Sylvius the Mad wrote...
You often point ouf that the player-invented backgrounds were not supported by the game. And I wonder why. Because no one disagrees with you. I would even describe this repeated assertion of yours as a non sequiter.
But even you argue that DA:O supported player-invented backgrounds. Your position is that "support" means something other than "have the game react to", but that's a very different debate. I'm not contesting that "support" in this sense shouldn't mean allow the possibility for". Rather, I'm contesting the aspects of the game that
actually lead a person to believe that DA:O is different somehow in its support from DA2.
And the answer is that people, someone, think that they can more easily ignore the set, established and absolute parts of DA:O re: the Warden's traits, personality and background. It's predetermined to the same extent as DA2 for any one origin, but somehow (some) players find the mental gymnastics unpalpatable in DA2 that they engaged in for DA:O.
]Whether the player-invented backgrounds are supported was never an issue. What matters is whether the player-invented backgrounds were ever permitted. The difference between DA2 and DAO, on this point, is that DA2 actively prohibits these backgrounds, while DAO did not.
DA:O also actively prohibits the backgrounds. You just engage in arbitrary mental gymnastics to ignore those parts of DA:O that prohibited them, and overstate the prohibition in DA23.
You're treating support for a feature like the only alternative to prohibition, demonstrating a lack of support, and then declaring yourself the victor. But you're excluding the middle unduly. There's a middle ground between prohibition and support, and that middle ground is where every BioWare game was until they started voicing the PC.
No, there isn't. That "middle" is just the incoherent standard that you (and others) apply to the "neccesarily implicated" and "explicit", which arises from the completely arbitrary standard that you use to ignore (what is effectively) objective reality in-game.
A great example your follow-up post. You're happy to assume that all NPCs are socially incompetent and unhigned liars, but you refuse (for example) to just refuse to believe what is shown on the game screen explicitly. But there's no actual reason to distinguish between these two different ways to (effectively) deny real
I insist that you have never shown that, however. There are specific sets of beliefs and specific personality designs that are excluded (which are particularly troublesome with the city elf origin), but not one is ever required. DAO grants the player a range (sometimes quite a narrow range) in which to create the PC's personality. DA2, however, grants the player no leeway at all - indeed, DA2 denies the player any direct control of his character in conversations.
You're just wrong on this point, but there's no way to have a conversation because the standard you apply - beside not even being internally consistent when it comes to the presumptions it makes about how logic works - draws an arbitrary post-hoc distinction between what features of reality you can deny (i.e., the tone that necessarily accompanies the text with the tone that explicitly accompanies the test).
I disagree with this, as well. First, since there's no way to know why other people say what they say, there's no need to make any such assumptions.
People behave according to very well established social and sociological standards. There's a reason why the entire Alienage, for example, doesn't run around naked, caked in mud, and doesn't publically defacate on their children. Or why a character smiling at you isn't an automatic challenge to mortal combat with rusty butcher cleavers.
Everything you believe about society is wrong. But because of the standard you illogically and inconsistently apply to "know" things, you've set up your beliefs in such a way that they're impossible to disprove.
Second, even if we do assume them to be liars (the easiest assumption of those you listed), there are a great many reasons for people to lie about a great many things. You're treating this assumption of lying like it's somehow a revolutionary way to look at people. Why? Would you ordinarily assume that they were telling the truth? I certainly wouldn't. I have no idea why people say what they say, and neither do you (well, you might have an idea, but that idea is foundationless).
See, this is a great example of the sort of vacuous analysis you apply to social interaction. Without writing a treatise on all human society, let's me try and explain it to you this way:
1) Cooperation is important to the functioning of society. There are lots of benefits to cooperating - this is how society operates, via division of labour.
2) A precondition to cooperation is trust. The prisoner's dillema illustrates this - lots of gains from trust, but no reasons not to trust.
3) Lying is complex, and the morality of lying is complex, but demonstrating a tendency to lie over, say, trivial matters where there is no discernable gain makes one untrustworthy, i.e., not well-suited to cooperate.
4) This leads to social isolation - we ignore the things that liars tell us (because we have no reason to believe them to be true and no basis on which to investigate them), we ignore dealing with liars (because there is no reason to believe we will not be cheated) and so liars end up socially isolated (to varying degrees).
For someone to randomly invent things about the background of someone they don't know, and then tell that person invented things that they've done in the past, is just such a deviation from basic social behaviour that it requires a great deal of explanation.
We either have to know how this entire society hasn't collapsed on itself, or why this person hasn't been forcefully evicted, or why they haven't just been declared (or honestly aren't) outright crazy.
But you're perfectly happy assuming all of this things, and creating a setting that is an incoherent jumble of non-functional contradictions, because you take the absence of an explicit contradition for your theories as proof of their authority.
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