Originally posted in response to a post about morality and games

This makes me think of Traffic Department 2192, when the MC decides on her own to murder medical responders to a mine accident because the miners are from a hostile country. I had her just sit there and do nothing until all the medics escaped, and got the generic game over message about how your failing a mission has endangered your allies’ lives. So I killed the medics instead, and after the mission, the other characters lectured her about how her mindless violence endangered everyone’s lives.

Or this one game about war planes where you have a mission to score points by destroying enemy units and installations. After you destroy all the guns on one installation, the people inside beg you not to kill them. But they’re worth points, and I kept failing the mission over and over because I couldn’t score fast enough. I couldn’t progress the story without more killing.

(Now that I think about it, I have some more respect for that visual novel where if you don’t inform on your fellow prisoners, you get electrocuted until you suffer a breakdown. It’s a more elegant game over than just “the story can’t continue from here.”)

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From a book I vaguely remember: the MC is a deaf teenager. She’s spent years saving up money from part-time work so she can afford college. Her parents take the money out of her account and use it to buy hearing aids for her younger sister, so the kid won’t have to grow up deaf. (Because apparently kids’ hearing aids cost as much as college? Holy shit.) Anyway, the parents genuinely don’t understand why the MC is upset.

She’s speaking to them again by the end of the book. I can’t say I would be.

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Lamias everywhere there are snakes. Lamias that climb trees. Lamias that burrow in sand. Incredibly venomous sea lamias. Lamias that mooch in your backyard. You flee north, but find lamias in the Arctic Circle. You cannot escape the snek.

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I’m reading The Dragons of Dorcastle, and I gotta say, the Mage isn’t very good at the solipsism he professes to. For instance, he tells the Mechanic she’s foolish for believing other people exist, but a solipsist would believe that the shadow he perceives as the Mechanic is neither wise nor foolish, just a shadow.

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Thinking through the worldbuilding in The Dragons of Dorcastle. I’m quite early on, but I think the mages are half-right. Their world is in some sense illusionary, and the things they see are tricks of the mind. But when you talk to yourself, that’s your mind thinking, and it’s “real” because your mind is real. So if other people also talk to you, even if their bodies are illusions, their minds are real in the sense that you’re talking to yourself! And I think it works both ways—they’re also talking to themselves when they talk to you. In this setting, all minds are essentially a single mind that’s been fragmented into multiple voices.

That’s why mages can’t directly work magic on other people. Each mage thinks they subconsciously believe other people exist, and they would be able to work magic on others if they truly accepted solipsism. What they actually need to accept is that the self doesn’t exist, only the voices within the one true mind. When that’s acknowledged, modifying the other voices is like modifying the voices in your own head.