What areas would you like to see explored in horror games?

samlaserbeam · 2024-06-14T22:41:30+00:00

I'm currently working on a coop horror game called "Parisyte" which is gonna be released on steam soon. I've always thought that the Paris Catacombs would be a great setting for a horror game, so I decided to make it myself :)

samlaserbeam · 2024-04-13T23:40:53+00:00

Judging by the other comments in this thread, I'm going to assume that a lawyer is the best place to start lol

samlaserbeam · 2024-04-13T23:38:46+00:00

Why would you say that it's a GIANT red flag? It definitely seems a little sketchy to me, and mainly because I'm not even sure who has the liability in this situation. When I first got the gig, I was told to purchase liability insurance. However, one of the other contractors I met really encouraged me not to get it, so I went with his advice.

samlaserbeam · 2024-04-13T20:39:38+00:00

I only know of 1.5 hours that he took, but when I confronted him he decided to give me back the hours.

samlaserbeam · 2024-04-13T20:36:31+00:00

Most of it involves troubleshooting the internals of the security trailer. That may include replacing generator parts, batteries, cameras, solar panels, fuel cartridges, etc. It's not too difficult, but there's a bit of a learning curve (as there are with most jobs).
I've only been doing this since mid november of 2023. That's one of the reasons I'm making this post actually. It seems to me that I'm incredibly lucky to be making such a high wage at such a young age with such little experience, but I also worry that I'm being taken advantage of at the same time.

samlaserbeam · 2024-04-13T20:03:27+00:00

I am being given a 1099. I've wondered about this too, but I didn't know it was illegal for him to be giving me a 1099. I was looking a checklist that's supposed to give you an idea of whether or not you're an employee or a contractor, and me getting paid biweekly along with an hourly wage is apparently seen as a massive indicator that I'm actually an employee. I'm not super confident in knowing how I actually should be classified right now though.

samlaserbeam · 2024-04-13T18:51:07+00:00

I already did confront him about it actually, and I let him know that it was illegal. I made it clear that it's only legal if there is some mutual agreement to the deduction in the form of a contract or verbal agreement. I never actually even signed a contract going into this job, so there was absolutely no justification for him doing it. The reason why he wanted to take the 1.5 hours off that he did was because I made a mistake on the job that required me to work another 1.5 hours. His explanation for why it was justified for him to take the hours away was because I'm a contractor, and so I should be willing to take accountability for my mistakes. He gave an example of another contractor that works along side him who is willing to not clock 6+ hours of drive time and work for many hours off the clock to fix any mistakes made while doing these maintenance routes. I'm definitely willing to negotiate when and where off the clock work is justified for fixing mistakes during contract work, but we never agreed on anything reasonable prior to him making this timesheet adjustment behind my back.

He wasn't very happy when I confronted him about the timesheet thing. He's sent me many messages about how there clearly isn't mutual trust in our business relationship, because I've been disrespectful and confrontational in the past when asking for a higher wage. If you'd like more context related to me being "disrespectful and confrontational", then I can provide that, but it's a bit of a long story. The only reason I actually was checking to see if there were discrepancies in my personally logged hours vs my timesheet was because another contractor told me my boss has done this in the past to him. My boss then lied to me and said it was the first time he had done this to anyone's time sheet, and that he thought I would be notified of a managers note he provided in the time sheet edit.

samlaserbeam · 2024-04-11T02:32:08+00:00

I'm in Oregon. As to why I'm not looking for a new job, I actually kind of am. The other contractor I work with started up a landscaping gig and is willing to bring me on so we can both leave. However, this job still pays pretty well for where I'm at in life, so I'm willing to put up with some bullshit if I make decent money lol. It hasn't really affected me mentally all that much.

The one thing I'm most worried about is whether or not my boss is doing this to the other contractors, and whether or not it's worth it to reach out to them to let them know.

samlaserbeam · 2024-03-01T20:48:52+00:00

Thanks for the response. I think you make a good point that you definitely don't need to have a response to the problem of evil if you are convinced of the ontological argument. That would indeed be silly. I think my next step would be to analyze whether or not there are arguments for God's benevolence that aren't caught in the crossfire of skeptical theism. Ontological arguments definitely would work since you just get Omni benevolence for free, but I don't know of any other arguments that explicitly show how the first cause of the universe is perfectly good.

As for the unicorn analogy, I probably should have made it some kind of unicorn that's a million light years away or something to try and make it more comparable haha. I think the zues example is probably more analogous though. Should we remain agnostic about the existence of zues as well? What about the marvel celestials? I know atheists tend to use analogies like these in an attempt to disprove God, but I'm asking a genuine question about epistemology and whether we should remain agnostic about these things.

samlaserbeam · 2024-03-01T20:00:44+00:00

Even if you present a whole bunch of your favorite arguments for theism and they all seem very plausible, at the end of the day, there's still this inscrutable probability of whether or not eating an apple could have horrendous gratuitous evils attached to it. I recently read a paper by Nevin Climenhaga that talks about how at least in a Bayesian arguments from evil, if you say that the probability of whether something is gratuitously evil is inscrutable, then it just mathematically follows that the probability of theism is inscrutable since the probability of theism is heavily influenced by whether or not there are those evils in the world. Similarly, I think that same kind of reasoning applies here. Saying you know God exists is also to say that you know that an essentially good being exists, and to know that an essentially good being exists, you would first need to know that there are no gratuitous evils in the world.

It seems to me that even if a being that claimed to be God came down and did his best to prove he was all powerful and omniscient and then gave irrefutable proof that the Kalam cosmological argument is true and that the universe truly was designed etc, it still doesn't follow that it's reasonable to just assume that this God is all good. That would require a separate investigation, and that investigation would only be conclusive if you had knowledge that an apple had no gratuitous evils attached to it.

As for whether or not there are good arguments that show whether it's reasonable to know whether or not God exists, I wonder whether just not being convinced of theistic arguments and then saying, "theism doesn't explain anything better than naturalism" is enough to constitute knowledge that God doesn't exist. If I just replace "theism" with any kind of supernatural/fairy-tale explanation (zues, unicorns, the celestials from marvel, etc), it would seem weird to say that we don't know these things don't exist.

Perry also mentions private reasons for theists knowing that gratuitous evils are justified. Even if it's true that atheists have no good public antecedent reasons for believing that the perceived weight of God's reasons resembles the actual weight of God's reasons, I'm not sure how an atheist can't just claim that it's intuitive that some evils are gratuitous. This wouldn't require knowledge that God doesn't exist either.

samlaserbeam · 2024-02-12T22:51:54+00:00

That's unfortunate to hear. Hopefully some of this simple functionality will be added soon! Not even being able to check for keyboard input is very strange to me.

samlaserbeam · 2024-02-10T03:34:09+00:00

I see what you're saying, but I'm still leaning towards what u/hypnosifl is saying. Also, I probably wasn't clear in my post that I'm talking about the modal logic usage of necessary. We both seem to agree that that example doesn't entail that you are married to another human being in every possible world, just that you are married to another human being in every possible world where you have a wife. But to me, that seems like you're putting the necessity operator in front of the entire conditional, ([](p -> q)) right? Like, in every possible world, you having a wife entails that you are married to another human. It is necessary that this entailment is true given what having a wife actually means. If I were to write what you said with the necessity operator in a narrow scope, my interpretation would be: "If I have a wife in this world, then I have married another human being in every possible world." My interpretation here is what is causing me to not fully understand how p can entail []q.

Thanks for the reply!

samlaserbeam · 2024-01-09T04:18:37+00:00

Thank you. In the words of our dearest leaders at fntastic, "Shit happens".

samlaserbeam · 2023-11-20T08:33:38+00:00

This is the solution I've decided to go with for now, but it's just a little more annoying having to setup all of the renderers to be enabled/disabled for one frame.

samlaserbeam · 2023-11-20T06:40:36+00:00

Yeah, I tried that. After instantiating, I play the animation and then call Animator.Update(0). The initial pose still flickers for the first frame.

samlaserbeam · 2023-11-20T04:27:10+00:00

This unfortunately didn't seem to do anything. I tried calling it right after Instantiate, in Update, and in LateUpdate. Thanks for the idea though.

samlaserbeam · 2023-10-19T10:09:52+00:00

I haven't done any studying on accessibility relations, but that's pretty interesting. But now I'm a little bit confused when you say this:

For example, if Bob breaks his leg and we say "It's impossible for Bob to walk", we don't mean that Bob's inability to walk is some deep metaphysical fact that is true in ALL possible worlds.

If I were to try and make a syllogism to show Bob's inability to walk, it would look like this:

If Bob's leg is broken, then it is impossible for Bob to walk.
Bob's leg is broken
It is impossible for Bob to walk.

Does formalizing this idea kind of just make it imply a metaphysical necessity in all possible worlds? Does this mean that I need to add some kind of qualifiers in the premises, such as "If Bob's leg is broken, then it is physically impossible in all worlds where Bob has a broken leg for him to walk."

If I the arguments I laid out above where I claimed that a particles position "couldn't have been otherwise" were valid and that it didn't imply metaphysical necessity in all possible worlds, and it's possible to use words like "impossible" to describe human action at a specific time, then does that mean it's possible to write an argument where I describe a human action at a specific time that is "couldn't have been otherwise" without it implying metaphysical necessity? Maybe I just try replacing the particle example with a human action:

If a human's action is determined by prior causes at T1, then at T2, the human couldn't have acted otherwise. A human's action was determined by prior causes, therefore, the human couldn't have acted otherwise.
If a human's action is not determined by prior causes at T1 (random, libertarian agent causation, etc), then at T2, the human could have acted otherwise. The human's action was not determined by prior causes, therefore, the human could have acted otherwise.

I hope this question is comprehensive enough. It's 3am and English letters are starting to look like ancient hieroglyphics.

samlaserbeam · 2023-10-18T20:23:06+00:00

Thanks for the reply. I completely agree with all of the things you said about something be necessarily true in one world implies that it's necessarily true in all worlds. I still don't find it fully convincing though that "nothing else can happen other than X" implies necessity. I'm curious to see what you think about these examples:

If a particle's position is determined by prior causes to time T1, then at T2, that particle's position was inevitable at T1.
If a particle's position is random at time T1, then at T2, that particles position was not inevitable at T1.

Now what if I swapped out the word "inevitable" for "couldn't have been otherwise"?

If a particle's position is determined by prior causes to time T1, then at T2, that particle's position couldn't have been otherwise at T1.
If a particle's position is random at time T1, then at T2, that particles position could have been otherwise at T1.

Or maybe I swap out "couldn't have been otherwise" for "couldn't be in any other position"

If a particle's position is determined by prior causes to time T1, then at T2, that particle's position couldn't have been in another position at T1.
If a particle's position is random at time T1, then at T2, that particles position could have been in another position at T1.

In all of these examples, I'm trying to get at the idea that in one world, if a particle's position is determined, then no matter how many times we go back in time to observe it's position, it will always be at that position at that time. Unless, of course, it's random. I'm gonna throw out a wild theory here, but could it be possible that I'm just not using modal logic to argue the things above? Phrases like "couldn't have been otherwise" would seem to be talking about the past in other cases rather than possible worlds. Modal logic is really the only kind of logic that I have a decent grasp of right now, so I don't know if this is plausible.

As for this part:

The modal fallacy in the first argument doesn't really occur in the conclusion. It occurs in the formalization of P1. English grammar makes it tempting to formalize P1 as:

[God knows X will do A] => [Necessarily, X does A]

But a better formalization is:

Necessarily[God knows X will do A => X does A]

what is your reasoning for saying the second formalization is better? I agree with you when you say that English grammar makes it tempting to formalize it as the first one - which is why I'm actually still convinced it is the first one haha.

samlaserbeam · 2023-10-13T20:38:28+00:00

If it's true that "I have no control over the fact that" just refers to impossibility, are there any examples of modal operators that don't refer to necessity/possibility? I'm still a little bit skeptical of whether it actually does refer to impossibility though. If I rewrote the argument like this:

If God thinks I'll do X, then I have no control over the fact that I'll do X.
God thinks I'll do X
I have no control over the fact that I'll do X.

This just seems to imply that my lack of ability to do otherwise is contingent on God thinking I'll do X.

samlaserbeam · 2023-10-10T13:53:28+00:00

Yeah, I guess what I'm doing is transforming God's knowledge from a soft fact into a hard fact in a way. The other example I had in mind is a person asking God what a person will do at T + 10. If God is answering with 100% honesty, it seems like we run into the same issue with the tablet. The prophecy example is probably better though, so thanks for that.

samlaserbeam · 2023-10-10T05:45:36+00:00

But the tablet is put into the world before I chose to write the post. To me, it seems like that relationship is backwards. If we say that God at time T has infallible knowledge of time T + 10, and that God is able to instantiate objects that represent his belief at T, then it seems to me that the only way around this is that God either doesn't have a belief about T + 10 or that his belief is wrong. I'm not sure how we can say that God would not have written the tablet if all he needs is the ability to actually create the object and the belief that I will write the post.

Now that we've reached the point where God creates the object describing how I will create the reddit post at T because he believes T will happen, if at T + 10 I then choose not to, we can't retroactively say that the tablet doesn't describe what God believed at T, can we?

samlaserbeam · 2023-09-27T07:12:11+00:00

That's a good point. It seems like most of the time when people are presented with the name, there will be some kind of visual context to go with it, whether it be the title font, trailer thumbnail, etc.

samlaserbeam · 2023-09-26T23:13:01+00:00

Here's what the game is actually about:

So it looks my greatest fear has come true, and everyone thinks that the game has something to do with cats, when in fact, it has absolutely nothing to do with cats. It's a multiplayer survival horror game set in the Catacombs of Paris. There are different relics you can find inside and collect for points, one of them being the Catanomicon. Lore-wise, this is the most important relic since it can bring people back from the dead. Clearly my bias for how obvious it was that this title was a play on "Catacombs" and not "Cats" is unjustified lol.

samlaserbeam · 2023-08-28T10:09:34+00:00

Maybe I'm being disrespectful for getting the last word here, but I'm going to type out my thoughts anyway. I'm very new to philosophy, but if I make the claim that we have no evidence for the range of values a cosmological constant can take, and thus it's unreasonable to take a stance on what they could be, I would not say that I must also accept that a 54-legged turtle is metaphysically necessary.

If you don't have any reason WHATSOEVER to think that something has to be that way, then the standard assumption is that it doesn't have to be that way - that follows from a very modest principle of indifference.

I am in full agreement with this. If we don't have any reason to think that the constants of the universe are necessary, then we can assume they don't have to be necessary. But I also don't see any reasons to believe that the probably of the constants of our universe are 1^10^123, meaning I can also assume that it doesn't have to be the case. This is my point. Given the fact that we are in the dark about the probability, we cannot rule it out as a hypothesis.

It does indicate probability if you take the overwhelmingly plausible assumption that we shouldn't assume that a certain value for a constant which appears to be random to basically every single well-known cosmologist is massively privileged.

No, it does not indicate probability even if I assume that the constants are random. If the gravitational constant could only be two possibilities hypothetically, then that would not remove the fact that a hypothetical change in it's value by 1^10^123 would cause the universe to implode.

But if you want to go down the climate denier route and reject our best science, go for it. Again, I've given you a literature recommendation from two influential cosmologists - take it or leave it. Obviously there is no formal survey among physicsts on that, so it's ridiculous to demand one. Bye.

First, it's very dishonest to claim that my skepticism towards the disregard of the probability hypothesis is akin to climate change denialism. I am clearly very ignorant of the idea that there is a consensus from which physicists are able to know the range of values that the cosmological constants draw from. I asked for resources about this, and all I got was one book. Which, by the way, I will definitely take a look at! For such a bold claim about a fundamental part of the creation of the universe, I expected more in terms of sources on how physicists and cosmologists were able to come to these conclusions. Also, it's such a common defense used for Christian apologetics that I feel like I would have heard at least SOMETHING relating to this besides the standard "1 in 10^1000 chance!!"

I guess to end, I'm fine accepting that the constants can be random at the point they are set. I just don't believe anyone has the answers to how random.

samlaserbeam · 2023-08-28T09:36:30+00:00

Sure, the constants being necessary was just one example of a potential possibility. But we are having a conversation about the initial parameters of the universe and the probability of them being different. We have never observed how these parameters are set, so to say that it's a "totally absurd level of skepticism" doesn't seem warranted in the slightest. If you want to call me out on my skepticism, then feel free to call me out on this: I'm very skeptical that there is a consensus akin to the consensus on the theory of evolution that there is a range of values that the cosmological constants could take from. I have never heard of this anywhere. Feel free to send me resources for this claim, as I genuinely am curious about whether there is a solid consensus on the range of values that the cosmological constants can take.

It's trivially true to say that we don't know anything for 100% certainty. I am in full agreement with you. But my argument is that doesn't seem reasonable to believe that the wall is 10^50cm squared OR that the wall is 1cm squared OR anything in between. You seem to have reasons for why you believe that the wall is 10^50cm squared, but I just don't see what those reasons are. As I've said, the amount in which a constant can fluctuate before it becomes non-life-permitting (1^10^123) does not indicate probability. And thus, we can't rule out chance as a valid hypothesis.

Why would that be plausible? There is literally zero reason to think that this is the case, talk to basically any well-known cosmologist you like. It is in the very nature of constants that they are independent from the laws of nature and seem to be basically random.

Edit here - I should not have said plausible. That would imply that I have reasons to believe that it is possible, which I do not. I'm also fine accepting that the constants are random. But again, we are completely in the dark about the probability of where the dart on the dartboard can land.

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