Wednesday 29 August, 2018

Nier Automata again has brought up interesting moral situations. Before I decided to delve deeper into the main story I wanted to chip away at more side quests. One side quest stood out to me very strongly. A character that I have meet before contacted me and asked if I could help her out. So, I meet up with her and she gave me a fish to eat. She warned me that it could kill me and not to get mad at her if I did, but characters in games just say this to scare you. When I ate the fish, I did die and I had to start back where I last saved. Luckily, I save often so I didn’t have to redo too much but I still hate this person for giving me that fish. She did warn me, but games usually don’t kill you like that. Sometime later I thought back on that quest and really admired the game for killing me like this. It is very creative and shows that this game is full of surprises. Next, I continued with the main story and things got even more uncomfortable. I had to battle through a great number of enemies all fighting to protect their king. I did not want to harm the king and we were just instructed to talk with him. But every enemy that saw me would charge and fight for this king. Once I got to the throne room to chat with the king I find that the king is a baby that doesn’t speak. Did this group of machines all come together and make a baby machine baby, or did they find it? Either way they probably did not trust any outsider and were very hostile towards everyone so that this baby could be safe. To this point the machines have showed so many emotions that they should not be able to have. Could machines eventually learn all these different emotions? Right after I see this baby machine I was really hoping my character wouldn’t hurt the baby. Then another android like me comes flying in and stabs the baby! Command calls in and says that this android is rogue, and we need to kill it. Surprisingly the rogue android did not start attacking me. I wanted to talk to it but then my stupid side kick 9S starts shooting at it. This was one of the hardest fights so far but of course it got away. My character asks this android why it betrayed the organization and she responds dramatically saying that the organization has betrayed me. Its hard for me to believe it when it just stabbed a baby machine, but I guess anything is possible now. The game then skips over the fact that a baby had an army willing to die for it and that this baby was just murdered. I really wanted to dig deeper into this story and figure out how this happed. Maybe later in the game these questions will be answered.

Great job Luke! You talk about a lot of interesting topics. You talk a lot about emotions, both in regards to the machines developing emotions and in regards to you personally feeling overwhelmed by the number of side quests just like the characters. What role do logic and emotion play in ethical discourse? For example, if the mysterious android had a logical reason for killing the baby, how does that affect the emotional discomfort of seeing a baby stabbed? And does the fact that this baby was fanatically followed, seemingly illogically, by a group of emotionally attached machines affect that?