Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 05:49:17 PM

Quote from: Bruwulf on January 10, 2023, 05:43:28 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 05:28:49 PM
This is my middle finger aimed at said idiot writers who seem irrationally compelled to turn literal hideous people-mutilating monsters into good guys. They're still fully intended to be an antagonistic force, I just find it an interesting novelty to depict their perspective. They're not evil, their value system is just so alien that humans cannot understand why anyone would follow it because it just seems insane to humans... just like the value systems of the aliens in Three Worlds Collide.

Well, the Hugh storyline was good. Even Seven, to some extent, as much as I hate how she turned the show into "The Seven of Nine's Boobs Show". But there the idea works because your contrasting the individual with the... "species", for lack of a better term. Hugh and Seven were *victims* of the Borg.

Exactly. They only prove my point.

I suppose I don't remember/never saw enough of "NuTrek" to really ever see the Borg presented as "good guys". I know Voyager occasionally bargained with them, but it was always very much shown as a "deal with the devil" type situation.

Quote from: Bruwulf on January 10, 2023, 05:52:30 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 05:49:17 PM

Quote from: Bruwulf on January 10, 2023, 05:43:28 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 05:28:49 PM
This is my middle finger aimed at said idiot writers who seem irrationally compelled to turn literal hideous people-mutilating monsters into good guys. They're still fully intended to be an antagonistic force, I just find it an interesting novelty to depict their perspective. They're not evil, their value system is just so alien that humans cannot understand why anyone would follow it because it just seems insane to humans... just like the value systems of the aliens in Three Worlds Collide.

Well, the Hugh storyline was good. Even Seven, to some extent, as much as I hate how she turned the show into "The Seven of Nine's Boobs Show". But there the idea works because your contrasting the individual with the... "species", for lack of a better term. Hugh and Seven were *victims* of the Borg.

Exactly. They only prove my point.

I suppose I don't remember/never saw enough of "NuTrek" to really ever see the Borg presented as "good guys". I know Voyager occasionally bargained with them, but it was always very much shown as a "deal with the devil" type situation.

Voyager didn't do the Borg any favors

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 05:28:49 PMI'm just really annoyed by how hack writers turned the Borg and the Zerg into good guys, nevermind that everything about them is just fundamentally horrifying. ...Only a complete fucking idiot would think it's a good idea to turn those monsters into good guys.

I totally understand that reaction, but I think the difficulty there arises from the nature of the medium of an ongoing, indefinitely-sustained drama. Put simply, if an individual -- or a species -- can't change, it inevitably becomes boring. And when you start a species off at the absolute nadir of compassion, empathy or comprehensibility, there really is only one direction for it to go if it is to change at all, i.e.: up.

I wouldn't go so far as to say the Trek writers (I don't know about the Zerg, never having played StarCraft) were hacks. I think they just had to deal with the fact that their predecessors who created the Borg had done so to create a specific dramatic situation (the idea that sometimes even the best you can do will simply just not be good enough) and then not thought ahead to realize that now, as part of the Trek universe, fans would want to see them again in other, equally interesting but different stories. Terrifying as that first, "Resistance is futile," is and was, you can't just repeat that forever and expect it to stay engaging.

QuoteThey're not evil, their value system is just so alien that humans cannot understand why anyone would follow it because it just seems insane to humans... just like the value systems of the aliens in Three Worlds Collide.

Well, I will say that I appreciated how Yudkowsky actually made the morality of the aliens seem not quite incomprehensible. The idea that life is only appreciated if it is earned by surviving a struggle, and the idea that the value of life is in the elimination of suffering, are both maxims that have turned up in human moral systems. Yudkowsky just cheats by denying his aliens any capacity to question this in themselves as part of the story arc.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 10, 2023, 06:24:26 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 05:28:49 PMI'm just really annoyed by how hack writers turned the Borg and the Zerg into good guys, nevermind that everything about them is just fundamentally horrifying. ...Only a complete fucking idiot would think it's a good idea to turn those monsters into good guys.

I totally understand that reaction, but I think the difficulty there arises from the nature of the medium of an ongoing, indefinitely-sustained drama. Put simply, if an individual -- or a species -- can't change, it inevitably becomes boring. And when you start a species off at the absolute nadir of compassion, empathy or comprehensibility, there really is only one direction for it to go if it is to change at all, i.e.: up.

I wouldn't go so far as to say the Trek writers (I don't know about the Zerg, never having played StarCraft) were hacks. I think they just had to deal with the fact that their predecessors who created the Borg had done so to create a specific dramatic situation (the idea that sometimes even the best you can do will simply just not be good enough) and then not thought ahead to realize that now, as part of the Trek universe, fans would want to see them again in other, equally interesting but different stories. Terrifying as that first, "Resistance is futile," is and was, you can't just repeat that forever and expect it to stay engaging.

I already have humans to provide drama. If I'm just going to turn the aliens into humans, then there's no point in having aliens period. If you can replace aliens with humans, then do it. Don't pretend otherwise.

Using the compassion/empathy comparison doesn't work in this case. My aliens think they're being compassionate. Humans live short feeble lives full of suffering, perpetually lonely even when surrounded by their own kind. Why not give them a better life? Letting them exist as they are is just pointless cruelty, isn't it?

That's the problem with humans. They're so egotistical that they think their current existence is perfect and everything else is inferior. That's something I want to challenge.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 07:38:18 PM
I already have humans to provide drama. If I'm just going to turn the aliens into humans, then there's no point in having aliens period.

Paging William Dean Howells, William Dean Howells to the courtesy phone, please ....  (For those who don't recognize the name, Howells has been called "the father of American realism"; he was part of the 19th-century Socialist movement in America and, as editor of The Atlantic Monthly, influenced American writers across the nation for decades, and he did so firmly in the direction of dull stodgy "realist" literature. For more on this, check out this essay by Tom Simon.)

I think there may be an excluded middle happening here. Nonhumans and humans being different enough that mutual understanding and coexistence is difficult doesn't have to mean being so different that mutual understanding and coexistence is impossible. And examples of how imaginary cultural difficulties can be overcome can be meaningful guidance for overcoming real ones.

The "essentialist" argument I've always rejected is the idea that a group-imparted difficulty a character can't ignore amounts to an intolerable imposition on anyone who wants to play a character of that group.

QuoteMy aliens think they're being compassionate. Humans live short feeble lives full of suffering, perpetually lonely even when surrounded by their own kind. Why not give them a better life? Letting them exist as they are is just pointless cruelty, isn't it?

That's the problem with humans. They're so egotistical that they think their current existence is perfect and everything else is inferior. That's something I want to challenge.

I don't have to believe that my existence is perfect to reject the idea that anyone else has the right to change its conditions for me without my consent, especially if it's a question of which conditions they're changing. After all, there's no guarantee that the changes someone else thinks would improve my life actually would do so.

As Theoden said to Saruman, "Were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit as you desired."

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 10, 2023, 08:56:52 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 07:38:18 PM
I already have humans to provide drama. If I'm just going to turn the aliens into humans, then there's no point in having aliens period.

Paging William Dean Howells, William Dean Howells to the courtesy phone, please ....  (For those who don't recognize the name, Howells has been called "the father of American realism"; he was part of the 19th-century Socialist movement in America and, as editor of The Atlantic Monthly, influenced American writers across the nation for decades, and he did so firmly in the direction of dull stodgy "realist" literature. For more on this, check out this essay by Tom Simon.)

I think there may be an excluded middle happening here. Nonhumans and humans being different enough that mutual understanding and coexistence is difficult doesn't have to mean being so different that mutual understanding and coexistence is impossible. And examples of how imaginary cultural difficulties can be overcome can be meaningful guidance for overcoming real ones.

The "essentialist" argument I've always rejected is the idea that a group-imparted difficulty a character can't ignore amounts to an intolerable imposition on anyone who wants to play a character of that group.

QuoteMy aliens think they're being compassionate. Humans live short feeble lives full of suffering, perpetually lonely even when surrounded by their own kind. Why not give them a better life? Letting them exist as they are is just pointless cruelty, isn't it?

That's the problem with humans. They're so egotistical that they think their current existence is perfect and everything else is inferior. That's something I want to challenge.

I don't have to believe that my existence is perfect to reject the idea that anyone else has the right to change its conditions for me without my consent, especially if it's a question of which conditions they're changing. After all, there's no guarantee that the changes someone else thinks would improve my life actually would do so.

As Theoden said to Saruman, "Were you ten times as wise you would have no right to rule me and mine for your own profit as you desired."

Great points but, again, that's not the story I want to tell. "Why can't we all just get along?" is everywhere in scifi. It's the standard moral cliché. The moral dilemma in this story is that, sometimes, aliens cannot coexist with you and you have to kill them before they kill you or worse.

I do have a second alien species who are more personable space communists, and the moral dilemma there is "how much of your humanity do you want to relinquish in order to make your idealized utopia work out?" This is the actual social commentary part.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 07:38:18 PM
I already have humans to provide drama. If I'm just going to turn the aliens into humans, then there's no point in having aliens period. If you can replace aliens with humans, then do it. Don't pretend otherwise.

Using the compassion/empathy comparison doesn't work in this case. My aliens think they're being compassionate. Humans live short feeble lives full of suffering, perpetually lonely even when surrounded by their own kind. Why not give them a better life? Letting them exist as they are is just pointless cruelty, isn't it?

That's the problem with humans. They're so egotistical that they think their current existence is perfect and everything else is inferior. That's something I want to challenge.

Amen. And here's the thing I was thinking about. And others have said. With d&d6e and make everyone equal there truly are no "aliens" or "others". Some 6e player goes, oh I don't think it's fair my human doesn't need to eat or sleep like an android like Data. So the rules say, make your human like that. Then....you're not human anymore. I know games are supposed to be fantastical, but there's things that even I go, huh...that's stupid. Like a halfling being as strong as a half-giant.....it makes zero sense

Quote from: jhkim on January 10, 2023, 11:58:31 AM

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 10, 2023, 08:41:38 AM
To pick a given theme for robot PCs at all, in other words, and to structure robot PC design around manifesting and dramatizing that theme, is to take agency away from the characters and players to begin with. The objection of essentialism in PCs is not what lessons or themes a character background is intended to convey, but that a background is built to work towards conveying any themes at all other than what the player himself wants to do, and I think it likely that somebody bothered by this will find it just as bothersome for robot PCs as they would for half-orc or dwarven PCs. (After all, paradoxically, a world in which every droid resents its service and wants its freedom could be argued to present just as "essentialist" a reading of what "droidness" is as a world in which none of them do.)

I think any Star Wars game with droid PCs is going to run up against droid slavery being a theme.

My approach, and it certainly isn't canon in a universe where it's possible to physically torture droids*, is that droids are programmed to have personalities, to facilitate interaction with biologicals. But if you were to flip a switch to turn off their personalities, they would be blatantly machine like. C-3PO would no longer complain or have opinions. It would simply say "yes" or "no" and blindly comply with orders.


*And even then, they still might be only programmed to react this way, and Jabba just like the idea of torturing droids, whether they actually "feel" it or not.

Quote from: Bruwulf on January 10, 2023, 05:43:28 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 05:28:49 PM
This is my middle finger aimed at said idiot writers who seem irrationally compelled to turn literal hideous people-mutilating monsters into good guys. They're still fully intended to be an antagonistic force, I just find it an interesting novelty to depict their perspective. They're not evil, their value system is just so alien that humans cannot understand why anyone would follow it because it just seems insane to humans... just like the value systems of the aliens in Three Worlds Collide.

Well, the Hugh storyline was good. Even Seven, to some extent, as much as I hate how she turned the show into "The Seven of Nine's Boobs Show". But there the idea works because your contrasting the individual with the... "species", for lack of a better term. Hugh and Seven were *victims* of the Borg.

Jeri Ryan was a great actress and saved that role from being the T&A insert.

And I agree, the Borg were always shown as malevolent. First Contact started the trend of watering down the Borg by introducing an individual (The Queen) into a hive mind.

Voyager watered them down further by having multiple people escape from the collective, and having defeated the Borg or at least gotten away from their encounters without too much impact.

In the process, the Borg became less menacing, and more like a typical Star Trek faction.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on January 11, 2023, 12:51:38 PM

Quote from: Bruwulf on January 10, 2023, 05:43:28 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 10, 2023, 05:28:49 PM
This is my middle finger aimed at said idiot writers who seem irrationally compelled to turn literal hideous people-mutilating monsters into good guys. They're still fully intended to be an antagonistic force, I just find it an interesting novelty to depict their perspective. They're not evil, their value system is just so alien that humans cannot understand why anyone would follow it because it just seems insane to humans... just like the value systems of the aliens in Three Worlds Collide.

Well, the Hugh storyline was good. Even Seven, to some extent, as much as I hate how she turned the show into "The Seven of Nine's Boobs Show". But there the idea works because your contrasting the individual with the... "species", for lack of a better term. Hugh and Seven were *victims* of the Borg.

Jeri Ryan was a great actress and saved that role from being the T&A insert.

And I agree, the Borg were always shown as malevolent. First Contact started the trend of watering down the Borg by introducing an individual (The Queen) into a hive mind.

Voyager watered them down further by having multiple people escape from the collective, and having defeated the Borg or at least gotten away from their encounters without too much impact.

In the process, the Borg became less menacing, and more like a typical Star Trek faction.

Giving the Borg a leader was nonsensical. Giving them a leader with a romantic obsession with the hero was just stupid. The queen would've worked better as an agent of the Borg. A refinement of the Locutus concept, maybe. If they absolutely needed to, which they probably didn't.

In "I, Borg" Picard pretended to be a secret borg agent and Hugh bought it without question. The Borg could've done many things without diluting their concept.

Voyager's encounters with the Borg had the effect of making them far less menacing. I think there is an easy way to avoid that: if you can't have Voyager suffer significant consequences due to the episodic nature of the production, then tweak the Borg so that rather than being defeated all of what happens is either planned by them or benefits them in some way. Like Xanatos in Disney's Gargoyles.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 11, 2023, 07:35:42 PMIn "I, Borg" Picard pretended to be a secret borg agent and Hugh bought it without question.

I think the implication being that Borg severed from the collective don't really know how to think. They have a brain, they can "think", but any executive decisions come from the collective, and Hugh didn't have that.

I don't think Picard could have pulled that trick with normal borg.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 11, 2023, 10:20:06 AM"Why can't we all just get along?" is everywhere in scifi. It's the standard moral cliché. The moral dilemma in this story is that, sometimes, aliens cannot coexist with you and you have to kill them before they kill you or worse.

Oh, the notion that there may be no way to interact productively with an alien species short of attempted mutual extermination certainly has its place in SF, and I'm not averse to it. Lovecraft's entire oeuvre is based on the same idea, and one of my own planned SF series turns on the various conflicting species of a space-opera galaxy having to unify against exactly this kind of greater, mind-subsuming and individuality-annihilating threat, against which no diplomatic solution will ever be possible.

My complaint is simply that any alien species which fills this role is dramatically no different, in terms of its story function, from a forest fire or volcanic eruption, and describing whatever psychological mechanisms drive their genocidal incompatibility as "morality" makes about as much sense to me as describing lava's temperature, viscosity, and flowing downhill as "moral choices". If they do what they do because they have no choice about it (and inability to imagine or understand alternatives amounts to "no choice") and the only possible resolution is one side or the other being forever annihilated or escaped, this is not the "conflict of morals" Yudkowsky clearly wants to create in his story. If Yudkowsky really wanted to examine that kind of issue, we'd have had scenes from the Babyeaters and the Superhappies where they had arguments among themselves the same ways the humans did.

(Full disclosure should probably be noted here, in case I'm coming across as angrier or more aggressive than I mean to: I have a great deal of personal dislike for Yudkowsky based on his other writings, so I must acknowledge that I am not an unbiased critic. Feel free to take my opinions with the grains of salt felt to be merited.)

QuoteI do have a second alien species who are more personable space communists, and the moral dilemma there is "how much of your humanity do you want to relinquish in order to make your idealized utopia work out?" This is the actual social commentary part.

How much of someone's humanity does one have to relinquish to integrate successfully into this society, out of curiosity? And can you get it back after it's relinquished, if for some reason someone decides they want out of it?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 11, 2023, 07:35:42 PMI think there is an easy way to avoid that: if you can't have Voyager suffer significant consequences due to the episodic nature of the production, then tweak the Borg so that rather than being defeated all of what happens is either planned by them or benefits them in some way. Like Xanatos in Disney's Gargoyles.

I agree, I think that would have been an excellent way to handle it. The one problem I see there is that it would require giving the Borg some cultural objective or value besides simply "assimilate everything we encounter", which (a) is difficult to imagine based on everything established about them up till then, and (b) by definition makes them more comprehensible, rather than less, which I think would undermine their menace just as inevitably.

Part of what made the Borg so terrifying was the simple fact that they wanted nothing from anyone other than totally assimilating them, which made negotiation impossible and communication in general pointless.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 11, 2023, 10:39:51 PM
(Full disclosure should probably be noted here, in case I'm coming across as angrier or more aggressive than I mean to: I have a great deal of personal dislike for Yudkowsky based on his other writings, so I must acknowledge that I am not an unbiased critic. Feel free to take my opinions with the grains of salt felt to be merited.)

I totally get that. Yudkowsky never went to college but still thinks he has authority to write posts on high level academic subjects and has a cult of personality too. A lot of his work is overrated but I can't find much else that communicates the same point besides the works of Peter Watts and Cixin Liu, which are outright horror stories.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on January 11, 2023, 10:39:51 PM
How much of someone's humanity does one have to relinquish to integrate successfully into this society, out of curiosity? And can you get it back after it's relinquished, if for some reason someone decides they want out of it?

I can only speculate, but I imagine being connected to the "egalimind" would be indescribably amazing and that trying to remove oneself after being part of it would be like undergoing a lobotomy. Nowadays many people cannot live without constant connection to the internet, and this would be an more extreme version of that. Most human beings will go insane after a sufficient lack of sensory information and social contact, which would probably be a similar result to losing the egalimind. Which I think would add to the moral dilemma. Is forever surrendering part of yourself, whatever the size, worth the benefits? Is maintaining "freedom" worth the lives of those in the egalimind who cannot survive without it?

No person is an isolated island. Individuals are parts of societies, and societies are composed of individuals. You can't truly distinguish the two. This is a speculative extension of that. This isn't supposed to have an easy answer, or even a right answer.

Also, I'm still butthurt over the ridiculous ending of StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void where the not!Na'vi casually destroy their not!Eywa because the writers equate it with slavery. jhc, even Star Trek: Picard didn't equate voluntary group minds with slavery.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on January 12, 2023, 10:22:34 AMI imagine being connected to the "egalimind" would be indescribably amazing and that trying to remove oneself after being part of it would be like undergoing a lobotomy. Nowadays many people cannot live without constant connection to the internet, and this would be an more extreme version of that.

That's compellingly plausible, but I have to admit the first thing that occurs to me in counter to that is Sartre's great remark, "Hell is other people." Every time I'm tempted to join Twitter I only have to remember the reason I eventually left Facebook, which was that I couldn't bear the constant reminders of how so many of my friends and family believed different things than I did. And even today there's a growing awareness of the costs and difficulties of screen addiction, and the destructive effects on social cohesion from the loss of in-person contact and interaction skills. "Offend one person in the group and you offend us all" is exactly how we get Twitter-shaming cancellation storms, after all.

QuoteAlso, I'm still butthurt over the ridiculous ending of StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void where the not!Na'vi casually destroy their not!Eywa because the writers equate it with slavery. jhc, even Star Trek: Picard didn't equate voluntary group minds with slavery.

Well, the great thing about a group mind is that as a fictional concept it can be designed so that it meets whatever moral conditions are felt necessary to justify it. For myself the thing I've always distrusted about them is that in practice, (a) they always seem to be a heck of a lot harder to get out of than to get into, and (b) the collective always seems to exercise much more control over the individual than the individual can ever hope to exercise over the collective -- and if those two conditions don't strictly equate to slavery, they are close enough to raise my hackles all the same.

Trying to bring things back to the original topic, perhaps this is one of the things people object to about "essentialism" -- they react to it the same way I instinctively react against the notion of the group mind; they see it as a way of sneaking universal enforced group definitions of personality onto individuals. For myself I think there's a meaningful distinction between innate factors that influence PC attitudes/decisions versus innate factors that predetermine them, but I would be willing at least to listen to an argument about why that distinction might be less meaningful in practice than I'd want to think.