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wjoseph's Witcher 3 (XBONE)
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| [February 23, 2017 11:59:21 AM]
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This morning while I was playing Witcher 3, I had another Kantian experience. Except this time it wasn't any decision I had to make, it was more of a situation your character witnesses. In the game, one of the captains of the army is taking taxes from one of the farmers. The guy was to bring him a certain quantity of food because of how big his yield from this season was. The guy lies to the captain initially about how much his farm brings in, but the captain is too savvy for that nonsense. The captain feels pity towards the guy though and doesn't charge him the full amount he could and asks the guy to come back the next day. The guy is really grateful and goes away. I ended up having to go do some other story missions where I had to kill a griffin (which was outrageously difficult), and then I came back. When I got back, the farmer was there but he had delivered spoiled goods. Which was a bit of a dick move. (That's another thing we talked about a while back). It reminded me of Kant again, where keeping promises is important to keep a society going. It also ties into the social contract theory we were talking about with Hobbes. To keep a healthy society going, we need to reasonably expect people to act a certain way, ie keep their promises. When they don't act accordingly, it makes society pretty difficult, hence punishments. If the farmer guy had just given the captain the goods he was supposed to, which were less than what was expected, the captain would have been happy and he would have been more inclined to be lenient with other farmers. But because this guy broke his promise, now the captain has to punish the guy for delivering spoiled goods, but now he can't justify being lenient with other people.
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| [February 22, 2017 11:35:03 PM]
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Today's gameplay offered an interesting moral dilemma. Quick side tangent, it's interesting how often moral dilemmas are implemented in this game. it's so full of moral questions the characters even explicitly say they should stop "moralizing." Anyway, today while I was playing, one of the side quests was to help catch the arsonists that burned down this guy's shop. Once you do find the arsonist, he offers you some money to keep it a secret. The arsonist gives youa sob story about how his mom died and he blames the blacksmith (the guy that hired you) because the blacksmith provided the army that killed his mom with swords. There's a sort of weird vigilante justice thing going on here. So here you are, deciding whether or not you should keep your promise or take the money and go. It reminded me of when we talked about Kant's Categorical Imperatives. To Kant, keeping promises was a big deal mainly because you can't universalize the idea that breaking promises is ok. So even though we've gleaned this new information about the guy's mom and we might sympathize with him, we still shouldn't break our promise. So being the good Kantian that I am, I took him back to the blacksmith. Where he was promptly executed. Which I thought was a bit harsh, but that's a log for another day.
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| [February 20, 2017 09:58:09 PM]
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So today I started playing Witcher 3. This game was a lot slower than I anticipated. There's a lot of talking and it's really story heavy. That's been my experience so far at least. I get the feeling that it'll pick up speed the further into I get. Anyway, right from the start, one of the tutorials describes life in the game's world as "nasty, brutish, and short." I thought it was pretty funny that the developers took a quote straight from Hobbe's to describe the world. I thought it was interesting that the world the developers describe is in what Hobbe's describes as the state of nature even though they have a sort of social contract going on. Supposedly, we have the social contract theory so we can avoid the state of nature. The world seems to be on the edge of the two. There's a government and the citizens explicitly say they expect protection and order from the government, but they're still not really receiving this protection in full.
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wjoseph's Witcher 3 (XBONE)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Monday 20 February, 2017
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