On Resonance and terrorismTwo things: large-scale, long-term. Also, since I'm lazy, Moral Compass Guy to the rescue.
Let's make a wild and crazy assumption about Good: being Good means that you're making the world a nicer place. People live longer, have more fun, are less afraid, enjoy their surroundings, and their company a little more. That's Good. Sounds like a pretty valid assumption, neh? It's unprovable, and that's why it's an assumption, but as assumptions go it isn't bad.
Here's where things get unpopular: You know how when you're driving a car you can choose to turn right, you can choose to turn left, and you can choose to go straight? What do you do to the steering wheel to go straight? Nothing. And if you hit someone by not turning the car, that's an action on your part, right? Doing nothing is a choice, and it's an action, and the consequences of that action are on your conscience.
So being Good doesn't mean that you solve all the problems, it means that you actively solve more problems than you cause by a substantial margin. That you don't shrink back from doing Good for others, that you take some responsibility for making the world a better place.
Trolley problem9/11 was a terrible tragedy. However, I happen to notice that airplanes are still not banned and people fly of their own free will, because the benefit of airplanes far outweighs the possibility of someone crashing them into buildings.
(A less extreme example is fireworks. Fireworks kill and traumatize people every year, but we're not banning them because we consider the entertainment factor to be worth more than the human lives lost to them.)
But human perception is weird: since then, many more people died
in the course of natural disasters due to
entirely preventable causes and
in the aftermath of natural disasters, and yet 9/11 stands out.
MonkeysphereDunbar's numberEverything is an optimization problem. (I refuse to supply the obvious quote from Resonance here.)
Every action, every decision has risk associated with it: say, 1/10000. On a small scale, if nothing happens, you won't notice. If the dreaded event comes to pass, you'll think, "aw, that was a bad decision, I must have underestimated the risk involved". (You wouldn't know the truth, whether you actually underestimated the risk or just got unlucky, because the sample size - you - is too small.)
Once you're doing something on a global scale, you can actually get accurate figures and see which decisions cause people to live longer and be healthier and happier. In non-euphemistic terms, it means
people DIE no matter what you choose to do, and if you want the best for humanity, you should choose the outcome where
fewer of them die.
And yes, that means that if you do something - anything, really - you'll be blamed for the deaths of whoever has died, but if you don't do anything and *more* people die, it's very likely you won't be blamed at all.
Anyway, Good is hard. That's why more people don't do it.
Suppose you need to build a powerplant. Which one? A reactor can melt down and/or leak radiation and there's the problem of nuclear waste, a coal plant emits poisonous smoke, a hydroelectric plant destroys ecosystems and reduces biodiversity, etc. Each of those has projected costs and projected returns. Even solar panels are not harmless, not to mention not eternal.
Ursula Le Guin's "forsaken child" is the most ethical power source imaginable.
Now, the projections are always subject to fudging and mispresentation, which is a known problem called "conflict of interest". That doesn't mean we should stop predicting, any more than 9/11 means we should stop flying.
It's very human for Dr. Morales to not want to have his name attached to a specific act of intentional violence. However, that directly leads to
many more people dying in less spectacular, shamefully underreported ways. It's also very human of him to think he can't usher in a new age of prosperity if he couldn't even take care of his daughter. But this is why we have the government.
Can crazy assholes get access to Resonance devices and blow up something? Why, sure. But that's a risk we can take. We have had satellites and fusion bombs for decades, and yet no terrorist group mounted a fusion bomb on a satellite. The most aggressive action anyone did was using railguns to chuck rocks at American sats' optics. There's still a
stupid amount of nuclear warheads in the world NOT providing unlimited clean energy and not one has been launched unauthorized.
Consider North Korea. It's a proven crazy dictatorship, and it survives due to being a geopolitical meme, as a symbol of opposition to America (showing token support to North Korea is how nations show they will be willing to help each other against the USA, if push comes to shove), and keeping a low profile. If they started throwing their minuscule weight around, they'd be immediately disowned as a token, with everything that entails. They don't, because the people in power like being in power, and other nations do not interfere, as they don't want to disrupt the geopolitical balance and risk their own wellbeing just to help some foreigners they don't care about.
On overpopulation
We actually see a downward trend among the second generation of city folk. Educated people tend to have fewer children. The last population explosion was due to enhanced agricultural techniques that provided food for poor children who would "normally" die. And that's why I said second generation: first another population explosion (the children who would've otherwise died will grow to adulthood), then an exponential downward trend.
Note the map here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#GrowthMore links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertilityhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradoxBack to Resonance:
Preserving the status quo is a moral choice. You do not get a discount because
you didn't do anything. Poverty by itself kills orders of magnitude more people that all the terrorists in the world, even without taking into account violent crime (which correlates). Destroying a marvellous invention that can drastically reduce human suffering is cowardly, selfish, and evil. (Dr. Morales' situation is not
that clear-cut, because he knew shady people were following him. Still - he could have asked the authorities for protection. We know the world is not dystopian for it to be useless, since in ending #2 Antevorta got taken out by a single blogger
after its ascension to power.)
Recommended adventure gamesObvious
Blackwell anything (really, WadjetEye anything)
Note on order of playing: Having started playing in the past millennium, without access to hints and working versions, I played serialized games out of order or simultaneously and considered it normal. There are two types of suspense - one, when you don't know what's coming, and two, when you do know but the characters don't. Want to play the latest installment? Play it. Prefer to play in order? Buy the other games, the bundle is good value for money.
Classic
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis: three plot branches with multiple solutions. Effectively, the game constantly references itself with clever subversions. On Steam for, err,
money (

) - in fact, get LucasArts adventure pack for, errr, $7? (I hate regional pricing.)
Gabriel Knight I: supernatural Danbrownesque thriller. Not much in the way of ethics, kinda preachy, but solid puzzles. $5.99 on GOG. For a European take on the genre, see the Broken Sword series.
King's Quest VI: fairytale adventure, play it for the individual puzzles, because the overarching plot logic is an oldschool screw-you call-the-hotline money-grubbing mess. 4+5+6 in a $9.99 bundle on GOG.
King's Quest episodic fangames: can't beat the price. FREE on
www.tsl-game.comLoom: short, sweet, zen, lyrical, quotable. But short. Was intended to be the first part of a trilogy, stands on its own. No explanation of the ending! On Steam.
Funny
Space Quest 4: other Space Quest games are cynical, this one is heartwarming. 4+5+6 for $9.99 on GOG.
Escape from St. Mary's: Think "Ferris Bueller stuck in school". Text adventure, but you get to pick your options from a list, no typing needed. Minimal mapping. FREE.
Zork: Grand Inquisitor: wacky, fourth-wall-breaking graphical adventure. Familiarity with Zork text adventures not required. $5.99 on GOG.
Mindblowing
Spider and Web is widely considered to be the best text adventure ever. Some of Resonance's themes are present. Keyboard input, but, being a modern text adventure, it doesn't have Infocom's guess-the-verb problems. FREE.
Planescape:Torment is nominally an RPG. It takes place in a magical city at the center of the world (but not really) where various philosophies are having an eternal free-for-all, and your goal is
to die. $9.99 on GOG.
Immortal Defense is a tower defense game with timed missions, quite possibly the most mindblowing game ever. In three years since I first played it I ran out of words to describe how awesome it is, so
here's a link to review snippets and the store (PWYW, min. $1.75).
Special mention:
Perils of Akumos: sci-fi thriller (but stop-the-bad-guys-and-be-awesome all the way, no moral choices). Text adventure, pick options from a list. Supposedly tied into some sort of mindblowing metaplot 12 years in the making. FREE.
Special mention 2:
Dragonsphere: fantasy adventure, remarkable in how badly it dated due to being HARDCORE AS HELL. Logical but very unforgiving. Free on GOG.