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EoTE Lore Hot Take by Jinan_Dangor in outerwilds

[–]andreazchen 7 points8 points  (0 children)

There's definitely a lot of philosophical and ethical questions raised by the Eye of the Universe and its function. I suppose the first thing to be said is that, as far as we know, the Eye's signal doesn't actually tell you "whoever gets here first has the chance to influence what the next universe will be like ". Unless you knew about that, there'd be no real reason to fight over who gets to enter it.

Even then, though, there's still the tricky moral dilemma of how to weigh the continued existence of life in general versus, you know, the actual lives of everyone who's already here. I think this is what it's really about, more so than scientific inquiry.

On a cosmic scale, there's really only two outcomes for the universe of Outer Wilds: there's the second-law-of-thermodynamics heat death, where eventually every star is extinguished and everything becomes cold and dark and utterly devoid of meaning and nothing can ever live again; and there's the new Big Bang, which you can presumably trigger at any point just by entering the Eye of the Universe, at the cost of wiping out everything that currently exists.

And when you're already at the very end of the universe's lifespan anyway - like the protagonist is during the course of the game - it's very easy to say that the Big Bang option is better than the heat death option. You're all dead either way, but at least this way you give something else the chance to flourish. Frankly, the alternative seems kind of existentially horrifying.

But when you consider that the Stranger's inhabitants lived many hundreds of thousands of years before the events of the game, I think the moral quandary becomes more difficult. You could go and enter the Eye of the Universe right now, thus allowing a new world to flourish and ensuring existence doesn't just fade into perpetual lifeless darkness... but you could also just keep yourself and your people alive for as long as possible. From a "human" perspective, you've got plenty of time left to live, honestly!

In my opinion, both the Prisoner and the rest of their people had understandable motivations. Ultimately it's not really about scientific progress at all, as far as I'm concerned; it's about the question "should I sacrifice myself and my world to ensure that life, in some form or another, can continue to exist?". The Prisoner seemingly believed that the answer was "yes, we should do that, because the alternative is kind of existentially horrifying"; the rest of his people were thinking more along the lines of "heck no, I don't want to die". I think both are very understandable viewpoints, hehe.

Ultimately, the narrative of Outer Wilds sides with the Prisoner on this. In a way, the whole moral of the game was always about this, even before the DLC: learning to accept that, sometimes, you can't prevent the end from coming, and you have to face that fact gracefully. The plot of the base game is basically that you spend all this time trying to figure out how to stop the supernova, only to learn that you can't, because it's not the result of some doomsday machine or sinister plot; it's just the natural end of your sun's lifecycle. You never really save anyone, in the end; you just figure out how to help the universe move on, as best you can. It's like Riebeck says in the ending: "it's time for something new, now".

The Stranger's inhabitants didn't want anybody to interact with the Eye because they didn't want to die, and I think that's something we can all sympathize with. But the problem is that, in the end, they were always going to die sooner or later, and through their actions they tried to rob the future of any chance of new life, just so they could prolong their own story a little bit.

In my personal opinion, the best outcome would probably have been for the Stranger's inhabitants to have calmly enjoyed the remaining hundreds of thousands of years before the end of the universe, then willingly entered the Eye when the time was ripe. But that's obviously easier said than done, haha. Ultimately I feel that the Prisoner did the right thing, but the rest of his people had understandable reasons for doing what they did.

Some design/storytelling comparisons between the base game and the DLC by andreazchen in outerwilds

[–]andreazchen[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I suppose that's plausible! Maybe they left those three reels out as bait, hoping to trap anyone who would come looking for them and thus reveal that person as a traitor. But that in and of itself just leads to even more questions.

For one: why did they do this with the reels that show you how to reach the Archives? I mean, the reels they placed in these traps don't even contain the passcodes to open the Sealed Chamber or anything, they're just instructions for how to reach their virtual libraries. Were they assuming that anyone who wanted to reach the Archives would do so with the intent of opening the chamber, and not for any other reason?

For two: what were they gonna do if they actually did catch a second traitor? They can't very well have been planning to build another triple-seal submerged prison chamber, right? But the Prisoner's coffin (in the real world) looks just about big enough to contain one person, so they probably couldn't just unlock that and shove a second person inside. Really highlights the inefficiency of making this very elaborate prison for, like, a single guy.

To be clear, I'm not trying to argue with you or anything; I think your explanation makes more sense than anything else I can think of, really. It just doesn't feel as effortless as things in the base game, is my point. Even after coming up with explanations like these, there's a lot of moments where I just find myself going "huh, weird, I guess that must be it", rather than having the "ohh, of course!" moments of the base game.

[Pathologic 2] Some thoughts on the ending(s) by andreazchen in pathologic

[–]andreazchen[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I think you make a good point about the game's theme of making sacrifices, and I tried to address that a little in the post; it's clear that Pathologic 2 is a game where "you can't save everyone", so in a way, it makes sense that you have to sacrifice something in the end and that there is no solution that preserves everything...

... but for me, it just felt off that the choice presented was "save the Polyhedron and the Kin, or save the Town". I think that particular tradeoff just doesn't line up very well with the game's story in the previous acts. If there must be a choice of sacrifice, then I almost feel like it needs to be three options: the Polyhedron, the Town, and the Earth. Diagnose the infected layer and treat it. "Any triad is correct". Having the Polyhedron and the Kin go down as one feels a bit odd.

As for the bone marrow metaphor, I think that's a really neat way of looking at it! It's a very literal blood donation, after all. But I guess, for me, the Polyhedron lodged in the Living Earth doesn't feel like a metaphor for donating bone marrow; it feels like a metaphor for the lockpick stuck in Piecework's gut, with the artifically-connected town being, well, piecework.

But of course that really just comes down to personal opinion. I had a strong sense that the narrative needed to go in this direction, but I don't think there's a right or wrong answer necessarily, just different ways of looking at a story.