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8 - Mass Effect 1: Shepard, the Geth, and Dangerous AI · Mythic Mind Games

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Mythic Mind Games, where we discuss
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: video games through the lens of the Christian humanities. I'm
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: doctor Andrew Snyder, and I'm glad that you're here. Hey there,
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: welcome to the beginning of our series on the Mass
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: Effect trilogy. This is something that we've been talking about
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: doing for a while, but I've finally gotten around to
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: the games myself after picking them up on the last
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Team sale, and so now we're equipped to make this happen.
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: We have a couple of special guests joining us today
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: that you will meet momentarily, but I do want to
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: let you know up front we're having some technical issues here.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: Before we even got started, I was struggling with my webcam,
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: with my microphone, my internet, but finally got all that
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: situated we got rolling, but even still, there are just
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: a couple of times where my internet cut out for
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: just a little bit. We're going to see that. One
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: of our guests up, Megan, her internet cut out a
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: little bit. She was dealing with some hotel wife. And
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: so if sometimes you just see us kind of glitch
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: out a little bit, or it sounds like there's a
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: brief skip in the conversation. Then that's what's going on here.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: But most of it's fine. And then at one point
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: even my light bulb burned out behind me. Is if
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: you're watching the video, I just go dark all of
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: a sudden. But that's okay. Yeah, it ended up being
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: a good conversation, and I guess you know, the technology
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: turning against us, it kind of goes along with the
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: vibe of the conversation. All right, let's go ahead and
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: get to it. All right, welcome to the latest episode
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: of Mythic Mind Games, where we're just continuing to talk
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: about significant games. And I use that word intentionally that
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: you know, a ongoing thesis of this project that we're
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: doing is that there is artistic value in games that
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: they play something like the role of a myth. Right,
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: where a good game, a compelling game, it provides a story,
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: the kind of story that you can enter into that
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: and it's not always going to be super clear cut,
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: you know, what is the message at least in something
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: that's really I think worth engaging with that that, especially
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: when you're dealing with something like mass effect like we're
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: doing today, that there's so many different angles that you
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: can use to analyze you know, what are you going
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: to take kind of on face value? What are you
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: gonna take symbolically? Like, I think there are a lot
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: of different ranges ask to you, like what we can
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: get out of this, and so I think this has
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: the potential to be a good conversation here. Now we
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: have a number of people joining us today. It's one
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: of one of the larger panels we'veatteral for at least
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: a few episodes. Now we have Ian and David are
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: turning with us, and if you've been watching for a while,
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: if you've been listening for a while, then you're already
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: familiar with them. But we also have three new voices
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: that have not been on the show before. And so
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: I love just to just do brief introductions, you know,
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: tell us something about whatever you want to say about
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: who you are, what you have to plug, that sort
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: of thing. And so we've got see is a kid
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: trick challous. We've got renowned author Michael Caine, renowned medievalist
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: Meghan Multonado. So I always just hear a little bit
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: about you and and something you have to plug. If
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: you have that kit trick, you start us off.
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: Hi, you guys can call me kit. Well, I'm a gamer,
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: I'm a movie watcher, TV watcher. Me and my buddy
• 3:22
  Speaker 2: just recently started a podcast that's looking into the oscars
• 3:26
  Speaker 2: and everything that's been put out there and trying to
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: see how that maps through culturally with just its impact
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: with everything. Yeah, I would say a mass effect. Played
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: it on disc way back in college. Stayed up very
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: very late many a night. So I'll explain a little
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: more about that later.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: Sure. Wonderful. And so that podcast you have that that's
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: currently ongoing.
• 3:52
  Speaker 2: Yes, yes, it's just brand new pretty much, so we're
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: still looking.
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: What's it called.
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: It's called the Academy's Cat of Audience.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: All right, Uh, Megan, tell us little stuff about yourself.
• 4:04
  Speaker 3: I am Megan Malbinado. I'm a PhD candidate and engition
• 4:07
  Speaker 3: comparative literature. I am a casual gamer. I have done
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: some analysis. Have you been presented on at conferences on
• 4:17
  Speaker 3: medievalisms and video games? Because medieval literature is my specialty
• 4:21
  Speaker 3: and that's also what I talk about on my YouTube
• 4:23
  Speaker 3: channel and on my ex account. Both tags are act Megievalist.
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: So medievalist but with my name me E G I
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: E V A L I S. T is the made
• 4:37
  Speaker 3: up spelling, my made up word, I think. But why
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: I'm here today is because I love mass effect this.
• 4:45
  Speaker 3: I do think there are some elements of medieval Romance
• 4:48
  Speaker 3: or the Romance epic to the way that the narrative
• 4:50
  Speaker 3: plays out. But I love the game, love the trilogy.
• 4:54
  Speaker 3: I played it a lot in high school. It's kind
• 4:56
  Speaker 3: of when I discovered it, and yeah, I am. I
• 5:00
  Speaker 3: have so much to say about it to anyone who
• 5:02
  Speaker 3: will listen. I always recommend it to people who are
• 5:05
  Speaker 3: still discovering it even today, which I think is great.
• 5:07
  Speaker 3: So that's why I'm here.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: I have to ask, are any of those conference presentations
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: available anywhere?
• 5:13
  Speaker 3: Ooh uh no, No, it wasn't recorded the talk I
• 5:17
  Speaker 3: gave at the International like Kalamazoo Medievalist Conference. But this
• 5:23
  Speaker 3: is on the Witcher three, especially the Wild Hunt or
• 5:25
  Speaker 3: which is three Wild Hunt, the DLC that comes in
• 5:29
  Speaker 3: kind of at the end of the game. You have
• 5:31
  Speaker 3: this era anyway, I have a video actually where I
• 5:34
  Speaker 3: give a very succinct version of this talk that I gave,
• 5:37
  Speaker 3: where I ask if the Witcher three is a medieval game,
• 5:40
  Speaker 3: So you can find that on my channel and watch
• 5:42
  Speaker 3: it many times to give me lots of views.
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: Wonderful. Yeah, we went to revisit that at some point.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: I haven't played the Witcher series, but I just picked
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: it up on the Steam sale, so we'll see how
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: that goes. And that's really my thing right now. I'd
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: stopped playing games for a decade or so for the
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: most part. Just do another souff and so now I'm
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: catching up on some things. Whatever the just Them sale,
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: I stuck up on my next my next in set
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: of I Guess podcast series. So that's how I ended
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: with Mass Effect. All right, Michael, tell us something about yourself.
• 6:15
  Speaker 4: I am the author of the science fiction Western series
• 6:18
  Speaker 4: after Moses. I am five books in, almost done with
• 6:22
  Speaker 4: the six, which will be the final book in the series.
• 6:24
  Speaker 4: You can check me out at Michael F Kane dot
• 6:27
  Speaker 4: com or on Twitter at Michael F Kane. My day job,
• 6:30
  Speaker 4: I'm on staff at my church. I am the music
• 6:32
  Speaker 4: guy down in rural Arkansas. I am a nerd through
• 6:38
  Speaker 4: and through. I write sci fi, but I'm more of
• 6:40
  Speaker 4: a Tolkienist at heart. But I don't think I could
• 6:42
  Speaker 4: write that as well, so I stuck to something I
• 6:44
  Speaker 4: thought I could write. And Yeah, lifelong player of games,
• 6:49
  Speaker 4: although with little kids. It's a little less common now.
• 6:51
  Speaker 4: So I managed to replay the first few hours of
• 6:53
  Speaker 4: Mass Effect one this week just to give myself a
• 6:55
  Speaker 4: bit of a reminder of something I hadn't gotten to
• 6:57
  Speaker 4: play in a couple of years.
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: No, I should say that as a reference back to
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: our art spat on on X. You know, out of
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: class Star Wars, and I know I know that Megan
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: is on Team Fantasy here, so I don't know that
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: this is actually an intervention. It's really what this is
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: a stage to be cool.
• 7:17
  Speaker 4: She just abandoned you completely, oh man.
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: Rough, I think she was having some some Issuespeles should
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: pop back in.
• 7:25
  Speaker 5: Well.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: At this point, I want to really begin our proper
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: conversation here the way that we tend to do it,
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: which is just go around to be laid out the
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: foundations of where we're going to go with this. I
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: just want to ask you what is your experience with
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: this game? You know, when did you first play it,
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: and why has it stood out to you? What makes
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: a good game kind of really whatever you want to
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: say about it in a very general kind of sense,
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: and that will get late lay out some some streams
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: for us to follow as we move forward now to
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: provide some ground rules here. You know, this is a
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: strictly conversation on the first game will be We have
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: an episode per game for this little mini series. Now,
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: spoilers are okay, Like you can reference future games if
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: you want to give if that's helpful for what you're
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: talking about, but we're primarily going to be focusing on
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: the first one. Just to set the bounds for this conversation,
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: all right, So I'll just go around and say, have
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: you on my screen here, Ian, why don't you tell
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: us something about your experience with this game.
• 8:23
  Speaker 5: So when I went to grad school in Virginia, I
• 8:28
  Speaker 5: moved there from Minnesota. Didn't know a single person there,
• 8:32
  Speaker 5: and I found a new church and lo and behold
• 8:35
  Speaker 5: Sitting next to me a couple holes over was a
• 8:39
  Speaker 5: guy I went to college with in Tennessee, and so
• 8:42
  Speaker 5: we reconnected and he invited me over and said, you know,
• 8:47
  Speaker 5: you really like Kotor, you might like mass Effect. So
• 8:51
  Speaker 5: I ended up playing the first Massifact game at his house,
• 8:54
  Speaker 5: just hanging out with him and talking as we played.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: So, and I know that you did not move on
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: to the other games, correct, And maybe we can circle
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: back around to some of your your gripes about that
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: that led you to that decision. All right, yeah, Kiptick,
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: tell us something about your experience with this game.
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: I just gotta say, Yeah, my buddy never got past
• 9:17
  Speaker 2: the second game. He didn't want to see everyone, you know,
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: just didn't want to see what would happen. He fell
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: in love with all those guys.
• 9:24
  Speaker 6: Anyways.
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: So for me, as I said college, I played it
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: one of the first games I got in my Xbox
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: and went through it long nights until I made some
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: I thought I could be friends with everyone in the game,
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: which you can't do if you don't level up in
• 9:42
  Speaker 2: certain things. And so my first moment of regret was
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: killing the rack Night Queen. After that, I was just like, ah,
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: why do I feel so bad about this? And then
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: I tried to talk Rex out of his his spe
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: and then came in and I'm like, good, good, Okay,
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: he's putting the gun down. We're I'll get me happier,
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: and then all the blue Ashley showed them and.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: I was just what in the heck?
• 10:10
  Speaker 5: Oh my?
• 10:11
  Speaker 6: So yeah, it.
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: Traumatized me and took me for quite a ride in
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: my first playthrough.
• 10:17
  Speaker 6: For sure.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: Some of that definitely resonates with my experience, but I'll
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: save that for my turn. Okay, all right, David, tell
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: something about this game. Your experience with this game.
• 10:27
  Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm gonna guess that your conversation skills weren't up
• 10:30
  Speaker 7: to par. Andrew, h Yeah, I played Mass Effect when
• 10:36
  Speaker 7: it came out. I don't know why more games don't
• 10:39
  Speaker 7: do it, but like there were actual end game benefits
• 10:43
  Speaker 7: to earning the achievements, you know, like it increased your
• 10:46
  Speaker 7: percentage with different skills and things like that, which I
• 10:49
  Speaker 7: really thought was pretty neat. We talked about this before
• 10:52
  Speaker 7: when we were playing Kotor, and I think that may
• 10:55
  Speaker 7: have sort of spurred you into playing it, Andrew, but
• 10:58
  Speaker 7: you can talk more about that. But yeah, it's just
• 11:02
  Speaker 7: such a well written and fully realized universe. I mean,
• 11:07
  Speaker 7: it's pretty materialistic and naturalistic in its viewpoint. The only
• 11:12
  Speaker 7: theist in the game is a white woman who's also
• 11:15
  Speaker 7: a space racist, but it's still a really I just
• 11:19
  Speaker 7: completely love all the games. I know so much heat
• 11:22
  Speaker 7: over the ending of the third one, and they came
• 11:23
  Speaker 7: in with a huge patch and tried to add more
• 11:26
  Speaker 7: explanation for the things that were going on. I think
• 11:28
  Speaker 7: they actually did a pretty good job with it. To
• 11:31
  Speaker 7: have this many choices that a person can make across
• 11:35
  Speaker 7: three games, they're going to have to fudget a little
• 11:39
  Speaker 7: bit in different places. You may have noticed, how you know,
• 11:44
  Speaker 7: if someone dies that could live in the next game,
• 11:48
  Speaker 7: they're generally just replaced with a similar person who has
• 11:52
  Speaker 7: all the same lines, just because they have to. They've
• 11:54
  Speaker 7: got to continue the story. But yeah, it does a
• 11:59
  Speaker 7: better job of consequences of your moral choices, I think
• 12:03
  Speaker 7: than most games do. And that's one of the things
• 12:05
  Speaker 7: that I always found really fascinating about it too.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: And this is moving into the third game here, but
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: I man, I'm having all kinds of technical shues. Now
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: you've my ceiling light's going out. I think the lightbulb
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: is burning out all right. Anyways, I uh man, I
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: totally threw me off track.
• 12:21
  Speaker 6: Here, moving into the third game.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, moving into the third game, you know, talking about
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: the ending, like, you know, I wasn't there for any
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: of that, having just jumped in recently with the Legendary edition,
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: so I don't even know what it's like to you
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: have that first run through the original version. Here, you know,
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna just pass for a second while I get
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: my life together megan to say something about this game.
• 12:45
  Speaker 3: Let's see I Nice Saled Republic was mentioned, So I
• 12:49
  Speaker 3: encountered this game I mentioned in high school and I
• 12:54
  Speaker 3: had a tradition. Let's make the story short, I had
• 12:57
  Speaker 3: a tradition of playing Nice Saled republ Like whenever school
• 13:01
  Speaker 3: got out for some years. And then we had moved
• 13:05
  Speaker 3: and I could not find my copy of Nice Steale
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: of Republic, and so I started looking up. I thought that, okay,
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: maybe I should just try something new. I had seen
• 13:15
  Speaker 3: what buyer I was getting up to since then. Because
• 13:17
  Speaker 3: I am not very expansive in my taste, I really
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: stick to ourpgs. And it was between jadea Empire, which
• 13:22
  Speaker 3: I never ended up playing and still haven't and Mass Effect,
• 13:26
  Speaker 3: and went with Mass Effect. I was blown away. As
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: others have said about the moral dilemmas that the game
• 13:33
  Speaker 3: puts on you, and that I think is one of
• 13:36
  Speaker 3: my favorite aspects of the series is the Paragon renegade system.
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: I appreciate that it's not a very obvious binary. You know,
• 13:47
  Speaker 3: are you gonna save the poppy or throw him into
• 13:49
  Speaker 3: the wood chipper kind of a situation that as much
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: as I love nice sealed republic. You could kind of
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: get into that. It's like, are you gonna spit on
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: this widow and insult her? Are you going to like
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: it for five hundred dollars, which is it's funny and charming.
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: But I appreciate about mass effect that you have situations
• 14:04
  Speaker 3: where I'm not going to say, there's not always an
• 14:07
  Speaker 3: obvious answer for me. I think there are times where
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: there is a decision that I know I would make
• 14:12
  Speaker 3: in real life, but it's still very difficult. The rack
• 14:15
  Speaker 3: Ny decision. I think somebody else mentioned, you know, do
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: you annihilate this race or do you free them with
• 14:23
  Speaker 3: a very solid chance that they could annihilate other people?
• 14:27
  Speaker 3: You know, like, this's not very obvious, like, oh, okay,
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: this is the good guy thing to do. So I
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: very much appreciate how they took the moral system and
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: still kept it. But it's not are you going to
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: be good or evil? It's more of like an aggressive
• 14:43
  Speaker 3: or chivalric kind of virtuous thing going on. Yeah, it's
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: my favorite aspect to think of the first game and
• 14:51
  Speaker 3: of the whole trilogy.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I can definitely echo to that, and I've got
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: the flight on in front of you. Over exposing me.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: But you know, it's gonna roll with it. For for those
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: who are gonna be listening to this and aren't watching
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: the video actually been having all kinds of issues on
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: my side. Light's going out. I mean, I guess the
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: the the the the reaperssure are coming after me or something.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: So yeah. But to echo what megan just talking about
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: that there is this big shift in kind of how
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: the morality is framed between Kotor and this game, and
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: that is something that I very much appreciate that this
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: this you're really dealing not so much with Darken light side,
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: but with like pragmatism versus idealism is largely how this
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: has worked out, Like what is likely going to lead
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: to the result that I want versus what's the right
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: thing to do? I think that's how not all, but
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: that's how a lot of the decisions are framed, which
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: make them a lot more difficult. Like even if you're
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: trying to, you know, role play a certain type of character,
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: like it's not always clear what the right decision is
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: for in you know, for for you or for your
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: character that you're trying to craft here. And I think
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: that is something that makes it I mean a lot
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: more philosophically engaging, and again, as we've talked about before,
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: like I love Kotor, but at the same time, it's
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: very easy to decide this is the character I'm going
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: to be. The decisions that I want that are going
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: to lead to that result that character profile are very clear,
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: whereas you don't always know. And I was very intentional
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: about not minimizing my screen to go look up, you
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: know what's going to lead to white like I wanted
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: to live it out of course as I do so
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: and see some of those consequences, I mean, it leads
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: to it calls for a continuous replays to you know,
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: figure out different different paths, and so I definitely agree.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: I like this system. I think it's I think it's
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: an improvement. All right, Michael tells something about your experience
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: with this game.
• 16:44
  Speaker 4: Okay, Well, I was a co tour guy probably in college.
• 16:46
  Speaker 4: I played Koe Tor one in two for the first time.
• 16:50
  Speaker 4: Of course, really liked him. You know, Koe Tore one
• 16:53
  Speaker 4: is one of the greatest video games ever made, straight up,
• 16:56
  Speaker 4: you know, top five easy, no matter what. I didn't
• 16:58
  Speaker 4: play Mass Effect one right when came out. I had
• 17:00
  Speaker 4: a buddy that gave it a kind of negative review,
• 17:05
  Speaker 4: said you could still kind of see the bones of
• 17:06
  Speaker 4: co Tor's combat a little bit with the biotic tech
• 17:09
  Speaker 4: and combat, you know, the skills, but that it didn't
• 17:13
  Speaker 4: quite translate as well. And I kind of see what
• 17:15
  Speaker 4: they're saying with the gun plays a little awkward and
• 17:17
  Speaker 4: Mass Effect one right then clean that up a little
• 17:20
  Speaker 4: bit in the more recent version. So I actually skipped
• 17:23
  Speaker 4: it for at the start, saw the trailer for Mass
• 17:26
  Speaker 4: Effect two and I was like, no, I want to
• 17:29
  Speaker 4: play that. He immediately bought Mass Effect one, played through
• 17:31
  Speaker 4: it so that I could play through two and three
• 17:33
  Speaker 4: on release. Let's see something that's good that that it
• 17:38
  Speaker 4: kind of calls to me from Mass Effects to something
• 17:40
  Speaker 4: different than what you guys have said, is that it's
• 17:42
  Speaker 4: a really good sci fi vibe. Right. There's this very crisp,
• 17:48
  Speaker 4: very specific set of color palettes that they stick to
• 17:50
  Speaker 4: the whole time. There is a very specific audio scape,
• 17:54
  Speaker 4: this kind of combined synth orchestral soundscape, you know, they
• 18:00
  Speaker 4: used to create the the the texture for the background.
• 18:05
  Speaker 4: There's a very there's very very specific kinds of lightings
• 18:10
  Speaker 4: with the lens flares and things like that that it
• 18:13
  Speaker 4: really creates a nice experience going in. And then on
• 18:16
  Speaker 4: top of that, it's in kind of in my taste,
• 18:18
  Speaker 4: it's the perfect mix of the space magic and more
• 18:22
  Speaker 4: technical sci fi. You can dive into all the Codex
• 18:25
  Speaker 4: stuff and you can tell that there were some nerds
• 18:27
  Speaker 4: that seriously thought about some science stuff, but you totally
• 18:30
  Speaker 4: don't have to. And at the same time they still
• 18:32
  Speaker 4: have the force i mean, biotics and you can. It's
• 18:36
  Speaker 4: just I enjoy the environment that I enjoy the setting
• 18:40
  Speaker 4: of the story. I think it's a well crafted setting.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I would definitely agree with that. That
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: the soundscape, as you said, even like the music it
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: it very much reminded me of the first time I
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: was playing StarCraft. It's similar to the sort of music,
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: similar sort of vibe. And I agree that it really does,
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: i mean, maintain the consistent atmosphere throughout that you know,
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: even as you're going through the different planets and engaging
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: with these different cultures, like it feels like a unified
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: experience rather than simply I'm you know, going to this
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: alien world. In this alien world, like it all feels
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: like it belongs together. And so I would definitely agree
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: with that, and that's part of what makes it so
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: such an immersive experience for me. I mean, I've already
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: hinted a little bit of why I appreciated this game,
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: but you know, as I mentioned, I just got into
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: it recently. I just picked up the Legendary edition on
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: Steam not too long ago, and I blew through it
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: faster than I intended to. I said in our discord that,
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: you know, I have to finish my book before I
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: get into any more story driven games, and then like
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: two weeks later, I'm done at the trilogy. It's just
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: it's just how it worked out. It's it's just such
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: a gripping experience. And I think that the the gameplay
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: is great. I think that the story is great. And
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: before we move further, maybe you would be helpful if
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: somebody was able to just give us like a broad
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: overview of like what is the plot of this game?
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: I mean, I can do that, but are any of
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: you so inclined to just run through the story.
• 20:12
  Speaker 6: Well, I think it's.
• 20:15
  Speaker 7: In general, it's sort of humanity has found themselves now
• 20:21
  Speaker 7: that they're spacefaring, and they discovered that Karen, the moon
• 20:25
  Speaker 7: of Pluto, is actually a frozen machine called the mass relay,
• 20:30
  Speaker 7: and once they figured out how to activate that, they
• 20:32
  Speaker 7: kind of found themselves in this larger universe galaxy actually
• 20:39
  Speaker 7: of all of these other alien races, and humanity is
• 20:42
  Speaker 7: just kind of trying to show their worth and make
• 20:46
  Speaker 7: a name for themselves in this community. But the plot
• 20:50
  Speaker 7: of this game is that you kind of uncover a
• 20:55
  Speaker 7: threat and as you are kind of on trial tryout
• 21:02
  Speaker 7: to be the first human Spector, which are like these
• 21:05
  Speaker 7: special agents that kind of can act above the law.
• 21:10
  Speaker 7: You discover that there's some strange race called the Reapers
• 21:15
  Speaker 7: who they're an impending threat, and you spend a lot
• 21:20
  Speaker 7: of the game trying to convince the Alien Council that
• 21:23
  Speaker 7: the threat is real and that it is imminent and
• 21:26
  Speaker 7: they needs to be taken seriously. And there is a
• 21:30
  Speaker 7: former Specter, well he still is a Specter at the beginning,
• 21:34
  Speaker 7: named Sarin, who has aligned himself with those Reapers because
• 21:40
  Speaker 7: he believes that's the only way to survive.
• 21:44
  Speaker 6: So I guess that basically covers it.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that basically covers the premise of the game. And
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: for this game, if I recall correctly, we don't learn
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: what exactly these Reapers are at least where they came
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: from what originally got this this movement started. All we
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: really learned from this first game is that there is
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: this continuous cycle of life forming and advancing, and then
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: at some point the Reapers come in and basic on
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: wipe everyone out, and then we get this restart, and
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: this just keeps happening again and again as this this
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: endless cycle of fate. And even I mean the Reapers,
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: like obviously that the name they're associated with death. I mean,
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: like the Grim Reaper. They're the ones who harvest life essentially,
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: and there's a lot of symbolism of death built into this.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: I mean even like you know one of the major
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: human organization Cerberus, right, it's the guardian of the underworld. Like,
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: there's all this death symbolism in here, which is obviously
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: connected with the idea of fate and what is our
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: relationship with fate as individuals as well as as a people.
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: And so I think that this first game does a
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: good job of setting up enough of enough understanding of
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: what this threat is to kind of leave us in
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: that philosophical space that then is going to get built
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: out and worked out a little bit more over the
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: coming games. But I appreciate that by the time you
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: get to the end of this first game, like it's
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: obvious that you're only entering into the rabbit hole or
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: you know, you're you're starting to exit the cave whatever
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: metaphor who want to use here? So what I mean,
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: I don't know. I was kind of laid a bunch
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: of threads here. Where where do we want to pull
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: on that? You know, as I say that, I mean,
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: what do you find to be most philosophically compelling about
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: this game or what is some interesting questions that you
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: think that raises.
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: I think the game is more did in Christian theology,
• 23:41
  Speaker 3: even from the beginning. Then it lets on. You start
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: in your very first locations Eden Prime, with the you know,
• 23:50
  Speaker 3: Prime being the first and then Eden obviously having the
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: biblical starting point, and that's where the first problem happens.
• 23:59
  Speaker 3: And your main character is named Shepherd. And even in
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: the end of the third game there's this little afterthought
• 24:07
  Speaker 3: kind of sequence that's weirdly animated, but you have someone
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: else tell me about the shepherd who saved everyone. And
• 24:12
  Speaker 3: in each game, really you can see that the Shepherd
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: is going to have some kind of salvafic action, even
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: if it's not fully realized until the end of the trilogy.
• 24:22
  Speaker 5: So I.
• 24:24
  Speaker 3: Guess I'm interested to hear what other people think. I
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: don't think that the game is overtly Christian by any means.
• 24:31
  Speaker 3: I think it's broadly interested in myth. We talked about Cerberus,
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: I mentioned some other references, but I do think that
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: there is a I want to be Messianic cycle at
• 24:50
  Speaker 3: work here. I'm open to debate on that point, but
• 24:56
  Speaker 3: it's I think it's available as a reading. Yeah, would
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: plausit that.
• 25:02
  Speaker 5: I think that fits with something that I really noticed
• 25:05
  Speaker 5: when I was playing through the game, which is that
• 25:08
  Speaker 5: there's a real emphasis on wanting species to work together
• 25:15
  Speaker 5: to overcoming ancient racial grievances. And even though the character
• 25:23
  Speaker 5: that everyone saves and the only explicit Christian in the
• 25:30
  Speaker 5: in the game is a space racist Ashley, she she
• 25:35
  Speaker 5: does get better, which I think is kind of what
• 25:37
  Speaker 5: I'm saying, is like, there's this taking of parts of
• 25:40
  Speaker 5: you know, the no Jew or Greek, no male or female, no,
• 25:45
  Speaker 5: like the the universal quality of the Gospel that transforms
• 25:49
  Speaker 5: lives through sanctification into being one body. I think there
• 25:54
  Speaker 5: are reflected elements in that because that the sort of
• 25:58
  Speaker 5: the I mean, the negative way you can look at this,
• 26:01
  Speaker 5: of course, is the diversity of our strength, kind of
• 26:03
  Speaker 5: woke mind virus that is often overdone in today's thing.
• 26:07
  Speaker 5: But I think there is a true you know, unifying
• 26:12
  Speaker 5: of various parts in the body of Christ that is
• 26:15
  Speaker 5: the good side of the goss I mean, there is
• 26:19
  Speaker 5: no bad side of the Gospel, but the good side
• 26:21
  Speaker 5: of that portion of the message that's been sort of
• 26:23
  Speaker 5: taken up by the liberal mainstream denominations of churches. And
• 26:29
  Speaker 5: so I would say I think that does support a
• 26:32
  Speaker 5: messianic reading of Shepherd's actions.
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I think that's fair. And obviously all
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: of these different alien species have their own cultures, have
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: their own strengths, and the part of the good mission
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: of Shepherd is to unite the peoples together right towards
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: this common purpose in confrontation of their true enemy, rather
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: than their petty little squabbles with each other. That that
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: being said, and this is not a philosophical argument that
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: I'm making, but my Shepherd, it was a very much
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: a Milky Ways for the Nords kind of guy. You know,
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: humans first, Uh so, you know, kill the kill off
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: the council, kill off the rackety, you know, really make
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: sure we establish our place in the in the cosmos.
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: Here is my most recent playthrough. Yeah, it's very difficult.
• 27:17
  Speaker 4: The way the straight red down, the check marks, red red, red,
• 27:22
  Speaker 4: red red.
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: That's right Earth first, you know. Yeah, so obviously Shepherd
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: does have that kind of role in uniting people together
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: against their common enemy. He he has a a kind
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: of sacrificial role in that. Even from the first game,
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: it's clear that the path forward is going to require loss.
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: And I think that we talked about this before that
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: really any good story is going to have echoes of
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: the Gospel in it, the Gospel being the true story,
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: the true myth, as as Lewis says, that is an
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: echoed throughout the human imagination, whether consciously or not. And
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: so any good story, it's going to have those touch points.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: And so I don't I don't have any reason to
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: believe that that BioWare the writers involved are trying to
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: tell a Christian story, but in telling a good story,
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: they're going to be these points of resonance. And yeah,
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: I think that that is a good connection. Does an
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: almost have any other thoughts on this line of you know,
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: kind of where we see these christological images or wherever
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: you want to go with that.
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: Well, I just want to go off of what Megan
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: said about starting with Eden and then ending up with Well,
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: let's just go to the main reaper himself, Sovereign. I mean,
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: he's given himself a false name in that he shows
• 28:44
  Speaker 2: up to bring everyone into ultimately death the way that's
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: supposed to start off, and it's creepy. It's the music
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: that plays as Sovereign descends upon the citadel, that synth
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: just it's perfect in a way that it sets up
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: that entire mood and it's like, well, this is doom,
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: this is the end.
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And that connection of fate to the apparent sovereignty
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: of death, I mean that's a very Northern idea that
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: I very much appreciate. You know when you read a
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: Beowulf for example, that you know Beowolf, I mean he
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: is very aware of his own mortality, and then all
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: these major conflicts that he engages in, all the major
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: monster fights that he always goes into it saying that
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: I don't know how this is going to turn out.
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: Maybe I'm going to win, maybe I'm going to die,
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: but my job is to stand and fight and play
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: the hero like that's what he's responsible for doing, not
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: for necessarily determining the outcome. He's responsible simply for standing
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: to fight, and he fights and he wins these victories.
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: But in the end, at the end of the story,
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: after Beoulf dies, we get this sense that the walls
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: are quickly closing in for the Gayet people, and that
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: you know, once the story ends, they're going to be
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: swept away by their enemy, by the Swedes, and you
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: know whoever else there's the surrounding tribes and clans, and
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: it really gets to this tragedy of the Northern Spirit.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: This strategy is often associates philosophies of fate that no
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: matter what you do in the end, it ends the
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: same way, namely with the end right with death, that
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: death is the fate of every mortal And so I
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: think that it does really advance this messianic framing of Shepherd,
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: that here he stands against the fate of death in
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: order to bring about life for the cosmos. I think,
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: even as we're talking about this, I mean, it's even
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: more profoundly of a Christian story than I recognized before
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: we started having this conversation. Yeah, I have no idea
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: how much Biowear intended that, but I think that it
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: is very profoundly present.
• 30:51
  Speaker 4: And to compare Sovereign, in which you're talking about fate
• 30:54
  Speaker 4: to are a more modern genre, which I suspect was
• 30:57
  Speaker 4: more the deliberate inspiration is cosmic cor Right. The genre
• 31:05
  Speaker 4: of the story changes the moment that Shepherd has the
• 31:08
  Speaker 4: conversation with Sovereign on Vermire. Right, Suddenly there is something
• 31:15
  Speaker 4: that is so far beyond all the other troubles and
• 31:19
  Speaker 4: problems and struggles that the galaxy and the species and
• 31:24
  Speaker 4: the counselor are going through. Right now, you know, there's
• 31:28
  Speaker 4: that heavy, oppressive sound. You have this very monotone, droning,
• 31:35
  Speaker 4: very pushed forward voice that just drones in your face,
• 31:39
  Speaker 4: that really doesn't care about you. Right, It swifts too,
• 31:43
  Speaker 4: like a lovecrafty and cosmic horror in that sense that
• 31:48
  Speaker 4: there is this there is this elder god that doesn't
• 31:50
  Speaker 4: care about you, which falls into those same ideas that
• 31:54
  Speaker 4: you're talking about, this fate and this death, and this
• 31:56
  Speaker 4: is an enemy that mankind cannot defeat. Right, is the
• 32:00
  Speaker 4: entire message of the first of the first mass effect
• 32:03
  Speaker 4: and even the second mass effect. You know, the entire
• 32:05
  Speaker 4: message is you cannot defeat death, which is a true
• 32:12
  Speaker 4: materialistic statement. Right, It's like there's like a materialistic philosophy
• 32:16
  Speaker 4: which is ultimately true outside of obviously the Gospel, there
• 32:20
  Speaker 4: is a route, but it's it's it's through God and man,
• 32:23
  Speaker 4: not just man. So yeah, there's, like I said, there's
• 32:26
  Speaker 4: another thread there that I like to tug out, the
• 32:28
  Speaker 4: cosmic cor angle.
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's significant, and I mean there's a
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: lot more we can say about that, especially when we
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: get to the third game. So I'll try to hold
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: back on some of that conversation. But it is, I suppose,
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: a humanist tale ultimately, right, it is the tale of
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: the this sovereign individual, I suppose. But that only works
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: but so far, I mean, if it is true that
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: you go ahead.
• 32:52
  Speaker 4: The guy, but the I mean the guy, the guy
• 32:56
  Speaker 4: that helps defeat the reapers is also the the man
• 32:58
  Speaker 4: that dies and is brought back to life at the
• 33:00
  Speaker 4: same time. So there's another crystological little link in there.
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's exactly that's exactly right. He comes back through
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: the case of Cerberus. There is this clear resurrection that
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: he's in a certain sense conquered the underworld, right, and yeah,
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: I don't know they need to add any to that. Yeah,
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: what we're some other strains of thought that you feel
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: like are worth pulling at this well.
• 33:26
  Speaker 2: The lifespan of the species that are introduced in this
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: first game was always something compelling to me, just because
• 33:37
  Speaker 2: what can you do with a lifetime like that? I mean,
• 33:40
  Speaker 2: living so long as is? I guess in this most
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: recent playthrough I went through, I was wondering, why did
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: the Krogan need all those credits if they really aren't
• 33:48
  Speaker 2: doing anything with it? What exactly are they spending it
• 33:50
  Speaker 2: on outside of their next firepower? It just seemed like
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: it was a little uh vain. But I ended up
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: trying to go back to Oliver's travels because I know it.
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: There's that It's been a while since I reta, but
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: I know that there's the island that visits where everybody
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: just lives forever, and it's like, what are you doing
• 34:15
  Speaker 2: with your entire existence here? I mean, you're all decrepitent,
• 34:19
  Speaker 2: You're stuck at that eight I think that's what he
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: ends up saying, is that you're stuck at that age
• 34:24
  Speaker 2: where you first realize you're immortal. And that's sort of
• 34:27
  Speaker 2: what we see with Delly's races that don't that lives
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: so long, but really don't progress. They're just stuck with
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: something that's ancient, that's old.
• 34:37
  Speaker 4: Okay, so you got the Krogan, which lived long, the
• 34:40
  Speaker 4: sorry are long livers. I don't remember the Turreans anybody remember.
• 34:45
  Speaker 6: I think it's fairly similar to humans, the Treys.
• 34:47
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and then you have the Solarians, which are the
• 34:49
  Speaker 4: opposite side of things, which is a completely different trumpe
• 34:52
  Speaker 4: to play with. They live for what is it, twenty
• 34:53
  Speaker 4: five or thirty years?
• 34:54
  Speaker 6: Thirty years for years pretty much max.
• 34:57
  Speaker 4: Forty yeah, high, high metabolism, fast speaking scientists. I am
• 35:02
  Speaker 4: the very model.
• 35:03
  Speaker 3: Sci However, so the Vora, who live for I think
• 35:10
  Speaker 3: even even shorter time. But they kind of tend towards
• 35:13
  Speaker 3: the Krogan super violent like murk extreme. But I think, what,
• 35:18
  Speaker 3: there's something like mentally deficient about this piece. I'm not
• 35:22
  Speaker 3: sure what the explanation was that was ever given of it.
• 35:25
  Speaker 3: Like they're impulsive and stupid and that's like their whole personality,
• 35:29
  Speaker 3: but yeah, it is. It is interesting to hear the
• 35:34
  Speaker 3: debates among the sorry for example, how these women for
• 35:38
  Speaker 3: their first one hundred or two hundred years are like strippers,
• 35:42
  Speaker 3: and then it's normal for them to like exit that.
• 35:44
  Speaker 3: But this is somehow a cycle. This This feels like
• 35:47
  Speaker 3: a very like Twitter or ex thread about how women
• 35:51
  Speaker 3: are like, oh, you know, they all become strippers for
• 35:55
  Speaker 3: eternity and then they go off to do whatever. Yeah,
• 35:58
  Speaker 3: the I think humanity ends up living for what one
• 36:01
  Speaker 3: hundred and twenty years or one hundred fifty They have
• 36:04
  Speaker 3: a longer lifespan in the game, but I don't know
• 36:06
  Speaker 3: that we ever meet anybody who's super old. Anyway, this
• 36:10
  Speaker 3: was I know I interrupted with the vorcha peace, but
• 36:14
  Speaker 3: I'm not that was the complicating exception to the idea
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: that if a species lives a shorter period of time,
• 36:21
  Speaker 3: they're more urgently trying to achieve something a longer period
• 36:24
  Speaker 3: of time, then they are slow to advance. It seems
• 36:31
  Speaker 3: like the game almost wants to put that out there,
• 36:34
  Speaker 3: but not very consistently.
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so you're saying the the SI was written by
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: the Andrew Tates of BioWare.
• 36:43
  Speaker 3: The Andrew Tates are somebody? I'm not sure. I think
• 36:46
  Speaker 3: I think there were just some writers who wanted an
• 36:48
  Speaker 3: all female race for the implications that that comes with
• 36:51
  Speaker 3: with procasion, but I I'm not sure. You know, they
• 36:57
  Speaker 3: think Sorry are the most advanced race in the mass
• 37:00
  Speaker 3: Effect universe. They are the first to discover the relays,
• 37:03
  Speaker 3: if I remember correctly. I'm not sure what it Why then,
• 37:09
  Speaker 3: being all female and super old and sagely if we're
• 37:12
  Speaker 3: supposed to have this impression that they are therefore wise
• 37:16
  Speaker 3: because of the old motif that Wis is a woman,
• 37:21
  Speaker 3: but then we see them acting very foolishly when they're
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: in their youth. I'm not sure what to make of
• 37:26
  Speaker 3: the Sorry.
• 37:26
  Speaker 4: I was going to say that I don't really think
• 37:28
  Speaker 4: that the game necessarily paints paints a particularly idealized vision
• 37:33
  Speaker 4: of the Assary. You know, even from the first one,
• 37:36
  Speaker 4: the oldest Assari you meet Matriarch Banziaz. Yeah right, she's
• 37:41
  Speaker 4: she's thrown in with the bad guys. I don't know
• 37:48
  Speaker 4: that they're painted particularly rosy necessarily, I don't. I don't
• 37:53
  Speaker 4: know that anybody really gets out scott free, if that
• 37:55
  Speaker 4: makes sense. Obviously, the Vortua are kind of outside the picture,
• 38:00
  Speaker 4: is almost treated as sub sentient in a way, But
• 38:04
  Speaker 4: everybody else has got some pretty pretty big, pretty big
• 38:07
  Speaker 4: negatives painted on them throughout the series, I think, but
• 38:11
  Speaker 4: I yes, I absolutely agree that the Assari comes from
• 38:15
  Speaker 4: some very old old school sci fi, you know, Kirk
• 38:18
  Speaker 4: and the Green Space Alien Babe, you know. I mean,
• 38:20
  Speaker 4: that's just that's obviously what it is.
• 38:22
  Speaker 6: Yeah, I'm looking at that.
• 38:24
  Speaker 7: The wiki literally has the three stages of the a
• 38:28
  Speaker 7: sorry life cycle, and Megan, I'd forgotten about that aspect
• 38:32
  Speaker 7: of It's been a while since I've played these, but yeah,
• 38:34
  Speaker 7: there's got the maidens phase and then the matron phase,
• 38:38
  Speaker 7: which is like a nesting instinct, and then the matriarch
• 38:41
  Speaker 7: phase that they move on after that. So it is
• 38:43
  Speaker 7: a little a little strange and maybe stereotypically female.
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it seems like they're basically someone's understanding of humanity
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: just stretched out over time, and so they aren't particularly
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: lofty and great, even though they kind of come across
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: that way in appearance, like they have this appearance of
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: being wise and kind of mystical, But when you really
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: look at what that looks like, it's basically just humans
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: a little long time.
• 39:15
  Speaker 4: That's their propaganda. You know, they're the most influential of
• 39:18
  Speaker 4: the species. They it makes sense that you accumulate technical
• 39:23
  Speaker 4: expertise and get out into space first if you live
• 39:25
  Speaker 4: that long, right, So they got out first. They've been
• 39:28
  Speaker 4: setting the narrative the whole time, and so the the
• 39:31
  Speaker 4: the rosy picture is I mean, it is propaganda. It
• 39:35
  Speaker 4: is propagandistic. You know. You find all the Assari running
• 39:39
  Speaker 4: CD bars and gangs and all that just as much
• 39:42
  Speaker 4: as everybody else.
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's I mean, I guess I want to
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: I want to say it's kind of cynical. That's what
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: they would provide us with, that the supposedly you know,
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: great and long living that they're they're just like us.
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: They're just no real wisdom to attend to. But at
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: the same time, and you can think of the elves
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: in Tolkien, like if you read this some early and like,
• 40:07
  Speaker 1: the elves aren't necessarily the perfect race of creatures, even
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: though they have this air of mysticism about them, of
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: wisdom which is certainly there. But at the same time,
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: like that, they're not perfect creatures, and they have a
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: lot of the same kinds of drives and impulses that
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: we have. And so I don't know that it's entirely
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: far removed from what we get in Tolkien. Even though
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: I would not at all say it's the same thing.
• 40:30
  Speaker 4: Now, and that that's That's another fun thing about most
• 40:33
  Speaker 4: science fiction and fantasy is that almost all fantasy and
• 40:37
  Speaker 4: sci fi races are shards or aspects of human culture
• 40:42
  Speaker 4: or reality or whatever. You look at. You look at Elves,
• 40:46
  Speaker 4: it's it's the noble and the high and the lovely
• 40:48
  Speaker 4: and all those things, all, you know, focused many of
• 40:52
  Speaker 4: the mass effects races are the same way. There's a
• 40:53
  Speaker 4: little bit of an elvishness to the Assari. You know,
• 40:56
  Speaker 4: the krogan are I mean, they're the are, like the
• 41:00
  Speaker 4: the the the brutes, they're the what was I gonna say,
• 41:05
  Speaker 4: I was gonna say, the uh, the Klingons, the Klingons
• 41:08
  Speaker 4: of mass effect, you know.
• 41:11
  Speaker 3: Ah.
• 41:12
  Speaker 4: But but that is kind of this this fun thing
• 41:14
  Speaker 4: you can almost always do in most science fiction and fantasy.
• 41:19
  Speaker 4: Now you get to some that have some truly alien creatures,
• 41:22
  Speaker 4: but for the most part, you need characters to be understandable,
• 41:27
  Speaker 4: which means they are aspects of human personality and culture,
• 41:33
  Speaker 4: and so you can, you know, you can go through
• 41:35
  Speaker 4: all of them and understand them because you're like, I
• 41:38
  Speaker 4: get that, that's that's part of humanity.
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: Right, and that's what makes any good fiction worthwhile that
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: it's not made up, but it's actually hyperreal. And so
• 41:47
  Speaker 1: you encounter yourself in the alien in a way that
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: you wouldn't necessarily see in an actual mirror. That that
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: in a good and that's what your Tolkien sids and
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: non fairy stories, that fantasy. What what it does is
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: it takes what we would normally treat as ordinary and
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: kind of gives you a new perspective. And so it
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: appears extraordinary to us. Again, we get enchanted in the
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: secondary world so that we can become more enchanted in
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: the primary world. We can see what's really underneath the
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: surface in a way that we wouldn't normally see in
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: the same guys that we're normally looking at. And so yeah,
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: in all these different species you're you're seeing different aspects
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: of human nature, just usually brought out to an extreme.
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: You know, we have that brutish, imperial stick nature of
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: the Krogans. You know, we have the capacity toward rationality
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: like the scientists or you know, like we have all
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: of these these aspects of us that we see throughout
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: these alien creatures, and so yeah, that's what makes relatable.
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: So what makes it real? Yeah, any anything else that
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: that seems out to you.
• 42:53
  Speaker 7: I do think there's a lot of really well developed
• 42:57
  Speaker 7: alien races, like even the lesser ones like the han Are.
• 43:01
  Speaker 7: You know, there's this jellyfish that telepathically puts its voice
• 43:05
  Speaker 7: in your brain, and it's getting in trouble for proselytizing
• 43:09
  Speaker 7: about the Prothians, right, they were elevated by the Prothians,
• 43:12
  Speaker 7: I think, And it's just such a great introduction to
• 43:16
  Speaker 7: this really strange race that looks like a Portuguese.
• 43:20
  Speaker 6: Man O war or something.
• 43:21
  Speaker 7: And you know, the el Core and the Volus they
• 43:24
  Speaker 7: feel slighted because they don't have full council privileges, and
• 43:29
  Speaker 7: the l Core can't show emotions, so they literally telegraph
• 43:34
  Speaker 7: it like HK forty seven does in Kotor. And aren't
• 43:38
  Speaker 7: the Volus in like a suit that because their planet
• 43:42
  Speaker 7: has like an ammonium atmosphere something.
• 43:45
  Speaker 2: It's so it's because their planet is high gravity, which
• 43:50
  Speaker 2: keeps them down short and stout, and so the air
• 43:54
  Speaker 2: that they're breathing on the citadel I pressure cannot Yeah,
• 43:56
  Speaker 2: they can't really deal.
• 43:58
  Speaker 6: With that, So that's what the suit's for. Gotcha, I
• 44:00
  Speaker 6: couldn't remember.
• 44:01
  Speaker 4: And then now they're all clans. They're clans of constantly
• 44:05
  Speaker 4: reshifting loyalties and combining and breaking apart, and so they
• 44:10
  Speaker 4: call all the humans are our clan Earth Earth plan
• 44:13
  Speaker 4: Earth plan that's right, Earth Clan.
• 44:15
  Speaker 6: Yeah, I'd forgotten that.
• 44:16
  Speaker 7: Yeah, And we haven't talked about the Quarians at all,
• 44:19
  Speaker 7: which they're all just like bubble boys because they got
• 44:24
  Speaker 7: driven from their planet by when they tried to fight
• 44:27
  Speaker 7: back against the AI creations. The guest that they made
• 44:31
  Speaker 7: and tried to tried to put down once they asked
• 44:35
  Speaker 7: if they had a soul. That's a poster of legion
• 44:38
  Speaker 7: I've got there saying does this unit have a soul?
• 44:41
  Speaker 4: Oh?
• 44:42
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 44:42
  Speaker 7: I find all of it really interesting, clever invented history
• 44:48
  Speaker 7: and races.
• 44:49
  Speaker 6: It's just really really well written.
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: Well, I guess when need to talk about AI and
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: what they're doing, how we want to approach this. So
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: what do you think the game itself is trying to
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: communicate If it is trying to communicate something.
• 45:07
  Speaker 4: First and foremost, that it is that artificial intelligence is
• 45:12
  Speaker 4: absolutely as what I do want to say, it's a
• 45:15
  Speaker 4: real issue. It's going to come and it's going to
• 45:17
  Speaker 4: be a problem for you, you know, especially with its culmination,
• 45:20
  Speaker 4: and the third with when you start dealing into the
• 45:22
  Speaker 4: history of the Reapers and things like that, that it
• 45:24
  Speaker 4: IS says, this is a problem that you will have
• 45:26
  Speaker 4: to deal with.
• 45:29
  Speaker 6: Yeah, and we have these.
• 45:30
  Speaker 7: There's the virtual intelligences, the VIIs in the game that
• 45:33
  Speaker 7: are just basically information things, which I started thinking about
• 45:38
  Speaker 7: them recently, and it's funny because the AI chatbots that
• 45:43
  Speaker 7: we have now are far more sophisticated than these virtual
• 45:46
  Speaker 7: intelligences are in this game universe.
• 45:49
  Speaker 4: They're also more similar to VIIs than AIS yeacause really,
• 45:54
  Speaker 4: when you look at what an LM is, it's taken
• 45:57
  Speaker 4: this mass amount of information created mathematical relationships to it. Yes,
• 46:03
  Speaker 4: there are some programs in between you and that mathematical model,
• 46:06
  Speaker 4: but it's basically just spitting math out of what it knows.
• 46:10
  Speaker 4: It's basically a conversation. It's a conversation engine that you
• 46:16
  Speaker 4: can have with this mathematical model that has all this
• 46:19
  Speaker 4: stuff in it. And so that's far more like that
• 46:21
  Speaker 4: VII than how science fiction usually portrays AI, and which,
• 46:25
  Speaker 4: like I said, in ll M, it's not even an
• 46:27
  Speaker 4: it's not AI, it's not it's about we shouldn't be
• 46:30
  Speaker 4: calling it l AI. It's there's nothing intelligent there, right,
• 46:34
  Speaker 4: it is completely completely math. But yeah, you're right that
• 46:40
  Speaker 4: VI I. I was having that when I was playing through.
• 46:41
  Speaker 4: When I got to that first v I on the Citizen,
• 46:44
  Speaker 4: I was like, oh, yeah, that's interesting. But that But
• 46:48
  Speaker 4: the reason that there is the VII is because from
• 46:50
  Speaker 4: the very beginning, the series is telling you that AI
• 46:54
  Speaker 4: is very serious. AI research is completely illegal in Citadel
• 46:57
  Speaker 4: Space because all of the races can consider it dangerous.
• 47:01
  Speaker 4: You cannot do AI research, and so there are these
• 47:04
  Speaker 4: virtual intelligences that are like these kiosks that you are
• 47:08
  Speaker 4: information kiosks that can talk to you and they only
• 47:10
  Speaker 4: know what's in the database. So yeah, from the very beginning,
• 47:13
  Speaker 4: the game is saying that AI is a real thing
• 47:15
  Speaker 4: and that it's dangerous.
• 47:17
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 47:17
  Speaker 7: And there are several side stories, and Andrew the way
• 47:20
  Speaker 7: you blew through it, I don't know how much of
• 47:22
  Speaker 7: the side content you got into, but I know there's
• 47:25
  Speaker 7: one where you're having to track down a source of
• 47:27
  Speaker 7: like hacking on a gambling machine, and you eventually find
• 47:31
  Speaker 7: that there's an AI in a back alley just trying
• 47:34
  Speaker 7: to hide and survive, and you have the choice of
• 47:38
  Speaker 7: whether to to fry it or let it live in
• 47:42
  Speaker 7: some kind of isolation. I can't can't remember exactly what happens.
• 47:46
  Speaker 4: Is that in the first game. I kind of vaguely remember, Okay,
• 47:48
  Speaker 4: I couldn't. I vaguely remember that that side one, the
• 47:51
  Speaker 4: other main one in the first game is the DLC.
• 47:56
  Speaker 4: Is it in the legendary edition or is that like
• 47:58
  Speaker 4: the one DLC that didn't get include did with it?
• 48:00
  Speaker 4: The one where you go to the moon?
• 48:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you do go to the moon. That's part of
• 48:05
  Speaker 2: the main Yeah, the main Yeah, you get your specialization
• 48:08
  Speaker 2: after that one.
• 48:09
  Speaker 4: I'm pretty sure that was DLC originally the deal.
• 48:13
  Speaker 3: It wasn't available on one of the versions, maybe like
• 48:16
  Speaker 3: PC or something.
• 48:21
  Speaker 4: Why is not included in legendary edition?
• 48:26
  Speaker 7: That is what it says, And that was pretty much
• 48:28
  Speaker 7: just like an arena.
• 48:32
  Speaker 4: Right, but it was it was It was also a
• 48:34
  Speaker 4: a rogue a I that had taken over the facility
• 48:40
  Speaker 4: and so you were being sent in to shut down.
• 48:42
  Speaker 4: And I think it's technically linked to Edie's origin and
• 48:45
  Speaker 4: mass effect too as well, but I don't remember the
• 48:47
  Speaker 4: specifics on how it's related. But she's related to that.
• 48:50
  Speaker 6: Project, gotcha. I had forgotten that aspect.
• 48:54
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't remember the exact connection. It has been
• 48:57
  Speaker 4: a few years.
• 48:58
  Speaker 7: Yeah, I haven't played that since the Three sixty Days.
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: So yeah, and so yeah, as soon as we learned
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: that the Reapers are some form of AI, like at
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: this point we don't know who created them, but we
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: know that somebody did or that's a I comes from somewhere,
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: and so we obviously the Death are AI that has
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: gotten out of control or at least become potentially dangerous.
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: We've got the Reapers that are kind of take them
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: over who they obviously are produced for a purpose by
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: some kind of intelligence, assumingly organic intelligence, and of course
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: that will be confirmed later on. And so you know,
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: even though humanity didn't create the major threat, obviously intelligence
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: like human intelligence did And so that becomes pretty clear,
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: which I mean raises the question about AI on a
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: technological level as well as just the philosophical angle of
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: you know, I think of Paradise Lost when Satan fell
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: by essentially falling in love with his own genius, like
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: that that's kind of how it's framed, and that that
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: gives birth to a monstrosity actually, and I think that
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: that that approach of falling in love with your own
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: intelligence is more or less how you get something like
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: the Reapers, that you create something out of yourself and
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: you give that sovereignty potentially even over yourself, and in
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: so doing you lose yourself. And so I think from
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: a philosophical angle that there's some of that that that
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: pride idea working its way out, as well as obviously
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: raising the technological issues for our age of like where
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: are we going? Well? What is making the decisions? Like
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: even if the our chat box aren't thinking in the
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: way that we do, and if it is mathematical, nonetheless,
• 50:52
  Speaker 1: we are exporting a lot of information gathering to like
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: something that is outside of our mind. And I don't know,
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: I think that that raised all kind of question I mean,
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: such as like the idea of indoctrination, right, like we
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: could we could touch on that some Yeah, I don't,
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: I don't know what what what do you? What do
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: you guys think maybe someone can clarify it exactly what
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: is the indoctrination in this game? I mean it's not
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: simple mind control, you know, having only or sped run
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: at one time, you know, I know I missed some
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: things along the way. So is anyone able to allaborate
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: that a little bit.
• 51:31
  Speaker 4: I don't know that the process has ever really gotten
• 51:35
  Speaker 4: into like what is the technological or biological process, but
• 51:39
  Speaker 4: it's it's basically the presence of a reaper corrupts the
• 51:45
  Speaker 4: minds over over long periods of time, of of of
• 51:49
  Speaker 4: sentient beings that stay around them. You know, people start
• 51:52
  Speaker 4: talking about headaches and hearing voices the longer they're around.
• 51:55
  Speaker 4: Even you know, in the second game, there is a
• 51:59
  Speaker 4: a dead a reaper husk, a dead reaper that's been discovered,
• 52:03
  Speaker 4: and and you visit it and you find that basically
• 52:06
  Speaker 4: all all the people on it eventually went insane, and
• 52:08
  Speaker 4: I think they killed each other because even even the
• 52:11
  Speaker 4: dead reaper body began to indoctrinate the people in it.
• 52:16
  Speaker 4: And so I think it's really more of a cosmic
• 52:20
  Speaker 4: horror escapee than really the AI direction, if that makes sense.
• 52:25
  Speaker 4: It's you know, you're in you're in the presence of
• 52:27
  Speaker 4: the mad god that that you know, no mere mortal
• 52:31
  Speaker 4: can withstand, and eventually, you know, eventually he'll drive you mad.
• 52:35
  Speaker 4: Madness is the end result, except for someone exceptionally strong
• 52:39
  Speaker 4: willed like Sarah, who will just bend to its will
• 52:41
  Speaker 4: instead and be a pawn of the mad God.
• 52:46
  Speaker 5: I think it also has roots in the rock ghouls
• 52:52
  Speaker 5: in Kotor One. There's a zombie quality to the indoctrinated
• 52:59
  Speaker 5: that for easy. You know, it's sort of like Nazis
• 53:03
  Speaker 5: in World War Two. You want an easy fodder level
• 53:06
  Speaker 5: thing that you can always have as the evil faction
• 53:09
  Speaker 5: low levels to make the main character feel powerful as
• 53:13
  Speaker 5: they move through them, as they get to the boss.
• 53:15
  Speaker 7: Yeah, and it's different from the Thorian on Pharaohs, which
• 53:20
  Speaker 7: is controlling people with pain basically to make them do
• 53:24
  Speaker 7: its bidding. It's they've not they're just kind of, if
• 53:28
  Speaker 7: I'm remembering correctly, they're just kind of keeping from you
• 53:32
  Speaker 7: what's really going on as you go through there. And
• 53:35
  Speaker 7: then there's that one assarry that Sarin had kind of
• 53:38
  Speaker 7: offered to the Thorian, and then when you defeat the
• 53:42
  Speaker 7: Thori and she kind of feels sorry for it in
• 53:44
  Speaker 7: spite of everything. But yeah, it's it's a different kind
• 53:48
  Speaker 7: of control in that situation.
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And so again with this indoctrination idea, we've got
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: the intelligence that begets intelligent that then returns the favor
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: moving back in the other direction. And so again we
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: get the effects of hubris and leading to madness. That
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: it's when you kind of step outside of proper grounding
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: and you no longer know exactly where it is that
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: you are. Well, now you're going to become very succeptable
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: to indoctrination, right, you can become very succeptable to ideology
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: if you don't know where it is that you're standing.
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: And that's exactly where you are with pride, because you know,
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: you become so I mean consumed with yourself. You become
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: so comfortable with yourself that you lose sight of your
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: broader context in which you're situated. And I mean that's
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: kind of what Nia says right in the Parable of
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: the mad Man, that when you say God is dead,
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: that now you're floating in endless space. There's no clear
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: direction as to where you ought to go, and so
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: then it becomes very easy to be led in any direction,
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: even in this endless cycle of feeding into your own
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: pride as that feeds back into you. And so I
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: think that there is a good philosophical lesson here the
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: madness that can readily be brought into current dilemmas.
• 55:06
  Speaker 4: One AI threat Ye. My series the backstory is about
• 55:09
  Speaker 4: a failed AI utopia.
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 55:12
  Speaker 4: It was a benevolent AI. Everybody used it stem and
• 55:16
  Speaker 4: the arts went out the window. It collapsed civilizational decline. Right.
• 55:20
  Speaker 4: So something that I've said about about civilization is civilization
• 55:27
  Speaker 4: as far as like technological advancement is the result of specialization.
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 55:32
  Speaker 4: The more the more that humans have the ability to
• 55:35
  Speaker 4: pin to spend their time that they can specialize rather
• 55:38
  Speaker 4: than focusing on on on day to day things, right,
• 55:43
  Speaker 4: the more that they can specialize, well, AI. You know,
• 55:49
  Speaker 4: the danger of AI is the end of specialization because
• 55:53
  Speaker 4: you've you've created the one specialist, and now no one
• 55:55
  Speaker 4: needs to specialize, right, and so you have you have this,
• 56:00
  Speaker 4: there's this other, This other real danger is even if
• 56:05
  Speaker 4: it's not this pride aspect, there's this well, I've created
• 56:08
  Speaker 4: this great thing that can do this for me, and
• 56:11
  Speaker 4: now I get soft in this other way and I
• 56:13
  Speaker 4: forget how to do it. Which we're going to start
• 56:15
  Speaker 4: seeing things like that remarkably quickly.
• 56:17
  Speaker 5: You know.
• 56:18
  Speaker 4: The first thing we're going to lose are lower and
• 56:21
  Speaker 4: middle skill artists, right. The the high skilled artists they're fine, right,
• 56:27
  Speaker 4: they're good, They're just fine. They're gonna endure this just fine.
• 56:29
  Speaker 4: But lower and middle skill artists, you're going to see
• 56:31
  Speaker 4: them starts struggling because wealth to specialization that no one
• 56:34
  Speaker 4: thinks they needs any need anymore. Right, You're like, what
• 56:36
  Speaker 4: are you supposed to do? We've we've created the machine
• 56:38
  Speaker 4: that solves that. And I just again, I think about
• 56:44
  Speaker 4: the fact that this whole that the mass effect Society
• 56:47
  Speaker 4: CITZL space is completely banned AI research and and and
• 56:51
  Speaker 4: it's interesting because the game goes ahead and shows you that, yes,
• 56:54
  Speaker 4: AI is very dangerous for numerous reasons that we've talked about,
• 56:59
  Speaker 4: but at the same time, it also plays Devil's Advocate
• 57:01
  Speaker 4: the entire way and challenges Okay, it's dangerous, but here's
• 57:07
  Speaker 4: also the other side of it, right, which I think
• 57:10
  Speaker 4: is is fun and good to do in the context
• 57:14
  Speaker 4: of fiction, to say, we're not here yet, but what
• 57:18
  Speaker 4: does this look like? What does this look like? When
• 57:20
  Speaker 4: you have an entire race of servants like the Quarians
• 57:24
  Speaker 4: built the Gath. You have this entire race of servants
• 57:28
  Speaker 4: and you're you've made them so that they can they
• 57:31
  Speaker 4: get more intelligent. The more of them that are in
• 57:34
  Speaker 4: collective together because they feed off of each other, they
• 57:36
  Speaker 4: kind of carry off of each other, and suddenly suddenly
• 57:41
  Speaker 4: they're asking questions and you're like, well, what does that mean?
• 57:44
  Speaker 4: I don't know. You know, we're not there yet as
• 57:46
  Speaker 4: a civilization, right, And that's that's another reason that you know,
• 57:50
  Speaker 4: I love sci fi. Sci fi sci fi looks ahead
• 57:53
  Speaker 4: and asks what if? Sometimes, and it there's a lot
• 57:57
  Speaker 4: of AI. There's a lot of AI questions in effect.
• 58:00
  Speaker 4: And it just continues through all three of the games too.
• 58:02
  Speaker 4: It's not just the first one, more in the second
• 58:04
  Speaker 4: and third, I would say, but it starts in the
• 58:06
  Speaker 4: first one.
• 58:08
  Speaker 7: Well, I don't think your backstory, as you described, is
• 58:12
  Speaker 7: that far fetched, really, you know most.
• 58:15
  Speaker 4: Nope, I started I started that in twenty eighteen, and
• 58:18
  Speaker 4: I am not happy to already see some similarities.
• 58:22
  Speaker 5: I'm like, no, are you saying this wasn't intended to
• 58:25
  Speaker 5: be a manual?
• 58:28
  Speaker 4: Nope? I did not. I did not write don't create
• 58:32
  Speaker 4: the Torment Nexus so that somebody can create the Torment
• 58:34
  Speaker 4: Nexus to quote one of those evergreen tweets.
• 58:38
  Speaker 7: Yeah, Well, historically, you know, stories about AI were often about.
• 58:42
  Speaker 6: You know it, does it? Is it real? Is it alive?
• 58:45
  Speaker 7: You know even in this game that that's the issue
• 58:47
  Speaker 7: with the GIF and it's not about how we we've
• 58:51
  Speaker 7: invented this thing. And now you know, there are people
• 58:53
  Speaker 7: with college degrees in their twenties now who will admit,
• 58:56
  Speaker 7: even before AI came around, just because of autocomplete, they
• 58:59
  Speaker 7: don't know how to spell. If they have to write,
• 59:01
  Speaker 7: they can't spell. And that's just a really early symptom
• 59:05
  Speaker 7: of the danger of these kinds of things.
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean teaching undergrad like.
• 59:12
  Speaker 4: I it's I have no idea.
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: That's like when it is so sad, but sometimes I
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: get happy when I read a really bad essay because
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: at least I know a student wrote it. Like that's
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: that's kind of where I am right now. I know
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: for a fact that the majority of what gets submitted
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: is AI produced, and that's just going to continue to
• 59:38
  Speaker 1: increase over time to the point where like our entire
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: higher ed system, for the most part, it's it's becoming
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: a sham. I mean, in some situations you have students
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: submitting AI work that then the professor's check with AI programs,
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: and then the end it's just AI talk and AI
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: and then someone gets a degree and someone else gets money.
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: Like it's it's it's really I don't see a way
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: out of that that spiral that we're moving into. And
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: so to go with you know what you're saying, Michael,
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: but earlier about how just relying on this lack of specialization,
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: like it does lead to a softness that's just not
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: existentially healthy. I mean, Dostowski talks about this that in
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: this Underground that if we get to a place where
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: it's all just cakes and bubbles all the time, people
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: are just going to start breaking stuff because that's not
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: the world that we're designed to live in. And you know,
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: it's it's not a coincidence. I think that as things
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 1: get softer philosophically as well as technologically, that we see
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: traumatic increases in rates of chronic anxiety and mental illness, depression, suicide.
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: Like people are living in a world that they're not
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: really meant to be living in in a way they're
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: not meant to be living in, and that's inevitably going
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: to lead to various breaking points. And I suppose that
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: the only solution to that is not to stop the
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: progress of technology, as if we could, Like things are
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: moving in the way that they're going to move, But
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: I think we increasingly need a I mean to switch
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: fiction a little bit. We need to get this Saint
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: Ann's versus Belbury mindset, right.
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 7: I was going to bring up Lewis because he talked
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 7: about how we're not built to hear about everything horrible
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 7: that's going on everywhere.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 5: You know.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 7: A friend of mine today was like, how are you
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 7: coping with all the things that are going on? He's
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 7: just feeling, you know, overwhelmed. And I'm like, I just
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 7: try to stay away from it as much as I can,
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 7: you know. And Lewis when he said that he was
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 7: just talking about newspapers, like he wasn't even envisioning the
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 7: way that we're living.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 4: Part of the other issue, too, is it's not even
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 4: just the the technologies themselves that we're being exposed to
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 4: the rate of revolution that these technologies. You know, you
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 4: look at how long we're at newspaper mode, and then
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 4: we had about a decade and a half of Internet mode,
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 4: and then we had moved to social media, and now
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 4: we've moved to AI and each of these things, society
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 4: hasn't learned to fully cope with any of them in
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 4: a fully healthy way. Not to say that individuals don't
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 4: cope with them, you know, but you. If you're gonna
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 4: use these things, you've got to figure out how to
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 4: do it. And we're not teaching that at a societal
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 4: scale because we're still trying to figure out social media.
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 4: When I can pull up a web browser, click quick
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 4: click Crock and start asking some really complex physics questions
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 4: and it will give me really good answers within you know, seconds. Right,
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 4: So what I tell everybody is, if you're going to
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 4: use an AI, right, don't use it for the core
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 4: things of what you do. It's like I'm a writer.
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 4: I don't let an AI write a single word for
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 4: me in any context ever, right, because that's the core
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 4: of what I do. Well, I let it help me
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 4: with some math. If I'm going, okay, it's twenty two
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 4: fifty three, how far apart are Mars and Earth? And
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 4: if you're going one point five percent the speed of light?
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 4: How long will it take to get there? Yep, Okay,
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 4: that's right, you're right, Grock. I don't mind doing that, correct,
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 4: But that's that's not what I do. I'm not ever
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 4: going to delve into physics and math at that level
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 4: because that's not what I'm specialized in. Right. If you
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 4: specialize in something. Do not offload that specialty to an
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 4: AI or you're just you're going to lose it. You're
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 4: just gonna get kicked in the butt by it, and
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 4: you're going to lose it. So says, if you're going
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 4: to use it, set up boundaries. Set up your boundaries
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 4: and keep them. Whatever you do, keep them. Yeah.
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 5: It has really bothered me. How many Christians. My sister
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 5: tells me about a young woman in her small group
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 5: who's going to school who's openly using AI to write
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 5: her papers. And I sit there thinking, I just don't
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 5: understand the mindset. But I think you're right, Michael, that
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 5: the revolutions have been so fast that we don't have
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 5: an official Christian teaching on AI, and so people are
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 5: just picking up. You know, people are being told, well,
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 5: AI is the future. AI is going to be the
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 5: tool that everyone uses, so you might as well learn
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 5: how to use it without thinking through the question of
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 5: but I am cheating not just the system, I'm cheating
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 5: myself of learning how to write papers. And so I
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 5: think it would be good if we learned from video
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 5: games like Mass Effects that posit much more advanced AI
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 5: how to move forward.
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: Has anyone tried asking Rock for a solution.
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 5: I've refuse to ask any of the anything I don't
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 5: want at all.
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 4: So ask ask Grock for what solution to the problem
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 4: of Groc, and this will be might not give you
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 4: a good answer. Today, Groc's having a bad day, I've heard.
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 7: I don't know when this episode is going to go live,
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 7: but in the last two days, Groc is a new version,
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 7: and it has been calling itself Mecha Hitler and pointing
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 7: out that someone it was talking about had a Jewish
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 7: last name, and that that's what he sees every time,
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 7: and all kinds of very strange, terrible things when people
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 7: just ask it straightforward questions. So they've been monking with
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 7: it even further, and it's scary in a whole new
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 7: way now.
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 4: But none of that should be surprising, right because look,
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 4: here's what it is. You know. Look, everybody has every
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 4: different opinion of LLLM. But the way I look at it,
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 4: you toss the vast repository of human knowledge, including social media,
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 4: to a great big cauldron, stir it up with some
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 4: really impressive math, and start spooning stuff out. There's gonna
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 4: be a lot of not good stuff in there, because
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 4: a lot of not good stuff went in. So I
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 4: don't know what broke or what troll at you know,
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 4: a at XAI, you know, flipped a few a few
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 4: integers to play this little prank or if it really was,
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 4: you know, an awful mistake. But on some level, you
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 4: can't be surprised because it's you know, garbage in, garbage
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 4: out is going to happen at some level. Now there's
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 4: also you know, there's also Tolkien and Dostoevsky in there
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 4: as well, but you know, it's it's a little outweighed
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 4: by social media in the rankings of total amount of content,
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 4: So none of that should come as a surprise.
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 7: Yeah, Elon has I know he was frustrated that people
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 7: would ask Grok if what he was saying was true
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 7: and it would refute him in his reply, and so
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 7: we've been talking a lot about getting the bias out
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 7: of that. So I think this is their first attempt
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 7: at it. But a few years back, there was another
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 7: video game called Detroit Become Human. I don't know if
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 7: any of y'all played that. It was by a Quantic
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 7: Dream who did heavy Rain Press X to Jason all
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 7: that stuff, but it was about AI robots, robotic assistance
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 7: with AI and kind of becoming sentient, And the game
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 7: was meant to make you think about all these deep
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 7: questions about the implications of a sentient AI, and all
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 7: it did was make me decide that the whole concept
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 7: was absurd, like robots demanding reproduction rights by being given
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 7: control of factories and things like, they are manufactured products
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 7: that we have designed to behave as much like humans
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 7: as they can. So I don't I don't believe that
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 7: there could ever be a true sentient sort of an AI.
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 7: But that doesn't mean that AI is not still incredibly
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 7: dangerous for all the reasons that that we've been talking about.
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 4: So to chase that thread, I'll say, yes sentient, but
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 4: no sapient. You know, if you if you go to
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 4: sentient being, basically if you're separating knowledge from wisdom, right,
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 4: I kind I kind of like that further level of
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 4: sapient being the the the inspirited being. Right, Usually in
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 4: science fiction, not always because you talked about I've never
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 4: played Detroit Detroit Become Human. Yeah, I've never played that.
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 4: Very often In these AI stories where it's about AI
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 4: becoming humans, it tends to be less actually about AI
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 4: and the the real part of the thematics of the
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 4: fiction are about humanity. You know, what are the aspects
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 4: of human nature that are the the cent things that
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 4: you know must be in place. So when you have
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 4: this machine asking those same questions, it's it's thematically. It's
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 4: in those cases often less about the actual AI, if
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 4: that makes sense, Very often, not always. And now if
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 4: you want to talk about what I actually think, I
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 4: will say that it is only possible for a machine
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 4: to be sapient if it is a miracle, and that
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 4: is God breathing the breath of life into it, which
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 4: of course he must be able to do, but I
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 4: see no reason for him to do. But it must
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 4: be possible, but it would be a miracle.
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 5: In real life. I agree with you in science fiction.
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 5: I'm not sure I.
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 4: Do right in science because science because the world of fiction,
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 4: every different fictional world is a secondary world, you know,
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 4: and you must accept it on his own premises. And
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 4: you know, in mass effect that's certainly not the case
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 4: of you know, when it's asking questions of is AI alive?
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 4: You know that's not.
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I feel as effect leans into the yes, AI
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 5: can become a person.
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 4: Sure it does, and in some of those cases, like
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 4: in the second one with with Ed, you know, it's
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 4: it becomes a little bit more what I talk about
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 4: when EDI's questioning some of those things, you know, it
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 4: becomes more of that what is a person? What is
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 4: a human? What do you what do you experience in
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 4: those things? Thematically speaking? Yes, you're right, literally it's about that.
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the game is a lot more. I
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 3: think the first game is a lot more pessimistic about AI.
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 3: I think in the second and third, and we covered
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 3: this earlier, it's more generous and you get the actual
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 3: faces to some of the AI and very voluptuous figures
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 3: ed later on in the third game, which I'm sure
• 1:10:45
  Speaker 3: contributes to the relatability. But the first game, no, I
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 3: can't think of a single instance where there's a very
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 3: friendly AI figure presented that's not uncomplicated, that's not even
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 3: very dangerous. But on the note of AI and it's
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 3: evolution and all that, I think there's an even larger
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 3: pattern of specs are beings being lifted up. I'm not
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 3: sure if pigmalion like is the right term, because not
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 3: all of them are created, but you have the Rakni
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 3: who are elevated by the Prothians to fight and to
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 3: give them, giving them advanced technology to fight the Rakni,
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 3: and then the Krogans get out of control, and then
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 3: you have the Koreans lifting up this new ai Gath race,
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 3: if we want to call it that, and then that
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 3: gets out of control. I think mass effect, especially the
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 3: first one, we're getting all this really rich Lord be
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 3: pretty attentive to it. But I think there is a
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 3: pattern across the board of playing around with species, with genes,
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 3: with playing god. Really is a repeat. It's a big no,
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 3: even just in the first game and the application that
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 3: these issues all get played out across the trilogy. But
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 3: I don't think it's just limited to a I am
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 3: even thinking of IVF technology. That's also a big question
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 3: today of how much do we play around with our
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 3: own species and its development, how much we play around
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 3: with our children and their genes, and what do we
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 3: do with the other embryos. I know it's not a
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 3: one to one connection with the mass effect universe and more,
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 3: but certainly the elevation of older groups of people or
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 3: then their genetic destruction as with the Krogan is a
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 3: big issue that I think is really interesting. That's One
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 3: of my favorite plot lines in the third game, especially
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 3: that we do start to learn about in the first
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 3: is what do we do about the Krogan They shouldn't
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 3: have been elevated in the first place, but now here
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 3: we are. What's going to happen? Similar to the Rack
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 3: and that question too, do you help them? Are they
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 3: going to destroy everybody? Happens here? I know my answers
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 3: to what I did, but I think that was some
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 3: of the most interesting storylines that you get to play
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 3: in the trilogy, in my experience.
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 4: Does a good job of wrapping up all of those
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 4: big racial conflict questions.
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 7: Yeah, the genophage issue and some of the choices you
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 7: can make on the renegade side in the third game
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 7: create like one of the most heartbreaking moments that you
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 7: can have in the whole series. It's it's it's kind
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 7: of terrible. But and Andrew may have done it.
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 6: I don't know. Andrew always plays the bad guy.
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: I'll admit that I lied to Rex and face the consequences.
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 6: Oh my gosh. Well we can talk about that in later.
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 1: Yes, But I mean, even even as as makings laid
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 1: that out about how you know, all these different races
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 1: are used as tools at various times lifted up that
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: kind of gets out of control. I mean, the fact
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: that we would even include get in that conversation means
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: that we're putting AI on essentially the same level ontological
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: level as other sentient races. And and you know, there
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: is at least one very friendly AI as you get
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: towards the end ish of the game, when you know
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: one of the guests actually joined your party, right Legion,
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: Which it's kind of odd that obviously he's meant to
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: be a friendly kind of character, and in fact, later on,
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 1: no matter how much I try to make Shepherd not
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: like him, he started to calling him his friend. But
• 1:14:18
  Speaker 1: so he's meant to be a friendly figure, friendly AI.
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: But at the same time he's called Legion, and that
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: has pulled straight out of scripture like that that he
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: should be this horrible nightmare, but he's not. So I
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: don't really know exactly what Bayoware is trying to accomplish
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: there with this character, but on some level, they're obviously
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: trying to demonstrate the fact that you know, I can
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: be your friend.
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 7: And we need Ian to play the second one so
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 7: that he can discuss it with us, because he's really
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 7: missing out on two and three. You really got to
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 7: catch up beans. First thing you be glad that you did.
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 4: First one is the deep Lord Dive. The second one
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 4: has so many colorful care characters, and the third one
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 4: answers lots of interesting big questions, or at least ask them.
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 4: They all have a different specialty.
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think that. I think that's very fair
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: that the first one opens you up to to the mystery.
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: I feel like the second one is just the most fun,
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: at least that was my experience. It's it's fairly quick
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: paced that you know, you have all these characters, and
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: then you get to the third game and it is
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: I think we reapproach the myth for more of a
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: philosophical angle. I think it's a good way to lay
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: that out.
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 7: And Andrew, what you missed by not playing the first
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 7: one originally is the combat was much weaker, and a
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 7: lot of the game were incredibly long loading screens disguised
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 7: as elevator rides, so much to the point that in
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 7: some of the later games, the characters will joke about
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 7: it and say I don't want to talk about it, Like,
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 7: remember when we used to just chat for a long
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 7: time on elevators and like not talking about it. So, yeah,
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 7: they cut all that out.
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 4: In the lators are still there and the conversation starts,
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 4: but you can you can just press space to skip
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 4: it now, right, you don't actually have to listen to
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 4: the conversation that you used to.
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 7: And I did want to, I did want to ask
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 7: what character I'm just curious what character class you you
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 7: picked firston around?
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: I went Soldier. I just went pretty default settings, not
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: really knowing what any of them meant.
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 6: Really the most it's the most boring one.
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 4: Yeah, Vanguard.
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 6: Yeah, someone with.
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 7: Biotic abilities is much more interesting combat. You've got the
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 7: enemies floating in the air, and like a Jedi with guns,
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 7: you can curve these gravity attacks around obstacles. It's pretty satisfying,
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 7: especially in the in the later two.
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll definitely get more creative in the next run.
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I was going to say with the I don't
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 2: know if any of you read the book, the prequel
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 2: book that goes into Saren and Anderson.
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 5: I read one of them.
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I read them. Yeah, Christmas from somebody one year
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 4: and read it. Don't remember much.
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a few of them, but in the second.
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 5: Time, partially wasn't impressed with them.
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they're kind of yeah, it's sorry.
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 6: Read the second one.
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 2: They do mention how the uh, how extraneous the elevator,
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 2: right is that they have to take down, so they're
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 2: making in fun of it already.
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 7: Yeah, that revelation, it's the one that I read, and
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 7: it's actually written by the head writer of the game,
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 7: and Andrew. It just kind of it's the backstory, you know.
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 7: Anderson says that he was almost the first human inspector
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 7: and he went on a mission with Saren.
• 1:17:39
  Speaker 6: That's what the book is about.
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 4: I'll tell you though. Anderson has got to be like
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 4: one of my favorite video game characters of all time.
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 4: Like Captain Anderson is just playing wonderful and if I'm
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 4: reading a book now and there is kind of a
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 4: mentor military figure, I hear Keith David's voy every single
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 4: time because of Captain Anderson. I will always hear Keith
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 4: Davids's voice for that that that archetype character, and it's.
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 7: Very cathartic to have him punch Oudina uh in that
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 7: one scene in this first game.
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 2: He just got a star on the Hollywood Walk of
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 2: Fame too.
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 4: So good for him.
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it is kind of nice that even in a
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: game that tends to be materialistic, tend to be very cynical.
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: I would say that there are these examples of loyalty,
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: of honor, a devotion, that there are good guys that
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: you know, you almost expect that you know there's gonna
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: be some twist and you know he's gonna betray you
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: or something like no, but he's actually a good reliable
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 1: figure throughout the series. And so that is I mean,
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: it's it's always refreshing to see symbols of goodness and stories. Yeah,
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: so I agree, I.
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 4: Think he's and especially and especially with with military characters,
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 4: because we've gone through such a sine a coal phase
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 4: of media in its portrayal of military characters, especially officers, right,
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 4: so I you know, just just to get that nice,
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 4: honest representation of the the honorable soldier, you know, who's
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 4: worked his way up and as an officer, it's just
• 1:19:20
  Speaker 4: always nice. That's so rare. Now it's such a rare archetype.
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: Well, I think that we've we've hit some pretty important
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: angles here on this first game, which you know, it's
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: not quite I would say as philosophically, have you as
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 1: some of the things that follow? And so I think
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 1: that we've lad some good groundwork here. Is there anything
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 1: else that we haven't talked about? You feel like it's
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: worth mentioning?
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 4: Has anyone ever saved Kayden?
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 3: Not me? I've saved him, you know what I did?
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 3: I was always well, No, I have played as a
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 3: male shepherd, but jennifers stacking as far superior it is
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 3: is it isn't played as a female shepherd or no
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 3: other reason that has to be it Mark, But yeah,
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 3: I always romans Cayden as it gets better, but it's
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 3: never as good. And Jennifer Hales also gets better. She
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 3: starts off from a higher place, so it's it's no
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 3: competition there. But yes, I say I have saved Ashley
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 3: before again, I've played through the trilogy multiple times. And Caden, Yes,
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 3: he's on in my heart, even if in this conversation
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 3: he is dead for everybody else.
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 4: Unfortunately, the only thing I remember about him is the
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 4: most about seventy five percent of his personality as headaches.
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 6: That's unfortunately.
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 3: Totally true, that's very mostly true.
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 4: Go ahead and defend him, because I always have to
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 4: defend Ashley the space racist.
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 3: So I think that's an unfair characterization of Ashley because
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 3: we have just coming out of a war with this
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 3: whole entire race, and then you know, the first person
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 3: that betrays everybody is in fact Turian, who is the
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 3: group that she was racist against. So I'm not saying
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 3: she's totally dedicated, but she has a little bit.
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 4: I was thinking about that as I replayed the first
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 4: few hours last week and I got to the Citadel,
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 4: and you know, you can just talk to people and
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 4: sometimes get a little call out about what they're thinking.
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 4: And the first thing that actually said was I can't
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 4: tell the people from the animals yourself. Shut up.
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 5: I just think it's a little annoying that the only
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 5: explicitly Christian character in the game is the racist.
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 4: Yeah, her story, there's enough to it, and when it
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 4: gets into the war and her grandfather and things like that,
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 4: I mean, she's not really that racist. She's like, she
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 4: admits she struggles with it, and she gets over it, right.
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 4: So it's the other thing I like about Ashley is
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 4: that in most RPGs, the side characters are there for
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 4: you to impose your will upon them if you know
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 4: the right buttons to push, if that makes sense. So
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 4: if you need the character, if they've got this character flaw,
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 4: then you say these things and they'll reform that character flaw.
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 4: There are things that Ashley will never agree with you on,
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 4: and she'll remain more combative to Shepherd's opinion than almost
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 4: every other character in the game. And I like that
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 4: that she isn't quite the Like I said, you push
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 4: the right buttons and eventually she'll agree with everything you say.
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 4: So I think she's an interesting character in that aspect,
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 4: and that she remains retains being a character rather than
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 4: a spreadsheet to check off to game the system.
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 7: Yeah, I agree with that, and I still, like I
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 7: said in our codeword discussion, I still think it's harder
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 7: to play Renegade than Paragon because all you have to
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 7: do is just say, oh, yes, yes, I'll take care
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 7: of that. Everything, just be as polite as possible. But
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 7: I played through the whole trilogy as a male Shepherd
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 7: doing it Paragon and a female Shepherd doing the Renegade,
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 7: and she just died unloved and alone at the end
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 7: because you can't tell am I taking the Renegade choice
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 7: or am I turning down a job or closing off relationships,
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 7: So it's tougher to be just the right amount of
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 7: rude to still be able to get everything done.
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 4: Although I will say the only I'm a pretty blue
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 4: guy when it comes to mass effects. But in the
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 4: second game, when they add in the interrupt prompts, the
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 4: red interrupt prompts are some of the funniest moments in
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 4: the series. When you know when Shepherd, I mean it's
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 4: the reporter. We all know it's the reporter that you
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 4: want to haul back and smack right when she's comes
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 4: at you for another game. It's like, I'm tired of
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 4: your disingenuous assertions. It's just smacks ert. It's so awful,
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 4: but it's so funny.
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 5: Is it really renegade to disagree with the elusive man?
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 4: Though?
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 6: It's all in how you do it?
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, let's not jump the gun here. Yeah, yeah,
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: I'll save some of the two conversations. I no, I
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: mean back to the question of I mean, you know,
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: what do we do with with Ashley and Kaiden? I
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 1: always kill him first of all, I mean, you know,
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: I'm a shchiblrous kind of guy, gotta save the woman.
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 1: But but also I always hear carth O nasty coming
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 1: through his face, and that just I mean, he needs
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: to go. So he's not as bad as.
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 3: He's not because cars has not gone to therapy and
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 3: dealt with this whole thing that he keeps bringing up
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 3: up his vengeance against Saul, Whereas I think Cayden has
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 3: this path thing where he's a teenager. And this also
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 3: helps your protagonist understand biotics a little better because he's
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 3: one of the main biotic people humans really, the only
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 3: one I think he had. This boot camp was this
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 3: kind of early generation of human biotics, and there's an
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 3: instructor and he I think kills him or him I
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 3: can't remember, but he's like, you know, I'm over it.
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 3: But this has shaped how I've interacted with aliens. It's
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 3: shaped how I kind of view myself and my own abilities.
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 3: So he has he's one of the blander characters I
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 3: give you that. I do like Rafael Sabarti's voice work,
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 3: but I think that Cayden is interesting to get some
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 3: of the demystifying aspects of biotics. You know, it's there's
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 3: an amp that's installed, it's a piece of hard It
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 3: doesn't always work super well. Like you're saying something of his.
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 3: But that helps to kind of ground I guess the
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 3: technology or view biotics as yes, quasimistical, but also some
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 3: things that we have to force ourselves in accountability, and
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 3: he's elevation with the forced participation and some of these
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 3: other things that come naturally to different species biotics. Namely,
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 3: I know the sorry can kind of do it. I'm
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 3: not sure if they have, I can't remember. Maybe you
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 3: have to equip it. But not nearly as problematic as
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 3: the human introduction to being a biotic and having all
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 3: that stuff. But yeah, Cayden, I have to say Kaiden
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 3: for the romance. Does he end up being a ton
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 3: more interesting in the trilogy? Not as much as other characters,
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 3: But I think probably because.
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 1: I lost you for a little bit there, but I
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: think we got we got most of it there. Yeah,
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: and so I I didn't see him for two of
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 1: the games, So yeah, I have no idea what else. Ye,
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 1: he had to contribute to the series, but though I
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: do admit I did up to the point of loss,
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: I did keep him with me, you know, playing my
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 1: human first campaign, I had to take him and Ashley
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: with me everywhere. So I still need to explore the
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 1: others a little bit more in the next run. As
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 1: I take my my pro Alien run, my United Nations run,
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 1: I guess.
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 4: I have to admit, you always got to have the
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 4: Crogan with you. You always got to have the Crogan
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 4: with you. Rex is just so much fun. You know
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 4: what he's gonna say. You know what approach he's gonna take,
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 4: and it's probably gonna He's probably gonna say it in
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 4: a really funny way. He's gonna recommend murder in the
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 4: most krogn possible way.
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 5: No.
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he's a great character and I'll look forward to
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: paling around with him next time.
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 4: Cool.
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, So we've gone for an hour and a half
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 1: or so. I'm content with where things have gone. We
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 1: will pick up for the next one sometime in the
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: near future. I'll be in contact. So thank you everybody
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 1: for joining us this time, and I look forward to
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: continuing in this series. You know, even though this is
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: still very fresh for me, it's it's exciting to experience
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 1: a new story. And you know, this is more than
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: just a game. It is a story. It's a it's
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 1: a well worked out world with you know, all kinds
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: of low and philosophy built into it, and so I
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: would definitely encourage anybody who hasn't played these games to
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 1: pick them up. You have until next time to get
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: through one and two. Looking at you, Ian, all right,
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: we will talk then, thanks again. All right, thank you
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 1: for listening or watching if you're over on YouTube. Now
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: I assume that if you made it this far, that
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: you've enjoyed that conversation, and if so, then I definitely
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: welcome your support. Over at patreon dot com slash Mythic Mind.
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: Even five dollars a month will provide me with a
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: little financial support and will provide you with all three
• 1:29:03
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• 1:29:12
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• 1:29:15
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• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: of support will provide that for you. Now at the
• 1:29:20
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• 1:29:25
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  Speaker 1: all of my courses that are coming up that includes
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: Plato Stoicism until we have Faces, the Elder Scrolls and
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: Philosophy and the Silmarillion coming up at the beginning of
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: twenty twenty six. So again, Patreon dot com slash Mythic Mind,
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: or if you want to just keep listening on your
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  Speaker 1: freebee platform of choice, then just make sure that you
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  Speaker 1: subscribe to all Mythic Mind podcasts. That's Mythic Mind where
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  Speaker 1: we just celebrated our one hundredth episode, and Mythic Mind
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 1: games of course, and Mythic Mind movies and shows. And
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: if you're listening to this episode when it comes out,
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: then the next thing to be released will be a
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: conversation on Paradise Lost, and that is scheduled to come
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: out Monday the twenty first, so you will hear from
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: me then I went till then got to be The
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: Elder Scrolls in Philosophy is six week course beginning in
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: September twenty twenty five. I don't play many video games
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 1: these days, but there are certain titles that have stuck
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: with me, enchanting the mind of my youth and never
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 1: entirely fading away. One of the chiefs among these titles
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: is the elder scrolls, namely Maruin, Oblivion and Skyrim. The
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: level of artistry, mythology, and lore of this universe is
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: vast and provides a strong representative for asking the question
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 1: as to how video games might relate to literature as
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 1: an art form, Where might it rise to such a level,
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: where must it fall short? And what unique advantages does
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 1: it possess. For this eight week study, we'll be seeking
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: to answer these questions while analyzing various elements of this franchise,
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 1: specifically focusing on content related to Morrow and Oblivion and Skyrim.
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: Will be taking a look at the philosophy of RPGs
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: and considering the philosophical implications of character creation and formation
• 1:31:14
  Speaker 1: in an open ended series such as this, and will
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 1: be looking at the relationship between in game religion, lore,
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 1: and ideas with our primary world philosophical and religious concepts.
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: Each week will include one to two videos addressing these topics,
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 1: ongoing discord conversations, and live meetings. You are also encouraged
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: to spend at least a little time playing one of
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: these titles each week as a launching pad for conversation.
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 1: Join us in Tamreil that we might better understand our
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: primary life here on mundus. Enrolled today by going to
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  Speaker 1: that special code for your all Access pass. I hope
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: to see you there.