Starmaker: from the RPS review:
I was right. This is exactly the kind of dumb hateful crap eternal tweens lap up.
HeartsAndRainbows: I'm not sure I'm reading the review the same way you do. To me it seems like the game handles the topic of negative emotions (including hate) being needed in order recognize positive emotions as such. But I don't think it's a
hateful game. Don't get me wrong: You can keep your prejudices against "eternal tweens" all you like and you might be extremely intelligent so that you perceive every single puzzle in any video game ever as "dumb". But
"hateful" is something I just don't see here.
And you've got to appreciate the pottery bit. :) At the very least it's novel.
I've had copypasta on the topic but I can't find it so here goes.
I haven't played the game and I have no comment about puzzles. My comment addresses these lines in the RPS review:
Do we need to experience the depths of negative emotions in order to properly appreciate joy? Could removing prejudice and irrational hate be beneficial enough to society that it’s worth sacrificing that particular expression of liberty?
If you’ve any interest in transhumanist philosophy or even ethics in general, then you owe it to yourself to pick this one up. If you don’t, then The Red Strings Club should still hit the spot – and you might find you have more to say the next time someone asks you about the nature of happiness.
There's an excellent Russian expression that succintly describes these people (I'm not big on Russian slang but I know and appreciate this one): "the heaviest thing they ever lifted is a dick". It is in fact true that some people (ahem) get off of others' suffering, but presenting "should my grandma die of cancer in horrible pain so I could better appreciate the time we spent together?", "should a migrant worker have the freedom to have his skull bashed in by a racist gang, so I can laugh at The Big Bang Theory?", "do we need 'the desperation as your child is raped to death by a senator's retarded trustafarian son and the cops do nothing' to exist in the world for 'the joy of seeing the first coltsfoot in spring' to also exist?" as a debatable matter is fucking monstrous.
Now, you can make a great game with the premise, especially given semi-recent developments. Bill Gates fucked up education. Some massive douchebagcombinator twat proposed to feed prisoners soylent to cure drapetomania. Uber ruins transportation, then reinvents buses. Loan approval is a nightmare, and proprietary sentencing systems, especially coupled with private prisons, are a nightmare's nightmare. The question shouldn't be whether rapemurder is good, it's whether we can take a risk and trust a corporation, especially considering that it's the cyberpunk future outside, the public has lost, social accountability is going down the drain and there will never be any help from the nominal government -- if you're going to do something,
anything, you will have to do it as a publicly unaccountable entity. And then you probably won't have a metric for success, because data collection is expensive and the gatekeepers / censors of data are Not You.
The lack of any such theme raised in two of three reviews (gameinformer are racist censorious fucks and I'm not going to give them clicks) betrays a horrible lack of imagination and, indeed, intelligence. It's like another persistent stupid cyberpunk-adjacent question, "do robots have feeeeeeelings". The answer is of course they do, but the real interesting part is what do we do with it. Does a sex doll get human rights? An assembly line precision arm? Who writes the criteria for this (answer: the people in power, and of course those fucks write in shit like "can trace the humanist tradition from Plato", and then the business intelligence system in a corporate office has human rights because it was designed to get the right to "not incriminate itself", and the human janitor doesn't). Does the physical form matter? Processing power? Can I host a billion private servers with AIs who feel really strongly about a VAT increase and have them vote in a referendum as full citizens? (Dear gods, have I reinvented the blockchain?) What if androids get hacked, should they submit their utility functions to audits? Who's going to be doing the audit?
So
Do we need to experience the depths of negative emotions in order to properly appreciate joy?
isn't a question an emotionally mature adult would ever ask, it's the question of a primary schooler on summer break parroting shitty pop culture because (s)he doesn't yet have the capacity for independent thought and the worst hardship (s)he experienced was Mom taking the ipad away for ten minutes.
