Favorite Death Penalty Systems?

Discussion in 'All Things LitRPG' started by RandomFan, Mar 8, 2018.

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  1. MrPotatoMan

    MrPotatoMan Level 13 (Assassin) Citizen

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    but what about when people start killing themselves in dumb ways for convenience or fun. Its also important to mention we aren't just talking about nerotypicals here what about teenagers/young adults with poor implies control what about people who arent thinking straight like the suicidal its also important to mention desensitization would definitely take effect in some scenarios and who's to say there wont be games that look like earth with added mechanics that would definitely make it probable people would get confused. and really how often does this need to happen before people start limiting it there hasent been a good case against games and yet still violent video games got regulated i would be suprised if true VR didnt get highly regulated in the first month of its existance
     
  2. ChamomileHasANovel

    ChamomileHasANovel Level 7 (Cutpurse) Beta Reader Citizen

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    You really don't seem to be getting this: You can't just assume that would happen. That contradicts everything we know both about human psychology and game design. People will not do this. There is no reason why they would. The whole concept is nonsense.
     
    Last edited: Mar 28, 2018
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  3. CheshirePhoenix

    CheshirePhoenix Crazy Hermit on the Hill LitRPG Author Beta Reader Citizen Editor Aspiring Writer

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    If you take away the fear of death though, then everything changes. And we can’t predict how because it’s such a fundamental change.
     
  4. ChamomileHasANovel

    ChamomileHasANovel Level 7 (Cutpurse) Beta Reader Citizen

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    If. People already use video games and movies to activate their natural fear response for giggles. That and vague, confusing lore is all that Five Nights at Freddy's is, and it's not like the jump scares don't work. If you leap out at someone and shout "boo!" you will trigger their survival reaction to sudden, loud noises. You will trigger it even though there is never any real danger, and every "death" just reaffirms to them that they are safe in their house playing video games and not actually in a haunted pizzeria. These people do not subsequently step in front of a bus because they have lost their fear of death, even though they have that fear triggered by false alarms all the time, on purpose. The only way someone could plausibly be killed stepping in front of a bus due to full dive VR is if actually stepping in front of a bus was a regular occurrence in a game that mimicked their real life routine well enough that they might plausibly do it on autopilot, without thinking. For that to happen, someone would have to voluntarily spend massive amounts of their time in a game whose hook is that you are in a regular city with no superpowers or other special abilities, enough time to get the Tetris Effect from it. Someone who gets used to being eaten by a dragon or crushed by boulders isn't going to step in front of a bus because they have no muscle memory related to buses, so they would have to consciously decide to use death as fast travel despite clearly not being in Azeroth right now. I can imagine there existing a few people that stupid, but I can't imagine there being so many of them that we notice a nationwide pandemic of them rather than wondering why the Hell Bob stepped in front of a bus and never getting an answer because it never happens again.

    For the "step in front of a bus to fast travel" thing to actually happen, it'd have to be working on people's automatic, reflexive responses - the kind of thing where you're driving to your friend's house and then find yourself accidentally driving to work instead, because you do that more often. But you don't do that unless the routes overlap. If you're in a completely different part of the city, you won't start navigating to work without realizing it, because for that kind of reflexive behavior to happen, you have to be in a very familiar environment. Imagine if someone made a version of Grand Theft Auto where you have no weapons, have to obey the law, and have no HUD. Why would this game be so popular that people who play it so often they end up defaulting to in-game behaviors without thinking about it in the real world are so common that they become an epidemic worthy of government intervention? Bear in mind that MMOs have actually killed a few people and government response has been a shrug of the shoulders - it's not the greater community's responsibility to take care of people who play video games for three days straight until they die. The "people stepping in front of buses" problem would have to be significantly more widespread before it faces any kind of regulation, but I find it hard to imagine that the "exactly like real life to the point where your subconscious could plausibly confuse one for the other" game would have a big enough subscriber base to be considered a problem even if it killed literally everyone who played it for longer than a month.
     
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  5. Dragovian

    Dragovian Over-enthusiastic Tank wtb Pocket Healer LitRPG Author Beta Reader Citizen

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    But WOULD it take away the fear of death? I mean, I don't even like jumping off high places in WoW, and that's a game where the graphics are so-so and I play a race with decreased falling damage. I know I CAN jump off the walkway to get to the Stormwind docks faster, but it makes my stomach drop every time I do it. I don't think making the game VR would make me more inclined to jump off a four story building IRL; I think it would make me less likely to take that particular shortcut in game.
     
  6. CheshirePhoenix

    CheshirePhoenix Crazy Hermit on the Hill LitRPG Author Beta Reader Citizen Editor Aspiring Writer

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    Consider the Persona franchise - a game where you spend roughly half the time as exactly that: a person in a mundane setting with no special powers or abilities.

    Hell, they even use actual, real landmarks and locations in their game. And as I recall, in one of the games in the Persona franchise, you activated your special powers by literally taking out a gun analogue and shooting yourself in the head with it.

    And as far as jump scares and conditioning goes, I’ll counter that example with any soldier that’s ever been in a FOB that got shelled a lot. Ask them how easy it gets to sleep through mortar barrages, because it does. Hell, I’ve done it (albeit I was in a tank at the time, so naturally I felt quite a bit more secure, given the armor on an Abrams).

    You can get used to anything, given enough time and repetition. Exposure therapy is already an accepted treatment for phobias, where they expose you to whatever you’re afraid of until you’re not afraid of it anymore. If you get used to dying in a hyper-realistic game, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the game started to merge with reality. It all comes down to our brains being really bad at telling the difference between reality and the perception of reality, and if it’s thrown into a Persona style alternate reality, then it wouldn’t be a stretch to see people getting confused beteeen the two.

    There are more examples, like say, Assassin’s Creed and the like, but for an oddball one that you’d think could never happen in reality, ever, consider the Mercedes Lackey “Guardians” series of novels. They were urban fantasy novels that confused people and had them firmly believing that Ms Lackey was a good witch whose job it was to protect the world from evil, all while remaining in the shadows. Basically, a Wicca-based superhero.

    It got to the point where she had to add more and more high fantasy elements to it, write a disclaimer, and explain all about it in the author’s afterword. But even THAT didn’t help, so it brought down two of her series.

    There are also people out there that believe they can talk to their horses via telepathy, again because of things they read in a fantasy novel once.

    So yeah, I can see dippity dumbass offing themselves out of a case of terminal stupidity. I can also see normal people getting confused between the game and reality after long term exposure to a game that uses real world elements to it and is hyper-realistic.
     
  7. ChamomileHasANovel

    ChamomileHasANovel Level 7 (Cutpurse) Beta Reader Citizen

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    It's also a franchise where you can't fast travel by getting yourself killed. Where, in fact, you spend most of your mundane world time becoming friends with people in order to grant yourself superpowers in the non-mundane world. At no stage is stepping in front of a bus an advisable course of action, let alone one that you take so often that it could plausibly become automatic. And you'd probably have a HUD, which makes it immediately obvious where you are on a subconscious level. Even if everyone in the future wears Google glasses with a real world HUD, it's a different HUD.

    That'll be a big problem for all the real life super heroes who need to activate their super powers and accidentally pull out a gun and shoot themselves instead. We might see a real need for legislation if the demographic of people who carry sidearms on their person and also have and use super powers in real life is big enough.

    You say "counter" but unless you've stepped in front of a bus because you've forgotten that you're mortal, you're actually arguing for my point, not against it. If there's no amount of being shot at by actual mortars that will cause people to believe they are invulnerable to buses (and there is not), then there is certainly no amount of being eaten by dragons in Azeroth that will cause people to do so.

    How many of them stepped in front of a bus, or killed someone, or took some other kind of actually drastic action because of it? People's crazy beliefs almost never inform their actions. A psuedo-religious movement of full dive obsessives who believe they're traveling through the collective subconscious and the "real world" is just a hub, no more real than Azeroth or Tyria, that's perfectly believable as a thing that could happen. There'd be a lot of cringy, gullible teenagers involved, and half of them would only claim to believe it to feel special while being fully aware it's all fake. If a cult guru wanted to, he could radicalize the other half into a suicide cult, but he could also do that with Christianity or Wicca or whatever, so the introduction of full dive tech isn't changing anything but the flavor. Without the intervention of an actual cult maniac, though? A bunch of people will engage in magical thinking while otherwise being totally normal citizens, and there won't be any more reason for the government to intervene in VR than in crystal healing. At worst, you might get something like the Slender killings, where a couple of people go full psychopath, build a narrative for their bloodlust around some element of pop culture, and a couple of dumbasses become convinced that pop culture is brainwashing children into becoming murderers - but they're wrong, and the government isn't going to regulate profitable businesses on their demands unless, for some reason, six weeks of moral outrage from loud but impotent minorities has gotten way more compelling as a political motivator by the time full dive is invented.
     
  8. ChamomileHasANovel

    ChamomileHasANovel Level 7 (Cutpurse) Beta Reader Citizen

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    No. Your objections are so obviously incoherent and unrelated to the conversation that I am not going to waste time addressing them.
     
  9. MrPotatoMan

    MrPotatoMan Level 13 (Assassin) Citizen

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    Cults commuting mass suicide/murder, Fans going crazy over a celebrity, People killing others over minor differences These are all examples of peoples crazy beliefs causing them to take drastic action which I think refutes your point if a game provably increases the rates of stuff like that you bet its gonna be regulated and any vr thing that good will be hard to psychologically separate from reality how safe would you feel if you knew you had a 5% chance of going crazy/dieing from playing a video game would you play it?

    Part of what im trying to say is that you all might be sane but there are a lot of people who are either not sane enough or not smart enough to know better sure it might seem like noone would kill themselves because they thought they would be revived but is there any actually evidence to suggest that dyeing in a way that feels real wouldent make people more ready to die for real if not simply because they had already experienced it once?
     
    Last edited: Apr 13, 2018
  10. ChamomileHasANovel

    ChamomileHasANovel Level 7 (Cutpurse) Beta Reader Citizen

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    You don't seem to be getting this. Your objections are either the product of a mind too crippled to make even basic connections to reality or else blatantly dishonest - and my experience is that the latter is true far more often than the former. I am past the point of giving a single f**k what you have to say.
     
  11. CheshirePhoenix

    CheshirePhoenix Crazy Hermit on the Hill LitRPG Author Beta Reader Citizen Editor Aspiring Writer

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    You’ve Godwin’d the thread. Pretty sure the discussion counts as over and you should go to your neutral corners.
     
  12. MrPotatoMan

    MrPotatoMan Level 13 (Assassin) Citizen

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    In a final attempt to communicate is there something im missing about your point? What your saying seems to be that people wont be driven to drastic action by VR because people don't do drastic things based on there beliefs, or is your point more that games cant drive them to those places because games don't encourage that kind of thing?
     
  13. ChamomileHasANovel

    ChamomileHasANovel Level 7 (Cutpurse) Beta Reader Citizen

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    You are drawing a comparison between a video game and the Third Reich. That doesn't demand rebuttal. It is immediately obviously false.
     
  14. Paul Bellow

    Paul Bellow Forum Game Master Staff Member LitRPG Author Shop Owner Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    We can all agree to disagree too. Let's not get personal. We're having fun here. ;)

    ::PAL::
     
  15. ChamomileHasANovel

    ChamomileHasANovel Level 7 (Cutpurse) Beta Reader Citizen

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    You're still not getting this. I don't care if you're going to back up and pretend you aren't willing to equate between video games and Nazis. That is already a thing you did, it is disgustingly dishonest, and I do not care what you have to say anymore.

    And no, the point at which someone is lobbing accusations of that grade around because God forbid they lose an internet argument is way past the point of "we're just having fun." It's like saying "whoa, guys, simmer down" after someone's been punched in the face. This level of clearly demonstrated intent to exploit civility is not something that can be resolved by calling for more civility so it can be further exploited.
     
  16. Paul Bellow

    Paul Bellow Forum Game Master Staff Member LitRPG Author Shop Owner Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    It's never too late to ask for civility.
     
  17. MrPotatoMan

    MrPotatoMan Level 13 (Assassin) Citizen

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    Ok I want to make this as clear as possible I was not equating video games with nazis ever I was listing examples of extreme behavior caused by peoples belefs and I listed the holocaust as one such extreme behavior.

    Video games are my hobby too I love them and I would never insult them like that.

    But since you've clearly already decided who I am and don't seem to be interested in the actually discussion but rather in my supposed malicious intent the only thing I can say is I'm Sorry and unless your willing to engage in the earlier discussion I agree that there is no point in continuing like this.
     
  18. CheshirePhoenix

    CheshirePhoenix Crazy Hermit on the Hill LitRPG Author Beta Reader Citizen Editor Aspiring Writer

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    Once you Godwin a thread, the conversation is over. There’s no coming back from that, and continuing to argue your point is just making both of you look bad.

    So, go cool down.
     
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  19. ChamomileHasANovel

    ChamomileHasANovel Level 7 (Cutpurse) Beta Reader Citizen

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    Politely asking for civility from someone who's demonstrated a clear willingness to make whatever absurd, lurid accusations they think will give them an upper hand in an internet argument just isn't going to work. Their behavior will not actually change. Even assuming he does not actually believe that video games can reasonably be compared to the perpetrators of the Holocaust - and I don't think he does - all that means is that he is thoughtless and dishonest in pursuit of "victory," and that he will do whatever he thinks he can get away with in pursuit of it. So it's pretty goddamn important to make it clear that a community won't actually let people get away with that kind of thing.
     
  20. Paul Bellow

    Paul Bellow Forum Game Master Staff Member LitRPG Author Shop Owner Citizen Aspiring Writer

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    Didn't sound like he was trying to win a victory? Sounds more like a case of misunderstanding.

    Punctuation matters! Small smile. Especially with written communication.

    @CheshirePhoenix is right. Closing thread. PM me or start something up in the ideas forum if you want to continue to discuss for whatever reason.

    Thanks.
     




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