STAR WARS: the Old Republic...Anyone Playing?
POSTED BY: HKCavalier
UPDATED: Monday, April 23, 2012 01:53
VIEWED: 16284
PAGE 7 of 13
Well, according to certain interpretations, there's no evil or good actions. Balance isn't broken except by acts of creation or destruction. Positives and negatives are imposed by the experience. Over the long term, very little is actually ever significant, and balance, once skewed, is not broken but reasserts itself, sometimes slowly, sometimes like the snap of a rubber band.
To crusade for any of the principle ideals - good, evil, creation, destruction, and preservation - is a fool's errand and has it's consequences. Good and evil are relative and actions thought to be good may seem evil to those they are perpetrated against. Society, upbringing, and inborn personality will attune a person more strongly to creation, destruction, or preservation, but never all one way, and never all positive OR negative.
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Hey Byte,
That kind of reasoning will only make sense if you objectify good and evil, construe them as some kind of matter like freon or zinc. Some form of "stuff" that can be measured, quantified, mixed and purified. It's false logic and the sire of all manner of ugliness when applied to the real world.
At the end of the day, "good" and "evil" are words subject to interpretation. My own interpretation of good would include a fair amount of the balance you're talking about so the polarizing materialism simply doesn't work for me.
That said, I think there are actions that are good and others that are evil, depending on circumstances. I will say this: slavery is evil. One of my definitions of good is that it's not dependent on perspective--good's gonna be good for all concerned or it ain't good. Now, some folk are so twisted in the head that they don't know what good is and may perceive goodness as evil (for example, a certain man may believe that not beating your children does them harm), or evil as good (the happy slave). So, I'm not saying that good and evil are subjective, not remotely. But they aren't elements in some funky alchemy that conveniently self-destructs like some quasi-neitzchian strawman so we can give up trying to do right by one another.
Getting back to the game, for the most part the light/dark points seem to boil down to a pretty simple measure: does the action, here and now, promote life or promote harm and death? If you stay your hand you get light points, even if the ultimate fate of the one you spare is a lifetime of torture. It's nice, 'cause it doesn't pretend to know the future. It's not an ethos of control.
Hey Frem,
You may find some amusement in playing a jedi, if only in how far you can undermine and pervert the message and still have your masters glad-handing you at the end of the day. As I said upthread, my friend is playing a "dark" jedi and it's pretty entertaining. Not stupid--I'll make all the dark choices 'cause they're dark--but more playing a character who, basically, thinks she's right about everything and kinda immortal. Kind of Dirty Harry with a light sabre. The other night she force persuaded a group of security guards to go on a suicide mission with her. She did the little hand wave and said, "You will fulfill your duty no matter what the cost." And they replied "We will do our duty no matter what." Creepy as hell.
HKCavalier
Hey, hey, hey, don't be mean. We don't have to be mean, because, remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
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Quote:
That kind of reasoning will only make sense if you objectify good and evil, construe them as some kind of matter like freon or zinc. Some form of "stuff" that can be measured, quantified, mixed and purified. It's false logic and the sire of all manner of ugliness when applied to the real world.
That would be an interesting feat, considering that I just said good and evil don't exist and are entirely subjective.
Good and evil are meaningless words. In the long run they have no significance. Those who are holding on to some idea of someone or something being "evil" are simply finding reasons for anger and hate. The battle between good and evil has killed more people than anything else in the history of the world. Funny how it's never clear from the point of view of the people involved which side is good, and which side is evil.
As for slavery, everyone has at some point in their lives used someone else for their own ends. Some instances of slavery are more egregious than others, and on the whole it's a destructive practice, the lives of those involved on both sides of it are destroyed. And it is rife with negative experience. It would be easy for someone to call it evil. But slavery is just a thing, done by people. Should we sort every action into some category of good and evil? Is life a Star Wars game, and you are a bad person if you have ever lied? Should I exact some kind of justice or punishment on you if you have?
I oppose the things I do because they are destructive, contradictory, counter-intuitive, and inefficient. Slavery is one of those things. But I don't think the people doing the slavery think they're evil anymore than you think you're evil. Similarly, something one person might see as constructive, like procreation (if rather unhygienic), someone else would see as destructive, like overpopulation. To see everything as a duality like good or evil is needless, they are the same thing no matter what lens you look at them through.
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Also, I really hope that there's some point that you can tell a jerk force user exactly where they can stick their lightsaber.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:Quote:
That kind of reasoning will only make sense if you objectify good and evil, construe them as some kind of matter like freon or zinc. Some form of "stuff" that can be measured, quantified, mixed and purified. It's false logic and the sire of all manner of ugliness when applied to the real world.
That would be an interesting feat, considering that I just said good and evil don't exist and are entirely subjective.
Hey Byte,
Um. What just happened? I think I hit a nerve somehow and I'm sorry.
You began your post with "according to certain interpretations." How could I have known that they were *your* interpretations? A phrase like that suggests to me that you don't have a lot of stake in them. I thought you were discussing ideas, and I responded with what I thought about those ideas.
You say you don't believe good and evil exist, but your post had a lot to say on the subject of good and evil and those folks who find meaning in these terms. I thought I understood this and that's why I called the argument a "quasi-nietzchian strawman." It's always troubling to me when people go into detail describing and defining things they don't believe in. Not the most authoritative pov on the subject then.
Quote:Uh. To you, maybe. But what about the rest of us? Are we all just fools?
Good and evil are meaningless words.
Quote:Um. Says you? I don't know how I'm supposed to take these absolutes of yours. In my life, good and evil have had a profound significance. I've experienced some of the most extreme forms of human destructiveness and hate, witnessed a terrible will to annihilate and erase another human being first hand. Chilling. Completely fucked me up for decades of my life. Why shouldn't I find meaning in the word "evil?"
In the long run they have no significance.
And I've known extraordinary human kindness and love. And I've seen that this kindness and love is instrumental in healing the wounds caused by our terrible destructive will. Why should I have to resort to the mouthful, "terrible destructive will" when "evil" does the job?
I guess, you demonstrate an answer to that question in your latest post: because people harbor a metric butt load of assumptions about what these words mean and all manner of confusion ensues.
Quote:What? No? I can see how believing that people, in themselves, can be evil leads to hatred. Sure, I'm with you there. There are no definitive "evil" people. But the rest of this sentence is nonsense to my way of thinking.
Those who are holding on to some idea of someone or something being "evil" are simply finding reasons for anger and hate.
As I've said, I find a lot of meaning in these words and see no justification of anger or hatred in them. None. Three guys I've read up on, the Dalai Lama, Gautama Buddha, Jesus of the Bible, all of 'em have said things about good and evil, right and wrong. None of 'em are close up buddies of anger and hate, are they? Sure, there are all manner of self-described Christians in the world positively brimming over with hatred, we know this, but they do not comprise the sum total of people who find a use for the words "good" and "evil." (They don't even comprise the sum total of Christians!).
Quote:Who are you arguing with, Byte? You think because tremendous evil has been done in the name of goodness that good and evil do not exist??? To my way of thinking, wars are orgies of evil. Anybody fighting a war under the delusion that they're doing capitol "G" good in the world is in for a rude awakening if they live long enough.
The battle between good and evil has killed more people than anything else in the history of the world.
Quote:I don't believe going to war with evil lessens evil--actually, it's the opposite. Because war is, well, a form of evil.
Funny how it's never clear from the point of view of the people involved which side is good, and which side is evil.
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Quote:
You began your post with "according to certain interpretations." How could I have known that they were *your* interpretations? A phrase like that suggests to me that you don't have a lot of stake in them. I thought you were discussing ideas, and I responded with what I thought about those ideas.
I'm not sure yet. But the more I think about it, the more it seems correct. Speaking on the level of society, people arguing about what's good and what's evil cause a lot of problems.
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Uh. To you, maybe. But what about the rest of us? Are we all just fools?
No. But any conversation about good and evil would always depend on the point of view of those involved. Because no exact definition can be agreed upon, it's meaningless.
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In my life, good and evil have had a profound significance.
I'm not intending to belittle your experiences, but on a macroscopic level, most of the problems a person has to cope with in their lives are every day problems, individual problems, that end when the life of the person ends.
Quote:
Three guys I've read up on, the Dalai Lama, Gautama Buddha, Jesus of the Bible, all of 'em have said things about good and evil, right and wrong. None of 'em are close up buddies of anger and hate, are they?
Perhaps talking about religious leaders isn't the best conversation to have. Even they have their intolerances. The Dalai Lama has some rather unfortunate things to say about homosexuality, for example.
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You think because tremendous evil has been done in the name of goodness that good and evil do not exist?
What someone sees as good will always look evil to the opposite point of view. From there, I can infer that good and evil aren't distinct from each other. And if that's true, then good isn't really good, and evil isn't really evil. Therefore they don't exist.
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Only that a lot of people have some pretty debilitating delusions on the subject.
One thing we do agree on then. The justifications some people come up with to explain their actions to themselves are often very flimsy.
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Simple solution for me - I simply do what *I* think is right and be damned to what anyone else thinks of it, problem solved.
S'funny though, Darth bonehead didn't get on my case about chopping his little quisling messenger, in fact he seemed quite amused by it - his attitude towards me seems the paternal-possessive aspect of someone who has just been giften with a well trained but extremely vicious guard dog... which, maybe ain't THAT far from the truth, meh heh heh.
I do find it amusing that now TWO of my most vicious and intentionally malicious actions earned me lightside points - messing with the captive Jedis head, and now threatening to kill and eat a couple goons who were interfering with Darth nitpickers delivery... that was a hi-larious conversation, especially when the imperial officer complemented me on such an excellent bluff and my response winds up "What, don't you eat what you kill?"...
I guess the light-side points out of that were for letting the goons live, but I didn't send them howling in terror out of kindness, oh no, hows the rumor that imma cannibal gonna get around if there's nobody to spread it, yanno ?
My main gripe against the rest of the Sith is that they're just no GOOD at this, mostly a case of Stupid-Evil, puppy-kicking idiots - there's no point in ARBITRARY malice if you don't gain from it.
Oh, also, Vette is a font of hilarity, when I took her shock collar off.. oh wait, here's the EXACT conversion, heheheh.
And hoo boy, I also found the gonna-eat-you conversation too, mind you that's even MORE hilarious coming from a smallish human female, that being my Sith Marauder.
Seriously, LIGHT SIDE points for that ?
Bwaahahahahahah.
-Frem
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Okaaayyyy...
Who's brilliant idea was it to give the psychotic little Jawa a freakin rocket launcher?
Wandered into a PVP zone on accident and the little creep shot me in the arse with it!
-Frem
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:o
Okay, I suck at PVP, but this I gotta see. It'll be worth all the dying and screaming and such.
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Oh it's HI-larious...
Not only does he have a rocket launcher, he also has a flamethrower and a harpoon gun in that bag on his back, which is really wild since due to weight differential instead of using it to yank stuff to him (like Corso does) he uses it to yank himself at them like a freakin zipline charge.
And the really crazy thing ?
His decided game role as a companion, is as a TANK.
I rolled a Bounty Hunter this morning(1) just for the eventual payoff of having this crazy little bastard on my side!
(1) - I made said bounty hunter an extremely tempermental youngish girl in sort of an ad-hoc homage to Katie Ka-boom, side order of psychopathic sadism, and heaping helpings of pure greed for dessert, we're talking pure laughing mad psycho here.
And it SO WORKS for the story, it does.
(Cue Screams, fleeing in terror, that sorta thing - she made a HUTT cringe...)
-Frem
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