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"Real" Real Time Strategy?
Mr. Fluffyhead writes "This hardcore RTS gamer's rather thoughtful wish list asks the question, if somebody made a 'real' war sim, would anyone want to play it?" From the fake Newsweek cover story about the "Ultralisk Rape Scandal" to Mr. Wong's yearning to break the Geneva Convention in pixel form, this one's a humourous yet realistic look at real time war games.
Now where have we seen the "Fog of Bullshit" before.... *wink* *wink*
I have always thought that a realistic real-time war sim would be nothing like the Warcraft/Comand & Conquer type games, because those give you way too much control. In real warfare you can't control individual soldiers. As a general you can map out a very general battle plan, and then kind of sit back and hope it works out. Even with the best communcation systems in place at best you could give orders to individual soldiers, but you wouldn't have any control over how they carried them out.
Now, how much fun is it to play a game where you basically sit back and watch the action, rather than being able to interact with it?
You can't justify torture, but you can point out hypocrisy and put said torture in perspective.
Of course you can justify torture. It's not even hard.
Example: you have, in your custody, a person who set a bomb. You don't know where that bomb is, but you know it exists and you know that the person in your custody set it. You also know that it's going to go off at some point in the future and kill people. If it's a nuclear bomb, it might kill millions of people.
Ta-da: torturing that guy is justified.
Sure, that's an extreme example. I made it simple so we don't have to tackle the question of what "torture" means exactly.
Example: is putting somebody in a cell and leaving him there, without light or human contact, for an extended period of time "torture?"
What about depriving somebody of sleep for an extending period of time? Is that "torture?"
When we think of "torture," we think of a car battery to the scrotum or bamboo shoots under the fingernails. We think of injury, and in the worst cases, life-threatening or permanently crippling injury.
But there are lots of ways to make people uncomfortable that don't involve injury. Sleep-deprivation is one. Exposure to heat or cold is another. Extended periods of solitude, or nakedness, or loud noise. None of these things is harmful in any physiological sense. They're just unpleasant.
Have you ever had a toothache? It doesn't hurt very much, but the thing is that it never stops. It never lets up. So it's a killer.
You can convince somebody to give you information by exposing them to a low level of discomfort for a long time. Is this "torture?"
I have no problem at all with torture, in the sense of the application of non-injuring discomfort. It's prison, not church camp. You shouldn't expect to be comfortable.
Now, cutting off limbs or applying electricity or fire... that's another question. Sure, it can be justified under certain circumstances, but it's much harder to excuse at least.
I write in my journal
I've always wanted to see a multilevel MMO game that was playable as RTS (decides where units are sent), FPS (play as an individual in the unit), vehicle sim (pilot or drive something), or engineer/artist (create more buildings/items/stuff).
At the simplest level, you'd have RTS'ers engaged in some massive war at a high level, ordering troops around and sending out objectives, while the FPS'ers charged in with the vehicle players to try to take their objectives. The depth and randomness created by making all the footsoldiers real people would be almost like reality, although you'd probably have more "i'm stuck running in a corner" than in real life.
The fact that he is doing it in the form of a questionably 'funny' video game list, and that it was posted here as a games topic is pretty lame.