Fair Haven and Janeway's "moral dilemma"

[Melakon]

Mine are always completely different. Orcs ftw. Never played a human on anything.

My most successful character that I used for about 5 years on different servers was primarily a role play character. She was a barbarian half-drow who used axes, had a specific stilted speech pattern partially based on Robert Newton's Long John Silver only less intelligent, and pretended to be dumber than she really was. I didn't play her as a guy trying to pretend to be a female, I gave her a male personality where she'd say all sorts of ridiculous male chauvinist things.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

So you played that online on servers?

 

[Melakon]

A few fan servers based on Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights 2. It was possible to build your own world, create NPCs, encounters, shops, interiors, exteriors, and run it through a LAN or online as server host and dungeon master. It was not the MMORPG that you had to pay for. Some of the fan servers were pvp heavy, others roleplay heavy, and some were of an over 18 nature.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

Oh! That sounds great! I've never played that kind of thing, only MMO's (WoW and Guild Wars2). I've had a go at tabletop RPG's via mailing list but nothing every really worked out.

Just looked it up, Bioware. Do you still play it? Is it an active community?

 

[Melakon]

I don't play it online anymore, though sometimes I try to build test modules. All I can usually do is build a small starting area, then I'll have a road that leads to another area where a monster encounter takes place. I can't do complicated conversations with NPCs well, but sometimes I can get a store to work. You can create new monsters, customize their stats, new spells, new weapons, new clothes. There's a site run by IGN called Neverwinter Vault full of user created modules, areas, etc. Not much being added there lately it looks like.

I like games that have some kind of editor in them. I started with computer military games and preferred those where you could create maps. The day I bought NWN, I was just looking for a game with an editor, I wasn't that familiar with Dungeons & Dragons except as computer games. If Knights of the Old Republic had come with a game editor, I probably would have bought that instead because it was sci-fi.

The fan community used to be pretty active, but they've probably mostly died out by now because these are games from the 2000s. I was playing them mostly between 2005-2010.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

So I wonder if there is something with an editor that has replaced it? Something new and shinier I mean.

 

[Melakon]

Doesn't Skyrim do that? And Fallout 3 I think. When I can finally get a better computer running again, I want to investigate those.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

I think Skyrim just builds the story line?

 

[Drone]

I just caught up with this thread. Not contributing more to that diverting discussion of Trek intimate relations and related digressions, but I want to say that I'm not to put out by the issue of the dual episodes' unrepentant stereotyping of Irish mores and culture circa 1900. After all, how is the framework for the construction of these characters, their millieu, and the culture's zeitgeist, prior to those impossible algorithims doing the dirty work, established anyway?

For a period recreation such as this, does Tom, Harry, B'Elanna or whoever tap databases that pull a wealth of information from strictly primary sources(journals, diaries, memoirs, etc.) of the grinding versilmilitude of how life actually played out in the subject world? Just because it's the Federation and an enlightened future, does this mean that inputs into such holographic constructions wouldn't be likely to also be pulled, to some degree at least, from popular media representations that,perhaps not taken whole cloth, are not always critically questioned as to being legitimate source material or that that question is even necessarily of concern?

Bright and shiny as the world they inhabit is, it is still hundreds of years removed from us and it seems to me that for this reason by itself,such a holographic recreation is going to have a material amount of inaccuracy, let alone that its creator might want to smooth out some of the projection's "rough edges" so as to maximize its interactibility. In-Universe, our stalwarts might write the programs up differently if their intent was strictly for, say, academic instruction or historioraphic study of some cardinal event, but for the most part, as the saying goes, it is what it is and to expect as a matter of course anything otherwise would be to confer magical, not technological prowess to these characters.

The fact that as an audience we might predominantly respond to these images as being cloying, if not demeaning or offensive begs the question of what the logical bases are for our expectations for how things should play out in this fictional world. Now, if one wants to bring up the issue of Chakotay's ancestry and the choices made on how to represent it, well that's a whole other story that can't be fudged by citing a plot device filter that has a mediating impact has been put in the way.

Sorry if I've gone way too meta here, but I guess that's just how I run!!!

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

Drone I think what happened was this.

Tom: Recreate Irish village circa 1900

Holo-shop Program: State genre of village setting

Tom: Oh let's see. cheesy! That' more fun than realism, make it super cheesy

It could have been all smells and toothless peoples and dirt but Tom was there to play.