{"id":32034,"date":"2016-05-06T15:40:44","date_gmt":"2016-05-06T19:40:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=32034"},"modified":"2016-05-06T17:41:58","modified_gmt":"2016-05-06T21:41:58","slug":"soma-ep17-pathos-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=32034","title":{"rendered":"SOMA EP17: Pathos, Too"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/l7yyg4fIgEU\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=l7yyg4fIgEU'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>One thing still worries me about the ARK: Can you stop participating? Can you die? Kill yourself? Erase yourself? What if you become monumentally bored and frustrated with your existence? Sure, it&#8217;s a nice simulation and all. But no matter how idyllic the setting, after a few thousand years you might really be done with it. Human beings haven&#8217;t experienced lives that long, and we don&#8217;t know what kind of mental health challenges that sort of timescale might pose. <\/p>\n<p>The more I think about it, the more I think I&#8217;d decline an Ark invitation. Unless it comes with a level editor and some space to call my own. And some tools for composing music. And maybe some programming tools. Actually, this is starting to sound pretty good. <\/p>\n<p>So that was SOMA. The best part of this series has been the interesting comments. People have offered numerous bits of analysis, background, alternate interpretations, and philosophical viewpoints that I&#8217;d never considered. This really is a game that gets larger when examined in greater detail.<\/p>\n<p>I feel like I didn&#8217;t give this game enough credit in my initial play-through. I went in expecting &#8220;Amnesia, but in Sealab&#8221; and when that didn&#8217;t work out I got frustrated with the crappy monster encounters and sort of plowed through the game. I liked it, but I think I missed out on a lot of interesting things the game had to say. <\/p>\n<p>We don&#8217;t get a lot of this sort of science fiction in the world of videogames. Sure, we get a lot of games about shooting aliens with zap guns. And maybe we shoot robots once in a while. But proper <em>speculative fiction<\/em>? There&#8217;s not a lot. And lots of it is strategy stuff like Alpha Centauri, Master of Orion, or Homeworld. Don&#8217;t get me wrong, those are wonderful games. But aside from Mass Effect and SOMA, what other major releases feel like someone took science fiction ideas out of a novel and put them in a story-driven game? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) One thing still worries me about the ARK: Can you stop participating? Can you die? Kill yourself? Erase yourself? What if you become monumentally bored and frustrated with your existence? Sure, it&#8217;s a nice simulation and all. But no matter how idyllic the setting, after a few thousand years you might really be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32034\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}