Off top of my head, Silo has many of those things, eventually, the attention economy gets skewered a bit in Upload which is not from TVplus. Combat is so expensive for good live action maybe the best one can hope for is the depiction in something like Pantheon.
If I am remembering correctly, I felt terrible after completing the first mission but that may have been the point - make you think about what you are doing. It was presented to the player as authentic threat, then when you get to end you are told it was a test but in my playthrough I killed all the “bad guys” on the way, and could have spared their virtual lives by sneaking around and knocking them out.
Postal 2 can be played through without ever hitting anyone, which I've done for fun. Although it's the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do there, which is the joke.
Haven't been able to repeat that in Deus Ex, you can't play through the campaign as a total pacifist, and Carter explains as much right at the beginning.
I vaguely remember doing a self-challenge pacifist run... I think I had to move all the unconscious bodies on the PCRS Wall Cloud up to the dock, because otherwise, I would be indirectly responsible if it sank while they were unable to evacuate.
Sure, I've done at least a dozen of less-violent runs (being addicted to this game and a couple of others), but you still can't get though it without ever killing anyone, at least not without hacks exploiting NPC pathfinding bugs, and the game still treats characters like Anna as dead even if you work around it.
I choose to believe that whomever Paul defends himself from is not-my-fault as I hide inside the Covert Closet. (Though speed-running out the front is fine too.)
There is not a big difference between unconscious bodies and dead bodies in the game, after all, they never wake up. The real challenge is playing without harming anybody, which is possible up to one or two specific situations.
Or were there unconscious bodies on the ship from before your arrival? I do not remember that anymore.
My memory is hazy--a decade or more will do that--but I have this picture in my head of using the Pepper Spray (which temporarily neutralizes enemies without knocking them out) on the Wall Cloud crew inside the helicopter room control deck, so that I could get past them to some necessary switch or terminal.
It might be the "carry everyone to shore" thing was on a different playthrough...
One of Deus Ex's main flaws in my book is that they didn't really keep up with this after that first mission - you still have the choice to be lethal or non-lethal, but I don't recall the game really reacting to the choice later on.
I highly recommend the pop science book An Immense World by Ed Yong to disabuse you of this notion. There is a sort of refresh rate (not exactly the same but good metaphor) for everything at every level of living being we study. It gives enough information for you to read the actual studied should you have more questions after reading it.
I say this out of genuine curiosity: does Florida even make sense for data centers with the increasing weather patterns there? Feels like every time I read news about Florida, if it’s not political, it’s some natural disaster.
I assume there must be companies doing things like this there but would the big co’s actually want anything there?
I just used Florida for one counter example but Tennessee and Alabama just rolled out the red carpet, as results have come in, too. The usual course of things like this is the corporations will play different jurisdictions off each other to get more and more off taxpayers dime like pro sports stadiums and Amazon heralded HQ2 - thankfully voters in a lot of states mentioned rejected unlimited data centers - but it is not universal. The fight continues.
I remember growing up in Texas reading somewhere between 80-95 percent of all land in Texas is privately owned in various civics texts, my libertarian civics teacher was proud of this for some reason. It’s an exceptionally high percentage compared to the states to west of Texas. It’s a Texas issue dating back to Spanish rule and continued under successive governments. I don’t think this happened to other western states formerly under Spanish rule.
The amount of public land sort of follows when states were admitted to the union. At a certain point we saw what happened to the East and decided not to let it keep happening. Thanks in large part to early conservationists like Gifford Pinochet and Teddy Roosevelt
It’s amazing to me Waymo saw the estimated 50000-80000 tariff penalty (and time and money invested for essentially reinstalling electronics ) in their latest fleet worth it. American sourced options must really pale in comparison or be non existent and I wish I could just write off auto tariffs like that.
I moved from software in medical to communications to gaming in my 20s. It’s possible but even back then was difficult, I had just the right set of skills and gaming knowledge to fit into a couple of slots and I also only had to support one other person at a time when it was a lot less expensive to survive in USA, I also took a risk and took a much lower salary for years for the opportunity. It paid off financially for the most part but that was entirely happenstance. I also was on the pointy end of the hiring process once I got in - it was impossible for anyone who had not completed a game to get past the resume screening process - only new grads and they still had to have done projects for school and on their own. If you have not done any work on your own games or mods at this point you have no chance of getting hired by a game developer at least from my experience a few decades ago.
If you have any games on PC there is a huge community making mods available on the Nexus mods website. That is one way to start, tons of people have ideas to improve existing games and have found an outlet for it there. I would never have finished Silksong without those mods. There are also a ton of mods via Steam, Skyrim has a all sorts of mods from gameplay to visual changing all sorts of behavior and looks.
The feline purring for healing is in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and I just blew it off as too fantastical, but I’m prepared to eat my words metaphorically speaking.
>In 1995, Metcalfe argued that the Internet would suffer a "catastrophic collapse" in the following year; he promised to eat his words if it did not. During his keynote speech at the sixth International World Wide Web Conference in 1997, he took a printed copy of his column that predicted the collapse, put it in a blender with some liquid and then consumed the pulpy mass.[26][27] He had suggested having his words printed on a very large cake, but the audience would not accept this form of "eating his words."
I doubt a few decades of time is going to make much literature so much harder to understand. Just a little bit of historical context and background on currency values is enough to read and comprehend stuff back to Shakespeare where viewers and readers can instantly recognize the human foibles in fictional characters from centuries ago. Translations are a different beast where it’s a collaboration between translators and original author but there are many subplots in say Don Quixote that would not be out of place in media as different as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia to many romcom movies(I picked the oldest novel I could think of, The Iliad and Odyssey can work though translation does a lot of heavy lifting in those cases for majority of readers).
I think one of the reasons we gave Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn to kids was because it was a story easy to relate to without the gymnastics of interpretation like we'd do with Odyssey or Illiad. I could read Hamlet and understand it as a teenager, but I didn't feel like I had anything in common with him. I wonder if the same thing is happening with Tom.
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