I came across this from a post by Jerry Coyne (it was a few weeks ago so I’m not going to track it down again), as it is fits neatly in his own preconceptions and arguments over whether or not we have free will. It’s a video by , who is a theoretical physicist who nevertheless felt the desire to weigh in on the free will debate. She takes aim at some philosophical positions, too, but seems rather blissfully unaware of what they actually entail while being totally dismissive of them. More on that later, so let me examine this scientific examination of free will.
She starts by outlining why she thinks we don’t have free will:
Last week, I explained what differential equations are, and that all laws of nature which we currently know work with those differential equations. These laws have the common property that if you have an initial condition at one moment in time, for example the exact details of the particles in your brain and all your brain’s inputs, then you can calculate what happens at any other moment in time from those initial conditions. This means in a nutshell that the whole story of the universe in every single detail was determined already at the big bang. We are just watching it play out.
These deterministic laws of nature apply to you and your brain because you are made of particles, and what happens with you is a consequence of what happens with those particles.
There are a couple of problems with this. The first one relates to a criticism that Edward Feser makes of at least some scientific positions in “Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction”, where he points out that science reduces all of its phenomena to things like differential equations, and then insists that those things describe all of reality without remainder. But how does science know this? If all it ever looks for and incorporates into itself are these things, and it leaves out anything that doesn’t conform, how does it know that it is really capturing all of reality. Feser uses the analogy of the drunk looking for his keys under the street light rather than where he dropped them because the light is better there and, in the case of science, that he’s had such great luck finding things under street lights so surely he will find his keys there as well. For Hossenfelder, things are actually even more serious, because the move she actually makes is to argue that we can represent the natural laws with differential equations which is controversial in and of itself and then attempts to argue that a feature of differential equations is reflective of reality: that given an initial term you can always calculate what will happen at a future point of time.
The first problem with doing this is that we don’t know that everything in reality can be described with differential equations of that sort. While it has roughly worked that way, some of those equations have been a bit messier and for the most part we’ve worked them out as models, not as definitions or identities. Most importantly here, we don’t know that we can describe conscious decisions using them because, right now, we don’t have equations describing how those work, and especially not ones where we can plunk in an initial value and know what will happen at any future point in time. I’m not saying that we can’t do that, but it is entirely possible that conscious decisions are something that really cannot be described in that way and using differential equations. So she’d be jumping the gun to use that to argue that we can’t have free will.
The worse problem, though, is that as noted above she’s not actually making an empirical observation or talking about the observed behaviour of, well, pretty much anything in existence, even the ones for which it works. No, what she’s doing is taking a property of differential equations, the things we are using to describe reality, and mapping it directly onto reality itself. So it isn’t just an argument that those equations describe reality, but instead that they define reality. Reality, by her argument, really is differential equations, so much so that the properties of differential equations can be considered to be properties of reality without any argument, experimentation or observation required. Her argument for determinism is essentially that we describe reality with differential equations and differential equations by their nature would be deterministic, therefore reality is deterministic. Even Coyne wouldn’t make such a blatantly scientistic argument, defining reality precisely by what science is currently using to model it.
The leads into the second problem: quantum physics. She does attempt to address an appeal to quantum mechanics later:
What about quantum mechanics? In quantum mechanics some events are truly random and cannot be predicted. Does this mean that quantum mechanics is where you can find free will? Sorry, but no, this makes no sense. These random events in quantum mechanics are not influenced by you, regardless of exactly what you mean by “you”, because they are not influenced by anything. That’s the whole point of saying they are fundamentally random. Nothing determines their outcome. There is no “will” in this. Not yours and not anybody else’s.
It is a fair reply to say that quantum mechanics, being random, doesn’t allow for the sort of free will that we want, which is “free” and yet influenced by external factors and so “sensible” given conditions. Most Hard Determinists can use this to escape most challenges from those who use quantum mechanics to argue against determinism. But not me, because the argument I make is that most Hard Determinists rely more or less on an argument that science has proven that all things are determined, and therefore our conscious decisions have to be as well, but even they have to admit that quantum mechanics is not determined, and so those arguments fail. Not only has science not shown that everything is determined, it has in fact proven that statement false. Science knows that lots of things aren’t determined at all, and so any argument based on the universality of determinism is doomed by science itself.
Now, most of the time most Hard Determinists can escape this by limiting their scope, and so for example by saying that determinism applies at the macro level and conscious decisions and brain operations are at the macro level. But to make this argument actually even more devastating for Hossenfelder, she can’t actually go there. First, because she repeatedly makes the mistake of talking about particles instead of things like neurons, and particles exist at the quantum level, and so she’d have to be talking about them. But if we are charitable and grant that her phrasing there might be a little loose, she still has the problem that she’s argued that all things are describable by differential equations which has the consequence that they are deterministic, and since quantum mechanics are not deterministic then either they can’t be described by differential equations or else the initial condition property doesn’t hold. Since her only argument is this universality based on differential equations, this would be an issue for her, and attempts to escape it by appealing to the macro level fail because we don’t have those equations for conscious decisions yet. So science has proven that some things cannot be described by differential equations in the way she insists produces determinism, and she has no way to get to conscious decisions being things that are described that way because we haven’t done it yet. So not only is science not supporting her case, it’s actually working against it.
So, she turns to discussions of philosophy:
A lot of people seem to think this is a philosophical position. They call it “materialism” or “reductionism” and think that giving it a name that ends on –ism is an excuse to not believe it.
This comment clearly shows that Hossenfelder does not understand philosophy. At all.
First, materialism isn’t a relevant position here. Well, maybe eliminative materialism is, but that’s in the same vein as reductionism and there are a host of non-reductionist, non-eliminativist materialisms out there. Materialism is basically the idea that all that exists is matter. It doesn’t take a strong stance on whether all material things are deterministic. And good thing, too, for the aforementioned quantum mechanics is generally considered to be completely material and yet not deterministic.
Second, labeling things with an “ism” is never considered an excuse to not believe it, at least not in philosophical terms. Pretty much any consistent position in philosophy is an “ism”. If anyone is using that as an argument against her, then they would seem to understand philosophy about as little as she does. I suspect that no one actually is doing that — hence the bit of snark here that’s probably unworthy of me — and that instead they are classifying the views into those positions to point out the known issues with those positions, and her response here is her either not getting that or dodging those criticisms.
Third, materialism and reductionism are, in philosophy, possibly the majority positions. So anyone assigning her position to those labels as an attempt to get them dismissed out of hand should not be replied to with a comment that the move is invalid implying that we should not call her views such, but should be replied to with the fact that those positions are far from being ones that philosophy dismisses out of hand.
Fourth, her view is, at least, reductionist. As noted above, she thinks that what is important about reality can be completely captured in differential equations, so much so that she thinks she can use the properties of differential equations themselves to determine what reality is and must be like. The criticisms of reductionism are all about whether we can captured everything interesting and important about reality in things like that, or in her case it’s probably more accurate to ask whether all phenomena can be reduced without remainder to differential equations of the sort she relies on. And as noted above, we can’t … and that’s before we start talking about the really complicated things like qualia and therefore consciousness. So rather than being an insult or an attempt to dismiss her out of hand, it is instead an accurate classification of her position and her position is indeed actually particularly vulnerable to the objections raised against reductionism. Her response here can only indicate that she has no idea what those positions are, and doesn’t want to be bothered to figure it out, and so wants to dismiss then out of hand with an almost certainly strawman reply of them wanting to use them to dismiss her views out of hand.
Well, of course you can insist to just not believe reductionism is correct. But this is denying scientific evidence.
The scientific evidence does not demonstrate reductionism, as anyone who actually knew the positions would know. And just to demonstrate further that she doesn’t understand them, her justification for that statement is this:
We do not guess, we know that brains are made of particles. And we do not guess, we know, that we can derive from the laws for the constituents what the whole object does.
The first statement is irrelevant: you can believe that brains are made of particles but that not all things that are important about the brain and what it does — meaning consciousness here — is reducible to physics (see emergentism, another evil “ism”, for example). And what the challenges to reductionism are all about is questioning whether you can do that for every relevant phenomena, and there are good reasons to think that even with the more common ones — from, say, biology to physics — that it can’t be done. Writing laws to reduce all animal behaviour, for example, to physics tends to leave us with gaps and rather useless physical laws. So she first doesn’t want her view to be reduced to an “ism”, then insists that the “ism” is proven by science, but then never addresses the actual philosophical objections to her position, many of which use science. And her specific view isn’t actually scientifically valid. This makes this statement unintentionally hilarious:
If you make a claim to the contrary, you are contradicting well-established science. I can’t prevent you from denying scientific evidence, but I can tell you that this way you will never understand how the universe really works.
I feel confident in saying that you will never understand how the universe really works by reducing it to differential equations and then using the mathematical properties of differential equations to dictate to the universe how it really works. You’re going to have to at least do some observing to figure that out. And, remember, this is coming from a philosopher. If the scientist is ignoring observations and the philosopher is saying that maybe we should do some, something has gone seriously wrong.
She then takes a quick stab at a philosophical argument:
You see, that thing you call “free will” should in some sense allow you to choose what you want. But then it’s either determined by what you want, in which case it’s not free, or it’s not determined, in which case it’s not a will.
Of course, this argument equivocates on “determined”. As will be important later, the big issue with free will is that we want our conscious decisions to be the result of our conscious decision-making processes. So wrt wants, we want it to be the case that given the wants I have and how I believe the world works, that my decision will be what rationally follows from them as best as my capacities can do them. So we want our choices to be “determined” by my wants in that they rationally follow from them, and if we make a poor decision we can trace back the error we made — either in considering wants or considering the world — and note where our decision-making process failed. So it’s independent of neither our wants nor our decision-making abilities. But the operations of those processes are what determines it. It has to be the case that the decision is not fixed until those processes complete. Determinism in Hossenfelder’s sense breaks this by insisting that the actual outcomes are determined well in advance, at the Big Bang in fact. What this means is that the details of that decision-making process and our wants might not matter. We could very well have that deterministic process produce different conscious ruminations than what is “actually” used under the hood. If that’s possible, then how do we know that we make decisions at all? In fact, it’s more reasonable to say that we never make decisions at all.
Yes, our wants need to be in some sense free as well, so there are issues. But it’s hardly the case that free will simply never made sense, as she asserts. It’s only her equivocating her notion of determined with how wants would determine decisions that allow her to even make an argument that at first glance might appear to be one that we might need to consider for more than a second.
In summary, the idea that we have a free will which gives us the possibility to select among different futures is both incompatible with the laws of nature and logically incoherent. I should add here that it’s not like I am saying something new. Look at the writing of any philosopher who understand physics, and they will acknowledge this.
I suspect that she defines “any philosopher who understands physics” as those who would agree with her. Yes, she isn’t saying something new. Philosophers have raised issues with free will and its relation to physics for centuries. But for centuries other philosophers — yes, even some who understand physics — have raised issues with those issues and with Hard Determinism, and she seems blissfully unaware of any of them.
But some philosophers insist they want to have something they can call free will, and have therefore tried to redefine it. For example, you may speak of free will if no one was in practice able to predict what you would do. This is certainly presently the case, that most human behavior is unpredictable, though I can predict that some people who didn’t actually watch this video will leave a comment saying they had no other choice than leaving their comment and think they are terribly original.
Okay, she has a point that the last comment isn’t original. However, one of the issues with that is that there is a potential contradiction here, with Hard Determinists in various ways exhorting people to change their views or positions and take responsibility for their views in a way that isn’t compatible with Hard Determinism. By her own views, Hossenfelder can talk and talk and talk at me about there being no free will but if the Big Bang did not deign to permit me to be convinced by her words then I won’t be, so I can’t bear any responsibility for my views. And any attempts to move the relevant processes into the decision-making processes themselves and so retain that sort of responsibility lead one to some form of compatiblism, which is the view she is denigrating with the comment on redefining the term (they see it as coming to a proper understanding of it, not redefining it). There’s another issue where many Hard Determinists talk as if they make choices and bear responsibility — usually positive — for their ideas and the like, when they are no more free than anyone else.
This leads to the underlying issue around those responses to Hard Determinists: their views, if treated consistently and taken to their logical conclusion, so thoroughly contradict our actual experiences that it is almost impossible for us for actually talk and act as if Hard Determinism is true. That it’s so foreign to our experience is prima facie reason to at least be skeptical of the position, and most Hard Determinists only have “Science says all things are determined” as an argument, which as we’ve seen is quite inadequate.
Others have tried to argue that free will means some of your decisions are dominated by processes internal to your brain and not by external influences. But of course your decision was still determined or random, regardless of whether it was dominated by internal or external influences. I find it silly to speak of “free will” in these cases.
That she finds it silly doesn’t make it, well, actually silly or not useful. As noted above, we want our actions to be determined by our internal processes. Given that, if they were able to show that the internal processes mattered more then that would be important and would flatly contradict her own stated position at the beginning of the post. She might be able to quibble over whether we should call it “free will” but her view would still be wrong. That’s hardly inconsequential.
What is really going on if you are making a decision is that your brain is running a calculation, and while it is doing that, you do not know what the outcome of the calculation will be. Because if you did, you wouldn’t have to do the calculation. So, the impression of free will comes from our self-awareness, that we think about what to do, combined with our inability to predict the result of that thinking before we’re done.
If the outcome of the calculation is already determined before it starts, then what is the calculation itself specifically doing? Is it even doing the calculation that it purports to be doing? The issue is one that we see with neural nets. The actual calculation, at the hardware level, isn’t content-aware. You can use that same neural net for a different purpose and given its input it will spit out an answer. I remarked once that you could use a neural net trained to solve differential equations to play chess and it would work, which is probably a bit facetious, but perhaps what will drive the point home is that I could train a neural net to solve differential equations and then use it to play chess and it is possible that it would be better at playing chess than it would be at solving differential equations. At the level of the hardware, content does not matter.
Which leads to that self-awareness. See, the self-awareness isn’t us looking at the brain doing the calculation and thinking that it isn’t done yet so I don’t know what the answer will be. It is us working through the calculation consciously. When I am revamping my schedule while going for my daily constitutional, it’s not that my brain is calculating what will be best on which day and just not telling me what the answer is but that my conscious reasoning is walking through the options and ultimately deciding what works best on each day. If we cut those processes out and place the ultimate responsibility on the Big Bang then all of that might be epiphenomenal. Those considerations need not be what the brain itself is actually considering. But if they aren’t, then are my decisions rational? Even if they come to the conclusion that a rational analysis hints should be the decision? What is the point of conscious deliberation if it doesn’t do anything? But what could it possibly do under Hossenfelder’s view?
Suppose you have a computer that evaluates whether an equation has a real-valued root. The answer is yes or no. You can predict the answer. But now you can change the algorithm so that if you input the correct answer, the code will output the exact opposite answer, ie “yes” if you predicted “no” and “no” if you predicted “yes”. As a consequence, your prediction will never be correct. Clearly, this has nothing to do with free will but with the fact that the system you make a prediction for gets input which the prediction didn’t account for. There’s nothing interesting going on in this argument.
This highlights the issue here, as she proposes messing with the decision-making processes to produce wrong answers to make it unpredictable, and then says that that wouldn’t be free will. All of those who advocate free will — even those who make the predictability argument — accept this. What they argue is that we can’t predict the answer until the decision-making processes do their job because the answer is determined by those processes. Hossenfelder thinks that’s not the case, so there’s still a difference in argument there that she doesn’t acknowledge.
Another objection that I’ve heard is that I should not say free will does not exist because that would erode people’s moral behavior. The concern is, you see, that if people knew free will does not exist, then they would think it doesn’t matter what they do. This is of course nonsense. If you act in ways that harm other people, then these other people will take steps to prevent that from happening again. This has nothing to do with free will. We are all just running software that is trying to optimize our well-being. If you caused harm, you are responsible, not because you had “free will” but because you embody the problem and locking you up will solve it.
Well, a number of Hard Determinsts, like Jerry Coyne, argue that understanding that we have free will should change how we treat people since they aren’t responsible for their actions. So we should treat them more like we treat people who right now we consider are clearly not responsible for their actions, by trying to cure them and not considering them morally responsible for their actions. So surely saying that people aren’t morally responsible for their actions and having us treat them as such will erode anything that depended solely on morality, as it would eliminate morality as such. I also find it interesting that she rather blythly talks about locking people up on the basis of maximizing well-being, since morality tends to preclude us doing that. Essentially, she rejects the idea of Coyne that we should cure or rehabilitate offenders since they have no choice and only solve the problem by locking them up if there is no way to do that and accepts the idea of locking people up because they are “bad”, in that they challenge her well-being.
Why am I telling you this? Because I think that people who do not understand that free will is an illusion underestimate how much their decisions are influenced by the information they are exposed to. After watching this video, I hope, some of you will realize that to make the best of your thinking apparatus, you need to understand how it works, and pay more attention to cognitive biases and logical fallacies.
Even Libertarians about free will believe that our decisions are influenced by the information we have, and exhort us to pay attention to errors in our decision-making processes. If her Hard Determinism is true, though, our decision-making processes will just do what they do and there is no reason for us to attempt to correct them, especially since we will likely be unable to. And so, at the end, we see Hossenfelder creep back towards compatibilism while trying to convince us that only Hard Determinism is the right answer, as so often happens in these discussions.
The Verbose Stoic 
Most Personally Memorable/Favourite Games (31 – 40)
October 28, 202040: Missing: Since January
This game was also known as In Memoriam outside of North America. What was interesting about this game was that it was what is called an “alternate reality game”, where the game attempted to blur the line between the game and reality itself. It mostly did this through things like websites that you could look up in your research, but the most interesting part was that on installing the game it would ask for a hook into your E-mail system and during the game at various times it would send E-mails to you giving you certain information. The most memorable one for me was actually a three-way E-mail chain where one of the participants was “introduced” to the other and said that it was nice to meet them. While it wasn’t going to fool me into thinking that it was reality, that reflected a pretty fair amount of attention to detail that made the game more immersive.
The subject matter was pretty dark, as the premise is that the police are releasing a CD of puzzles related to the disappearance of two people by a shadowy figure, with the references and puzzles being decidedly creepy and even a bit supernatural. I seem to recall playing it at around the same time as I was watching “Murder in Small Town X”, and the similar atmospheres probably helped them feed off of each other.
I came into it a bit late and some of the sites and the like had disappeared, but a FAQ helped me get around that. Still, I never finished it and even though I bought the sequel I never played that one. That being said, I remember this game quite a bit and often wish that I could find a game like it out there, or could actually play it and maybe finish it.
39: Age of Wonders 2
For those who know me, there’s probably only one thing I need to say about this game: it has Hot Seat multiplayer. Yes, this is another game that I played against myself, looking more for the story than for the actual strategic competition. Basically taking the standard fantasy races, the game involves some spells, some gods, some bonuses from gods, and some units and throws them all at each other in a fairly decent strategy game. Balance, however, wasn’t necessarily its strong suit, as some abilities might have been overpowered at times (I can’t remember if the overpowered Death Knights were in this game or only in the previous one). Still, the series overall provided me with a decent sandbox to play around in, and the fact that it came with a scenario builder only added to the fun. I never did get around to playing the campaigns.
The first time around, this one was ranked ahead of the first one. On reflection, I like the first one better because it was simpler and had less moving parts. This one got a little bit complicated at times for what benefits the extra complexity gave you, which made it a bit more difficult to just jump into and play.
38: Age of Wonders
So despite promising to say more about these games this time around … there’s not much more to say about this game than was covered in the previous segment. This was for me the game that really got Age of Wonders in my head and now with the games being out on GOG I’ve pretty much picked them all up, even if I haven’t found the time to play them all yet, and I don’t have the very latest yet because it’s more of a sci-fi setting. I liked the charm of the fantasy setting for this game and have some other games to play if I want sci-fi, so it will need to go on sale before I’ll even consider picking it up. Still, the only reason I’m even considering that game is because of my love of the series, and that can all be traced back to the hours I spent playing this game against myself.
37: Lord of the Rings: The Third Age
There are other games set in the Lord of the Rings universe, and even board games set in that universe (War of the Ring is the one I’ve played the most) but this is the only game that I’ve ever really played and gotten into. As proof, I have actually finished this game to the end. In fact, I’ve finished it twice. That puts it in the rarefied company of the Persona games, Shadow Hearts and KotOR/Sith Lords.
Part of the reason I liked it is that unlike many other fans of the novels/movies I love works that focus on other characters and try to fit them into the existing structure, which is also one of the reasons I love “I, Jedi”. Shamus Young talks about them this way:
But when done even remotely well, I really like them. They can add things to the existing plot and cover up potential plot holes. And in fact one of the things that I most admire about them is how they have to add drama and tension to the plot while not contradicting what happened originally, and ideally while adding explanations and details that can add to the original work. So I’m pretty much always interested in works that try to do that, which is why I bought this one in the first place.
The worst part of it is the gameplay, mostly the fact that you have to use skills to advance them but your skill use is limited by skill points that you can only refresh at certain points in the game and particularly when you hit a save point. I hate that sort of gameplay because you get torn between having to use your skills and wanting to save them for when you really need them. It also let you swap characters in and out of your party during a fight and the ones that you didn’t use still got half XP, but ultimately if you focused on a couple of characters — and the lead Gondorian and the elf maiden were two that you probably wanted to focus on — the others ended up too far behind to matter, and the Rohan maiden starts too low in level to survive the fights making it really, really hard to level her up. Still, I was saved by the fact that save points restore all HP and SP and so if I was worried about that tracking back to a save point was always an option. As I said, I managed to finish it twice, so I was actually able to overcome the gameplay issues, which is more than I can say for some games with better gameplay. And better stories too, for that matter.
36: The Old Republic
I’ve started two Diaries on this around the characters I’ve built that I’ve never finished. I’ve commented before that this game might spoil me for all other games. And to that end, right now this is the only game that I have on my schedule and so may be the only game I play for the next few months. It’s not my favourite MMO, but it’s the one that even when City of Heroes was up and running and when I had Dark Age of Camelot that I could play the easiest. And that’s only gotten easier with the new changes where with Rest XP, the 25% Bonus XP and what they normally give I can generally only do the planet and story missions and get enough levels to get me through the game.
That’s really the big benefit of the game for me. The class stories are different so each class is a new story, and with eight of them by the time I finish them all I’ve forgotten the details and so the stories seem fresh again. By switching between the Republic and Empire with each character, the planet stories also seem fresh, or at least don’t seem stale. The gameplay is nothing exciting, but is at least simple enough that it doesn’t annoy or frustrate me, and while the combat can get boring mostly due to its sheer frequency, it’s not enough to bore me out of the game. It’s the MMO I’ve played the most, despite my liking at least two better. And it’s the only MMO that I’m still playing.
35: Icewind Dale
Of the Bioware Forgotten Realms games, this is the only one that I can unequivocally say that I like. Icewind Dale 2 appeals to me sometimes because it has more classes and more varied ones so making characters is easier and more interesting, but I really dislike how it makes level 1 characters commandos able to assault enemy encampments. Icewind Dale sets you up as adventurers who are meant to be the minor part of a larger expedition, there to help and gain some experience, who end up thrust into larger issues by virtue of being the ones lucky or destined enough to survive. And while the story can be a bit thin at times, I’ve enjoyed it far more than any of the Baldur’s Gate games or even Neverwinter Nights. It helps that it lets me create a party all of my own creation, since that’s something that I have a hard time resisting.
Still, I never finished it, getting bogged down in various places over the various times I’ve played it. This, of course, isn’t exactly odd for me, as it’s only been over the past couple of years that at least nominally “finishing” a game has been a priority for me. I’d sit down and try to finish it again sometime but I have way too many games to play right now and not enough time to play them. Still, I do keep considering it now and then.
34: Lost Dimension
This was a game that left me wanting more. Still, I did manage to finish it, three times, which is a huge plus for me. I liked the traitor mechanism, and liked that the missions were simple enough — and enough carried over on a New Game+ — that replaying it was fairly simple. Being able to mix and match powers on different characters was also cool. Bonding with someone and then having them reveal as a traitor was heart wrenching. The story behind everything had its hiccups, but worked pretty well and probably better than the equally dimension hopping Nonary Games. Ultimately, it was a bit of a mix between the Personas and a standard visual novel, and while it’s not a Persona game it all came together pretty well. I’d certainly buy and play a sequel, which is more than I can say for some games.
It’s also a game that I used as an example of innovative companion usage, precisely because of the traitor mechanism. In gameplay, it’s you investing development time in characters that might be traitors. While you can get back that investment if you have to erase them, relying on them makes it more difficult to get the others to vote them out as traitors. In story, having to convince the others to vote them out makes for a more democratized experience, and having to erase characters that you’ve bonded with allows for more emotional depth to relationships and to those scenes than you could get otherwise. And it’s all on you. You’re the one who ultimately has to decide who are traitors and who aren’t, and who you bond with and who you don’t. Without that traitor mechanism and pushing the boundaries of co-operative parties, none of that happens.
33: Dragon Age 2
When I first played this game, I didn’t care for it that much, other than finding the question mechanism addictive. When I replayed it, I enjoyed it a lot more. Part of that was because I was playing it to analyze it and so had to pay attention to it. So no playing while watching or listening to TV, which meant that I had to immerse myself in what the game itself was doing and saying. And the second was realizing that the game was a tragedy, which let me appreciate it for what it really was and not as just a sequel to Dragon Age: Origins setting up for Dragon Age: Inquisition.
Yes, you can’t really solve the problems of Kirkwall. But things would certainly have been worse without you. You keep things in check longer and even manage to save some people who would otherwise have died. You are supposed to fail. The Templar/Mage conflict will happen. But while you don’t get to choose your career you can choose at least roughly what will happen to at least some important things. And while the companions aren’t classic, they do react to you and as they’d expect, as even the ones who don’t want to side with the side you end up siding with can be convinced to do so either by loyalty to you or by arguments. It’s not perfect, and it can be buggy — my PS3 version seems more stable than, say, Chuck Sonnenberg’s versions — but it’s better than I thought it was at first.
32: The Sims
I do love life simulators, which is pretty much why I like the Social Link aspects of the Personas the most out of everything. This was one of if not the first games that provided me with that experience (I think the first one was an actual dating sim), and is still probably the only one that I’ve actually gotten into. I’ve played other Sims games, but none of them really captured my attention like this one did.
Of course, for me I wasn’t really playing it as a strategy game. As is my wont, I was playing it as a way to generate stories and so kinda liked the free will elements combined with my being able to have control myself. Sadly, I was never really able to play it long enough to build up any really memorable stories, but the little I did do were interesting enough. I probably would have liked more control over the initial set-up — you know, with some sort of cheats perhaps to tweak things exactly they way I wanted them to be in the neighbourhood — especially since the progressions — especially on the career tracks — were long enough to be annoying and got in the way of building a good story. Still, I remember it fondly and again this is a game that I consider playing again at various times.
31: Infiltrator
You know, I don’t think games today can capture the simply multi-component gameplay that old games managed to do (see also: Pirates!). Each element here was simple yet logically related: fly your helicopter to the site in a simple flight combat simulator, infiltrate the site using various tools, get what you need, and fly out. It provides variety in terms of gameplay and tools while still being simple enough that you know what you’re doing at all points. Today, many such games I think would want to make each component deep enough for those who would like it, leaving almost every potential customer confused and struggling in at least one of those components, or else would clearly favour one over the others leaving fans of that component bored. Infiltrator does not pretend to be anything more than it is, and I loved it for it.
Tags:Most Memorable Games
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