In this time and age, games are the bomb. People around the world are fighting the same war, against biological agents, virii. People are forced to stay at home and communicate only by digital means (imagine we would have had COVID-19 in the ’80…true it couldn’t, it would have been COVID-80, but still). We get to play more games on consoles, phones and pc’s than ever before! So that would mean the gaming industry is booming, right?! No…
Though there are plenty of great new titles, the cracks in the fabric of the virtual reality are becoming visible. One of those cracks is (and I say this with pain in my heart, as the franchise has been one of my favorites since the beginning) Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
How it is even possible that this game got past testing phase, is a miracle to me (and I don’t believe in miracles, so that says something).
Though AC:Odyssey isn’t alone in this, it shows that there is a limit to what the current status quo is able to deliver over time and cost. Lets quickly look at what games are and what games mean to people:
Games in general are a simplified activity of reality. Football is simply a warring match without death (Usually). Chess is politics without words. Pac-man is hide and seek in a two dimensional maze. And so on. The effect on human emotion and psyche can be extensive and diverse. One gets fun out of watching a match of soccer, the other can’t wait to kick the ball himself. One can see the intrinsic limited solutions to a chess match, another is trying to figure out why a bishop has a large mouth (it’s his hat, but I didn’t know that when I was a kid) and a horse can jump with no legs. It is all about the meta-physics of the game against the real world. We don’t like a game if it resembles real life too much. Then it isn’t a game anymore.
The experience people have with games, heavily depend on why you play a game. If you play patience/solitaire, you don’t expect goblins jumping from behind the cards on your screen. You don’t expect a ‘you died’ red blood dripping message, nor do you want to hear the sound of racing cars whooshing by. You are simply enjoying the chance to number to card ratio to try and hope your way through the stack of cards. And if you can’t finish it, you restart. This experience is relieving. When you play a 3D haunted mansion, with a pick-axe, you are betting your nerves. You know your not gonna be killed, but are going to be annoyed as hell, if the door opens and a big slimey zombie smacks you to the floor and that message ‘you died’ drips on your screen.
Each of the before mentioned games are great. They are simple, or more complex, but the more complex they are, the more you, as a player, want things to depend on your ability to transfer your commands to the game. If you press jump, you want your character to jump. When you click a card, you want the card to animate and turn, flip, move, fly, burn, or what not. When that doesn’t happen at the moment it is expected, it takes you out of the moment of the game. The moment of the escape from reality. The moment of being in control. This is bad. Can happen, but it is bad. The more time a developer puts into making a game, the bigger the claims lay on the expectations of a game. Now we get to the cracks in the metaverse called game-industry.
Some of the better dialog in the game.
Ubisoft, the creator of great games, like a whole bunch of Tom Clancy games, but also most of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, showed its limits when delivering Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Why? Because it fails at the most important part of being an ‘assassin’ in an Assassin’s Creed game: FIGHTING and STEALTH. If a company poured millions of dollars in creating a new skin for a game that has been done over and over, you should expect a polished game, where you can jump, roll, run, climb, stab and grab. Is this all possible? Yes…and no…After buying the ultimate edition two years after its release, I would expect any bugs or issues that would be obvious, to be …eradicated. Nothing is further from the truth. 2 years after the fact, the game feels unfinished, quickly set up and has several huge play issues: climbing controls are easy, yet often clumsy to below the mediocre. Often you find a ledge where your character simply doesn’t want to go up and jumps off…into death, or…you sneak up (yeah that is what Assassins do) on an enemy and take your bow, see the red bar saying, if you shoot now, it will be instant kill, to see the arrow hit the enemy, he brushes it off without any damage and you are running for your life with 10 enemies after you. Well…you could say karma, but still…that is not what you would expect in a game… This is about the game-play, but imagine you run up to a NPC (non-playable-character) and get a mission: Go there and get me the stuff. You come back with the stuff: and you say: yes, that’s it. All of it. Or you go kill two dude/dudettes, come back: yes, I got all of them. or you go break something: yes, lets say they will have a hard time fixing it together again. No problem…but if it is the only line you reply in EACH and everyone of the missions…it gets tedious the second time around already. These are three things that seriously take the wind out of enjoying the game, even two years after its release. Assassin’s Creed Origin had other issues, but they were depending on player choices, not on the engine that runs your actions.
Lucky for Ubisoft, it isn’t the only publisher running into games that are too big even for them to handle. But in this case they are on the far end of the stick I hold. And I didn’t even start about their change in UELA for the 1st of September 2020 yet.
(Images in this article are from the Ubisoft released E3 Fan Kit)
Well…the title is a bit deceiving. What I want to write here, is about reexamining the universe and the way we modeled ‘physics’. For those not much into the matter:
Science (any science) is the method of examining the relations between causes and effects in the universe. Building a model from those relations that can be used to calculate how things in other situations will behave.
This is how we got the ‘Laws of Thermodynamics’, and the ‘General Relativity Theory’ and ‘Special Relativity Theory’ and even the ‘Theory of evolution’.
The first is a model that has observed the causal (cause and effect) connections in movement of objects and matter in general. Though it has been refined over the centuries, it is an important base on which we decide how the effects we observe should be connected and which sub-steps and by that sub-causality can be found (which in many cases have been very precise and correct. Others are still being investigated, which caused us to come to more complex/elaborate fields like ‘quantum physics’).
The second is a model that relates to how we actually observed the causality of the first. That when something moves, it is depending on distance, angle and more (ie. both Light and Observer are connected to the movement of the matter and energy in the first model).
The third is a model that explains how the process of evolution is causing different effects to be observed. Though there are people not up to speed with reality yet, regarding the whole fact that people have sex, and their parents had sex and even their dead great great great great grand parents had sex and brought forth new generations with altered combinations of genes, it is what causes life forms (we call categorized them/speciated them into species) to change and diversify on Earth.
Why these three examples? Well for no apparent reason, but there is always a possible causal connection. One of the most attacked theories/models is that of evolution. This has to do with the fact that no scripture writes about the other two (though plenty of them tell tales defying the first and others can only have been observed by defying the second mentioned model). But the first two even have different names and that is something that I do want to address: The first is ‘The laws of…’ which states that the observed is irrevocably correct, while the second one is ‘…theory’, which means there is evidence and proving to support it, but it can still be falsified. The third is, in my mind, a misdenomer. You can’t falsify evolution, even if you wished. You can falsify some small theories (as has been done the last 400 years) regarding partial observed causality, but the actual evolution can’t be denied.
So….what is this ‘reinventing’ or ‘reexamining’ the universe about?
Well…basically it means, taking all the current ‘information’ and ‘data’ we have gathered about the universe and redefine the ‘laws’, ‘theories’ and intrinsic causality. I think that what current sciencific consensus has done, is make a shoestring action (string theory anyone? XD)
We now know that the universe exists of pretty much the same stuff everywhere. There will be exotic options elsewhere, depending on the influences of forces and ‘age’ of the universe at that spot.
We currently hold a model of the universe, where all we observe exists as a ‘spacetime’ unit. Matter is a ‘state dependant dilation of energy of a specific frequency’ E=MC2. In other words, the longer the frequency the more it shifts from energy observation to matter observation. How do we know? Energy is hotter than matter. Meaning the radiation in energy is higher than in matter. Obviously, as a rock is colder than a flame. Though lava is hot, it is so, when infused with radiation.
So, why do you want to re-examine or ‘reinvent the wheel’, you already named it as we know it?! Well…I think you can come to very interesting new insights if you do.
About spacetime. I don’t believe it is a good representation of what we observe. Why not? Because it was a model created as a starting point. If the causal calculations then require arbitrary ‘Constants’ like C, for which Einstein himself said he felt bad to have to add it because he didn’t recognize any other way, it shows that somewhere before that, it went wrong (same as in programming).
So, what is spacetime? Nothing. Lets start at the start. The universe has ‘evolved’ from the very early point. We don’t know about space yet, because all we observe is spatial states. There is always the question of whether wat we ‘experience’ (in the scientific sense of the collection of impulses from the universe to our awareness) is actually what exists. I don’t think spacetime exits. I think you can say: existence is the observed reality (collection of impulses gathered by awareness) of which the state exists without the observer. Yeah, wishywashy eh?
Basically, if we take time separate, we have nothing. Time doesn’t exist without existence. Why not? Because it can’t be measured without us. We are the ones observing it. But how did time pass when we didn’t exist yet? It basically didn’t. What happened was the evolution of the universe in progress. IE. change. Or the movement towards entropy. And how did that come about? Well…think of it as a ripple in a pond (bad example, because it requires something to start the ripple, but still). The ripple starts with large/high waves. Then when the movement is spread, the diffusion of the wave causes it to lose amplitude and angular frequency decreases.
Yes, we are talking wave here. What I will try to explain is that the universe is an extensive model of three dimensional wave functions, which cause what we observe as three dimensional field functions, which in turn is what we perceive/experience as reality. This is NOT a representation of a field theory, or wave theory (well the latter a bit more). What I will try to explain is that particles don’t exist without wave and field, instead of the other way around. Classical physics (but also quantum physics) starts from ‘there is matter and energy’. But the point is, that we also agree in that that matter = energy and visa versa. But if that is true, why do we have particles? Because of mass? Or, because we address matter and mass the same? We often example gravity as a force, that depends on mass. But what if gravity isn’t dependent on mass, but our observation of mass is dependant on the amplitude and the angular frequency of a wave function, and intrinsic behavior as a field function? In other words, what we observe as mass, is the implied result of interaction of the wave/field function in fluxtuation (was writing time there, but I want to explain how we observe time from the actual wave/field function behavior).
Now, lets see where we are. We have a wave (for which we have a flow, which causes the amplitude to diminish due to the frequency that interacts with ….), which has to start somewhere (we call this the big bang/rapid inflation model). At the very start, the amplitude was nearly infinite vertical and it will go to a amplitude infinite horizontal (figuratively, because direction in non-linear space is arbitrary).
You could prove your consciousness is separate of the functioning of your brain, IF it could exist without physical processes. Good luck in that.
You will find, it is impossible to have consciousness without physical processes. Why? Because of the way that the actual stimuli and their responses are causing us to have anything to be aware of.
Consciousness, or awareness, means nothing more than: ‘being able to respond to’. In other words, a single-cell organism is aware of barely anything. That is why it can do barely anything. Still it responds to stimuli on the level that its complexity allows (Pressure change, temperature change, lack of food).
Multi-cellular organisms have (depending on its species) more awareness of change in its surrounding. For instance: Pain receptors, or temperature receptors. Almost all complex-cellular organisms have a neural center that processes the different signals from receptors in a layered manner. This is what we call the nervous system. In vertebrates, this system has developed pretty similar in most species. Every animal is aware of its surrounding, depending on the amount of senses it has (sensible receptors, but senses is shorter). These senses have, through generations, been specialized at receiving a specific type of stimuli. Some for the electromagnetic spectrum we call light. Others for pheromones or aerosols. Some have tasks almost indistinguishable, yet for different speed and reasons. The skin has nerve endings for pain/heat/touch signals, the tongue for chemical imbalances, like the nasal cavities.
With worms and insects the signals from such senses go to nerve-knots. With vertebrates to the brain/neural center.
Knowing you know something, or don’t know something, means you are aware of your awareness. Metawareness.com is all about that! Human psychology, human culture, human beings, etc. Join us in the metabolism of the metaverse around the metamind of the metahuman!
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