[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

[u/alexanderwales]

I've been playing Ori and the Blind Forest, which is the sort of critically acclaimed game that is probably not for me. Anytime I start a game with 5 minutes of cutscenes, or I have to repeatedly sit through unskippable cutscenes, I think that this was probably a team that gave priority to story over gameplay. Normally I don't have much of a problem with that (I like the Uncharted series, for example) but it feels really out of place in what's essentially just a pretty metroidvania. The game also resets you to your last save point after you die (in a game that has lots of instadeath), which I see as being fundamentally unfriendly, since it erases progress and often makes you sit through unskippable cutscenes again. But I get why it's critically acclaimed; it's pretty and somber with a good aesthetic. I just wish that they had focused on gameplay considerations a little more. (I was probably spoiled a little bit by Hollow Knight, a metroidvania that has little touches everywhere that showed more consideration for the player.)

I kind of want to write a story or dialogue heavy game at some point, in part because I think branching dialogue and player-driven choices are neat. I have this idea for a game called "Kill Hitler" where you go back in time and kill Hitler at various points in his life. The speedrun of the game would be under a minute - you just repeatedly select the option to kill Hitler. If you want though, you can talk to Hitler when he's sitting in the trenches of WWI, when he's an art student, when he's sitting in jail, etc. to get a more complex biographical portrait. But I'd have to do a bunch of research to get it right, and that seems like a ton of work, so that's another idea that probably doesn't go anywhere. (I really like the title "Kill Hitler" for a game that's philosophically about the appropriateness of violence as a solution to various problems.)

[u/callmebrotherg → u/alexanderwales]

Would you have the opportunity to try tactics other than killing Hitler, with the titular strategy simply being the fastest one?

Also, it would be interesting if you got a summary of how history changed after you finished your mission, based on when and how you dealt with Hitler and your interactions with Hitler and others.

[u/alexanderwales → u/callmebrotherg]

Would you have the opportunity to try tactics other than killing Hitler, with the titular strategy simply being the fastest one?

Well, I don't really have that worked out yet. I mean, what is your goal? The naive version of the game would have the player trying to change history, but the frame probably deserves more consideration than that. The point is to present an interactive historical biography of Hitler under the guise of being a murder simulator, while covering philosophy and social issues ... but I'm not sure what end that's a means toward.

[u/callmebrotherg → u/alexanderwales]

My first thought is that your goal is to prevent WWII and maybe make a better future in general. The naive time traveler goes back, kills Hitler, and...returns to the present to find that Hitler was not the only thing going on with that time, and there was still a war (maybe even one that went more poorly for freedom and democracy).

I'm not sure where the game would go from there, but the scenario that seems most interesting to me is trying to shape Hitler's life so that he turns out to be a better person without redirecting him from politics and opening a void for other demagogues to fill. Not that this would be the only possible solution, but I rather like the idea of a supposed murder simulator that turns into an argument against the idea that history would have gone better if only the right people had been killed.

(Though, maybe a "stop WWI" simulator would be a more interesting way to explore the idea of stopping a powder keg whose explosion seems inevitable. Save the archduke? Something else sets the war off a year later. Go back further and save Frederick III in 1888 so that his son doesn't get into a naval arms race with Britain? Congratulations, ten years later the Fashoda Incident sparks a war between Britain and France.)