pnK on 26/8/2007 at 17:34
I am a little bit bored right now so i was thinking about System Shock and it's storyline. Well, to be exact i was thinking about SS and all the other games with a similar storyline (i'm not into console gaming but i read halo will have a rogue ai, too). In the SS games, at least what i can tell from my experience (like i've mentioned in the other thread, i am more into SS1 then SS2), Shodan was always kind of evil and arrogant. I was just thinking that in reality it's kind of the opposite. I mean if i look at movies or other media, it's almost always humanity which take the good part, and some other species or whatever, resembles the evil part. Like in Alien or Terminator - or System Shock. Now my point is, if Shodan was real and it would grow a self-consciousness, would humanity ever see it as superior ? I think humanity thinks of itself as the greatest being. I just have to go outside and find alot of different people and almost everyone of them thinks of themself as a intelligent or smart person. Twisted enough that you have to have some level of IQ to realize you're not that smart.
So anyways, i was thinking about a plot for a game - just for fun, nothing that i actually plan to do. Well, i thought about this plot and my idea was, that it'd be cool to have you run around like for example in System Shock - thinking you're doing the right thing. All the game the AI would try to convince you, that you are not doing the right thing but it would've to be made so that you as the player actually believe it IS the right thing. So, when the final scene arrives, you would finally discover that you were all wrong from the beginning and that humanity in fact was "evil" or a "plague" to the universe, and the AI was right from the beginning.
The idea is somewhat similar to the movie Frailty from 2001. Even though i'm not into religious stuff, the movie is great, with a great ending.
(
http://german.imdb.com/title/tt0264616/)
So anyway, what would you think of that story ? I think the only gamestory i know where it was "kind of" similar, was from Deus Ex with Helios being the good one at the end but i really don't remember the details even after playing the game so often.
RocketMan on 26/8/2007 at 17:59
I think its our nature as human beings to resist being controlled by anything, whether there is sound reasoning or not. We can say we are rational beings but if an AI said we were doin everything wrong and were a threat to ourselves and it wanted to relieve us of our freedoms and decision making liberties, we would fight it whether it was true or not.....collectively anyway.
pnK on 26/8/2007 at 23:27
The movie does look interesting and i just saw on imdb that there even is a remake planned for 2010. Nevertheless i will watch the original first, thanks for the advice ;)
redrain85 on 27/8/2007 at 01:32
Quote Posted by pnK
The movie does look interesting and i just saw on imdb that there even is a remake planned for 2010.
The fuck?! God help us. Yet another unnecessary remake. :mad:
catbarf on 29/8/2007 at 18:36
I remember reading in I, Robot (the book was a collection of short stories, nothing like the movie) about a guy talking about wanting a robot to be a mayor or governor- since by the three laws of robotics, they wouldn't harm anyone, wouldn't take bribes, and would only do what would be best for the people.
Peanuckle on 29/8/2007 at 23:30
Maybe so catbarf, but I highly doubt that SHODAN would run for governor on a humanitarian platform.
catbarf on 31/8/2007 at 14:37
You're totally missing the point.
ZylonBane on 31/8/2007 at 15:01
Quote Posted by redrain85
The fuck?! God help us. Yet another unnecessary remake. :mad:
By 2010, the original Forbin Project will have been released 40 years ago. I think that's a reasonable cooling-off period. And let's be honest here-- as a film that's almost entirely about computers, the original production hasn't aged very well.
demagogue on 31/8/2007 at 18:24
Haha ... yeah, reminds me of the old 1964 version of Failsafe. It's supposed to have the most sophisticated national security system, and it's literally a guy holding a flashlight to a map on the wall to portray nukes and airplanes tracking on the map. Then they remade it in 2000, the technology was much more believable ... but it did lose some of the charm of the original (didn't help that the Cold War had ended in the meantime, either, and that the 2000 version was a made-for-tv movie).
@pnK, I like this kind of story twist, as well (also cf Soylent Green and a number of classic sci fi movies in that vein) ... I feel like it hasn't been taken advantage of in gaming. Deus Ex had the revelation quite early. But too few games really draw the player deep into something like this, and then make the revelation. That would really get people thinking.
