer being Kalros, naturally.

Modifié par Deltateam Elcor, 11 mai 2012 - 11:44 .

[edisnooM]

Deltateam Elcor wrote...

Krogan death metal?

I picture the drummer being Kalros, naturally.

 I find this idea oddly fascinating.

[delta_vee]

edisnooM wrote...

Deltateam Elcor wrote...

Krogan death metal?

I picture the drummer being Kalros, naturally.

 I find this idea oddly fascinating.

That's a hell of a bass line.

[CulturalGeekGirl]

andysdead wrote...

delta_vee wrote...

andysdead wrote...

Ugh, 78 pages I haven't read....

I would heartily recommend doing so. There's some fantastic stuff in here.

andysdead wrote...

I am personally inclined to suggest that the synthesis ending is actually constructed a lot better than most believe.

I'm personally inclined to believe that the synthesis ending was conceived a lot better than it was constructed. What I imagine was supposed to be much as you describe, a jumpstart of the process which was already underway, was conveyed with so little buildup and so very little explanation of the (incredibly important) details that it could be mistaken for at least a half-dozen mutually-exclusive visions of posthumanity.

I get this...

I think the only reason I've been able to figure out this posthumanist theme is probably because I've taken graduate-level classes in Science and Technology Studies.

It could be incredibly problematic for Bioware to rewrite the entire series so as to clarify this theme for the audience, however. Maybe something in the extended cut could work for that purpose.

There is stuff in this thread about how I hate the ending of this because it violates and oversimplifies the most enlightening and philosophically useful aspects of transhumanism. I'm too swamped at work to find it, but it's in here somewhere. I recognize that theme (as do many, many people in this thread), I just don't think they could have handled it more ham-handedly if they had literal pigs strapped to their fists.

This isn't meant to sound confrontational, and I certainly don't expect you to have read 78 pages before posting. I just get a little snippy when people use "no no, you see, people think the ending is bad because they don't realize that it's really about {basic SF concept}."

I understand all the concepts it incorporates. I know what they were trying for. I get what they wanted us to feel.

Just for me, personally, they failed at fulfilling any of those goals in an engaging way.

[MetioricTest]

People will hate me for saying this but the fan reaction to the ending of Mass Effect 3 has been more entertaining than any ending they could have made lol

The opening post was brilliant

[delta_vee]

MetioricTest wrote...

People will hate me for saying this but the fan reaction to the ending of Mass Effect 3 has been more entertaining than any ending they could have made lol

Nah, you're good. In the grand scheme of gaming, it's better for something like this to happen. This entire debacle has become a schwerpunkt of heretofore-disparate threads within the games industry, and the resultant critical attention will benefit everyone in the long(er) run.

I just wish it didn't have to be this game offered up as our Iphigenia.

Modifié par delta_vee, 12 mai 2012 - 12:58 .

[jbauck]

edisnooM wrote...

delta_vee wrote...

edisnooM wrote...

KitaSaturnyne wrote...

First, a welcome to andysdead. You've found a good thread well worth reading.

@Mani Mani guy

You just made me imagine some kind of Harbinger-centric "day in the life" comic.

Harbinger: "WIFE, GET ME SUGAR FOR MY CEREAL. THIS HURTS YOU."
Wife: "Dammit! Stop saying that!"

Ha, maybe it's actually some kind of speech impediment. Now I sort of feel bad about making fun of it.

I didn't realize high-mass ham was a recognized speech impediment...

Reaper speech impediments are beyond our comprehension.

That Hurts Me.

[andysdead]

CulturalGeekGirl wrote...

andysdead wrote...

delta_vee wrote...

andysdead wrote...

Ugh, 78 pages I haven't read....

I would heartily recommend doing so. There's some fantastic stuff in here.

andysdead wrote...

I am personally inclined to suggest that the synthesis ending is actually constructed a lot better than most believe.

I'm personally inclined to believe that the synthesis ending was conceived a lot better than it was constructed. What I imagine was supposed to be much as you describe, a jumpstart of the process which was already underway, was conveyed with so little buildup and so very little explanation of the (incredibly important) details that it could be mistaken for at least a half-dozen mutually-exclusive visions of posthumanity.

I get this...

I think the only reason I've been able to figure out this posthumanist theme is probably because I've taken graduate-level classes in Science and Technology Studies.

It could be incredibly problematic for Bioware to rewrite the entire series so as to clarify this theme for the audience, however. Maybe something in the extended cut could work for that purpose.

There is stuff in this thread about how I hate the ending of this because it violates and oversimplifies the most enlightening and philosophically useful aspects of transhumanism. I'm too swamped at work to find it, but it's in here somewhere. I recognize that theme (as do many, many people in this thread), I just don't think they could have handled it more ham-handedly if they had literal pigs strapped to their fists.

This isn't meant to sound confrontational, and I certainly don't expect you to have read 78 pages before posting. I just get a little snippy when people use "no no, you see, people think the ending is bad because they don't realize that it's really about {basic SF concept}."

I understand all the concepts it incorporates. I know what they were trying for. I get what they wanted us to feel.

Just for me, personally, they failed at fulfilling any of those goals in an engaging way.

Respectfully, I don't see transhumanism as being a basic sci-fi concept. It's not fiction, at any rate. Sci-fi is well known for taking elements of real science and applying them to fiction, however, and it's clear to me that this is what the writers were going for here.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who understands these concepts. I am curious as to whether anyone else here has read things like A Cyborg Manifesto or Transcendent Man.

I'm *really* curious to know whether any of Bioware's writers have read any of the nonfiction in the transhumanist/posthumanist/whatever genre. With the execution of the ending, I'm going to put my money on "no."

[Gen Petitt]

I think by lit professor he means Aspie yes?

[delta_vee]

andysdead wrote...

I'm glad I'm not the only one who understands these concepts. I am curious as to whether anyone else here has read things like A Cyborg Manifesto or Transcendent Man.

It's been a while since I've read those particular works, but then again I find the up-to-date research more...edifying. Along with things like Shannon's information theory (the source of the term "cybernetics", for those who don't know), a fair amount of neurology, and a good understanding of computability theory. There's far more in play than Kurzweil, Vinge, et al.

EDIT: Everyone should also be required to read Limbo '90 before they read anything Vinge wrote.

I'm *really* curious to know whether any of Bioware's writers have read any of the nonfiction in the transhumanist/posthumanist/whatever genre. With the execution of the ending, I'm going to put my money on "no."

There were obviously some on the writing staff who had. Sadly, they were likely not those involved in the ending.

Modifié par delta_vee, 12 mai 2012 - 06:03 .

[delta_vee]

Addendum:

So I make myself clear, I come from a position of differentiating between transhumansim and the concept of the singularity. The first is a diffuse, ongoing process, the boundaries of which are entirely debatable. The second has already happened - it started with Edison and Tesla and ended with either Oppenheimer or Armstrong, depending on when you want to draw the boundaries.

[edisnooM]

delta_vee wrote...

Addendum:

So I make myself clear, I come from a position of differentiating between transhumansim and the concept of the singularity. The first is a diffuse, ongoing process, the boundaries of which are entirely debatable. The second has already happened - it started with Edison and Tesla and ended with either Oppenheimer or Armstrong, depending on when you want to draw the boundaries.

Sorry just so I'm clear, you think the tech singularity began with the advent of AC / DC and ended with the atomic bomb? 
(Sorry I have no idea who Armstrong is. Neil? Lance?) 

I will admit I find the concept of Tesla as an A.I. fascinating and it would explain a lot about him. 

[CulturalGeekGirl]

Yeah, the definitions of transhumanism, posthumanism, and the singularity are so amorphous it's often quite difficult to have conversations about them.

For me, the Singularity is the creation of any intelligence that is recursively self-improving. This could be organic (a human determines a way to improve human brain function, which makes him smarter, so he comes up with another way to improve human brain function, repeat forever) or synthetic (we get a machine that continually improves its own intelligence.)

However, there are those who define the Singularity as "any technology that transforms human life so greatly that we would no longer recognize it." Some people have used this to mean any technology that is advanced enough to change our essential lifestyle, but Verner Vinge, the man who brought the idea of the technological singularity into the mainstream, argues that it is the recursive, self-improving superintelligence that creates the "true" singularity.

Modifié par CulturalGeekGirl, 12 mai 2012 - 07:35 .

[drayfish]

MetioricTest wrote...
 
People will hate me for saying this but the fan reaction to the ending of Mass Effect 3 has been more entertaining than any ending they could have made lol

Hi MetioricTest.  And yes, I must admit (as I'm sure all people on all sides of these debates would agree): I hate that it had to be Mass Effect that sparked such controversy. But, of course, in many ways it had to be; I struggle to imagine any other videogame property evoking enough investment and passion to warrant this expansive a discussion. Ironically it's just further confirmation of how marvellous this fiction has always been. ...But damnit, why, Videogame Gods? Why couldn't you take Red Dead Redemption 2 instead?!?
 
(And nice Iphigenia reference delta_vee... There's a curious Trojan undercurrent – the Aeneid, the Odyssey, the Iliad – bubbling throughout this thread. I like it.)
 
Having loved this franchise dearly for so long, I would have delighted in savouring every second of all three games without reservation (and I can still see how people can take that journey all the way – I'm both heartened by and shamelessly jealous of them).  But if I divorce myself from my own personal response, I must admit that these contentious conclusions have offered the opportunity for a serious discussion about the validity of games as an art form, and the necessary relationship between artists, texts, and audiences – and that is always a good thing.
 
 
p.s. – Just wanted to add: one of my favourite minor details about being part of this thread, is that I have now picked up using the moniker 'Harby' when thinking of Harbinger, and in my mind he now lives a much richer, varied life – with cereal, a wife, a speech impediment, a mortgage, maybe even a slight paunch – than he even did in the game. Thank you all.
 
p.p.s – This does not mean that I need the DLC to contain Harby going about his daily routine; flossing; buying 2% milk; having his yearly check-up and prostate exam:
 
DOCTOR: 'And if you could just lower your trousers, Mr. Harbinger-of-Your-Perfection.'
 
HARBY: 'This.  Hurts.  You...'

Modifié par drayfish, 12 mai 2012 - 08:42 .

[NorDee65]

@Hawk227
to me it is not so much a question, which scientific theory/idea could have worked out better, since both are still only theories, with one being better thought out. The difference seems to me that the "storyline that could have been" would have portrayed the Reapers in an ambigous light, thus it would have created interesting villains (like Loghain or the Glorious Stragetist from DA:O and Jade Empire respectively). The "storyline that is", however created villains. Period. To make them more interesting, to give them more depth, more background information, more hints to "technological singularity" or "transhumanism" in the previous games and in ME3 itself might have worked.  As it is this suddenly and surprisingly introduced "new" concept for the Reapers' motivation created a sudden distance to the whole experience.

[delta_vee]

 

edisnooM wrote...

Sorry just so I'm clear, you think the tech singularity began with the advent of AC / DC and ended with the atomic bomb? (Sorry I have no idea who Armstrong is. Neil? Lance?)

Pretty much. The atomic bomb or the moon landing (I lean towards the latter). You can debate the start point, too - you can peg it at Curie or Pasteur or Cantor or even Gatling if you're military-minded. I usually go with my trinity of Edison, Telsa and Turing, though, if only for the poetics.

The point is that in less than a hundred years we got automobiles, aircraft, spacecraft, antibiotics, air conditioning, machineguns, tanks, radio, television, computers, rockets, nukes, quantum mechanics, relativity, set theory, and standardized shipping containers. (Don't discount that last one, by the by.) If that isn't a point of technological progress which changes everything and is impossible to predict past, I don't know what is.

CulturalGeekGirl wrote...

However, there are those who define the Singularity as "any technology that transforms human life so greatly that we would no longer recognize it." Some people have used this to mean any technology that is advanced enough to change our essential lifestyle, but Verner Vinge, the man who brought the idea of the technological singularity into the mainstream, argues that it is the recursive, self-improving superintelligence that creates the "true" singularity.

I don't believe it's any one technology so much as a set of overlapping ones. What always fascinated me was the interplay of various breakthroughs during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, feeding on and enabling each other. If you haven't already, I'd highly recommend reading John Gribbin's In Search of Schrodinger's Cat, which gives a stupendous history of the evolution of quantum theory, and makes clear how disparate breakthroughs are woven together.

As far as the Singularity goes, I'm skeptical of pretty much all of its base assumptions. Technological progress usually follows log-normal or power-law distributions, not exponential, as the physical or theoretical limitations of new advances are approached and progress becomes a matter of incremental improvement - tuning and tweaking, as it were. (See the design of aircraft, firearms, transistors, data structure algorithms, and nuclear power, among many other examples.) Even Moore's Law, so famously extrapolated by Kurzweil, is currently falling apart at the seams in chip design, where process shrinks are harder to come by each iteration, and where power consumption and multicore designs are now the primary focus. (It was always a rule-of-thumb at best, anyways.) And most importantly, perhaps, AI research keeps floundering at Strong AI (or rather, most AI researchers have moved away from such fruitless pursuits to focus on expert systems). We still subsist on algorithms discovered in the Heroic Age of programmers (Knuth, et al), perhaps layered and combined but never superseded. We are no closer to Strong AI than we were when The Age of Intelligent Machines first appeared. We may, in fact, be further from it. The final nail in the coffin, for myself at least, is that Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem suggests the theoretical impossibility of the kind of recursive self-improvement required - no system can understand itself fully, therefore how can an incomplete system improve itself? (And before the inevitable rejoinder, evolution is a different beast, reliant upon variability and external pressures, and maddeningly vague about what consitutes "improvement".) I'm with Hofstadter in how to view intelligence - as a shifting, recursive, self-referential, inherently emergent thing - and I concur with his doubt it can be bottled and bootstrapped in the fashion the Singularity requires.

My two fractional units of currency, anyways.

drayfish wrote...

But damnit, why, Videogame Gods? Why couldn't you take Red Dead Redemption 2 instead?!?

There's a slim chance the Extended Cut could be our Artemis, miraculously replacing our cherished games with a more palatable sacrifice, but I doubt it. Euripides knew the score, and we should too.

NorDee65 wrote...

 The "storyline that is", however created villains. Period. To make them more interesting, to give them more depth, more background information, more hints to "technological singularity" or "transhumanism" in the previous games and in ME3 itself might have worked. As it is this suddenly and surprisingly introduced "new" concept for the Reapers' motivation created a sudden distance to the whole experience.

Quoted for truth.

Modifié par delta_vee, 12 mai 2012 - 06:34 .

[Hawk227]

NorDee65 wrote...

@Hawk227
to me it is not so much a question, which scientific theory/idea could have worked out better, since both are still only theories, with one being better thought out. The difference seems to me that the "storyline that could have been" would have portrayed the Reapers in an ambigous light, thus it would have created interesting villains (like Loghain or the Glorious Stragetist from DA:O and Jade Empire respectively). The "storyline that is", however created villains. Period. To make them more interesting, to give them more depth, more background information, more hints to "technological singularity" or "transhumanism" in the previous games and in ME3 itself might have worked.  As it is this suddenly and surprisingly introduced "new" concept for the Reapers' motivation created a sudden distance to the whole experience.

I have mixed feelings on elaborating on the motives of the Reapers.

Personally, my favorite moment in the entire trilogy was the conversation with Sovereign on Virmire. I really liked the simple, unknowable, Lovecraftian villain that reaps simply because it can (or to reproduce, as ME2 hinted). I liked that they were "beyond our comprehension". I think too much effort to justify their existence, whether it was the Dark Energy plot line or the Synthetics vs. Organics plotline, is doomed to failure. I wonder how many people left the Sanctuary mission thinking "Yeah, the ends justified the means in that case". I would assume few, and the horrors committed by Cerberus on Horizon paled in comparison to anything the Reapers have ever done. They are the greatest war criminals of all time. They accomplish in a few days what Hitler did in total, and each cycle lasts years and the process has been repeated 20,000 times. Trillions of souls have been assimilated or vaporized over the course of a billion years. They are utterly irredeemable. . For more on this point I'll refer back to a wonderful post by Sable Phoenix.

I will say that I think the Dark Energy plot would have been better than what we got, but that is more a reflection of how awful what we got was. Had the Dark Energy justification been in game, I still would have been pretty upset (for reasons already stated), just not as upset.

I also think that the series does give us interesting (and perhaps sympathetic) villains in the form of The Illusive Man and Saren. Both were renegades, doing what they thought was best for humanity/organic life, but but they were driven to evil not because they were evil, but because their minds had been corrupted by the influence of the Reapers.

That said, I think their existence could have been explained without "justification" for their actions in something akin to the Technological Singularity, and it would have played out fine. I imagine in such a scenario, the Reapers were born out of Technological Singularity a billion years ago, and in a move towards self preservation they harvest civilization every 50k years to increase their numbers and prevent any rival post singularity race from developing. For me, though, it wasn't necessary. Sovereign had already firmly established their enigmatic and frightening nature.

Modifié par Hawk227, 12 mai 2012 - 11:03 .