In a recent thread, Alloh seems to bring up (inadvertently?) what I think is one of the oldest and most important discussions in philosophy: what is the difference between "fake" and "real"?

As a seed to the conversation, consider the following clip from the movie "The Truman Show" and related article:

The word "fake" tends to carry strong negative connotations. This is what I think of when I see the words "fake traffic". (Here is a philosophical article on that film, by the way. These are not necessarily my views but it's an interesting read; take it with a grain of salt: http://samvak.tripod.com/seahaven.html )

Another possible thing to consider would be a study done in my country of birth on what they call the "Uncanny Valley":

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/the-uncanny-valley

In a nutshell, people tend to react favorably to human-like robots, but not if they are too human-like. If robots are indistinguishable from humans, then everyone gets along fine (or do they?).

The concept is humorously illustrated in the following Calvin and Hobbes comic strip:

What does this mean about the world we live in, and Vendetta Online also? Feel free to discuss; talk about books, movies, artwork, traditions.... anything that comes to mind. I recognize not everyone may have wrestled with this as much as me, but if at any point in your life the thought has crossed your mind "what is real"? This may be a good place to discuss.

I may add some more nuggets to this as time goes on.

A thing that is fake is a thing that is pretending to be something else. For simplicity's sake, most people forego the full description of what the fake thing is pretending to be and leave it up to assumption, which can result in misunderstandings and arguments about what is and is not fake.

Take a muppet. Kermit is not a frog. He is a construction that pretends to be a frog. So he is a fake frog. But Kermit is an actual physical object - he is a real muppet. So if you only say "Kermit is fake" or "Kermit is real", you are leaving out critical details, forcing people to make possibly erroneous assumptions about what you meant.

None of the ships in Vendetta are real ships. They are real states of information on a set of servers, however, which pretend to be space ships. The new ships that the devs added are designed to pretend to be normal convoy traffic, but they are not actually convoys (where a "convoy" is a group of ships that travels from one station to another station, usually to transport cargo for profit). They do not originate from any station, but rather warp into the sector from nowhere. So they are fake convoy ships. But they are real VO ships that provide real congestion around the docking bays. (Indeed, the congestion is real enough to have elicited complaints on the forum.)

So the new ships are really [data pretending to be [data that pretend to be ships moving [data which pretends to be cargo] between [data pretending to be space stations]]]. So, several layers of fake in there, and one more layer of fake than the normal convoy ships have.

Ergh. I sense this thread becoimg all Matrix-ey very soon.

I think you need to discuss "Suspension of Disbelief."

Applied to Vendetta-Online:
"Real" to me means non-distinguishable from what I consider reality. I suppose that when I play Vendetta I'm fully aware that I'm playing a GAME, but if you play for a few minutes you get to that mental shift where you begin to interact with the game on a more, well, I'm not sure what to call it - a more intense level? It's not "REAL" but it's good enough where your brain does this kind of mental shrug and says "what the hell... good enough." Where gameplay becomes natural and you forget about dinner in the oven and the deadlines that you have tomorrow. The perception of time slows down and all of a sudden it's midnight, and you could SWEAR you just turned on the 10:30 PM SportsCenter not 10 minutes ago. There's probably a term that cognitive/behavioral researchers use for this but I have no idea what it might be.

And I suppose that whatever interrupts this mental state is "Fake." It's where the suspension of disbelief fails, because it's gone TOO fake for your brain to rationalize it. It breaks the game vibe that you have going and snaps you back to "reality".

Applied to VO, "Fake" for me means things like:
empty convoys (WTF are they doing, then - mass joyrides? vendetta-day parades?)
NPC's that ignore you when you shoot them
shockingly bad 3D models (Centaur)
stations that can't POSSIBLY be big enough to hold all of that crap you have stored there
Station "windows" that nothing moves in (What's the name of the guy in the window again?)
NPC's that don't talk back
Station bars without chatty bartenders that give you missions
Can't approach planets or suns and crash into them/burn up in reentry
Faction system (until recently - YAY for fix)
lack of persistent ingame NPC personalities
lag and/or latency issues
your weapons don't damage others of your same nation.
static, unchanging universe

Oddly, things that don't bother me or seem "fake"
You explode and are immediately resurrected light years away from where you died without cost to you (Wow Obamacare has come a long way)
Wormholes that don't spaghettify you when you enter them
People talking on 100 about their great bowel movement they just had or what politician they hate
hive presence

Aha, noway. This thread belongs in the Star Citizen forums, where they don't have an actual game to talk about so they all speculate and talk game philosophy.. lol

Hahahaha. Awesome find, Pizzaboy.

I believe the phrase for that is mind screw.

lmaoed so bad at that image, great job rin.

Give yourself a few minutes (or more) and take a look at the following series:

http://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/

If you haven't seen it before, you're in for a treat. If you only have time to watch one part, watch part 2.

Basically, the author makes the claim in his thesis that "everything is a remix". There is nothing profound here; Newton popularized the idea in the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" (which he himself borrowed from someone else). What's interesting to me is how this applies in particular to the classic storytelling idea of the "Hero's Journey", in Star Wars (highlighted in part 2 of the remix series linked above) and elsewhere. Suspend disbelief for a moment as Leebs suggests, and consider that storytelling might be thought of as the art of lying to tell the truth (Alan Moore). Be that as it may, things have to make sense to a certain degree within the story, which is to say that the story must follow a certain logic.

Stories involving high mimetic heroes tend to involve the hero encountering a so-called "threshold event" (sometimes a "threshold monster"); something that turns the accepted, everyday "ordinary reality" upside-down, forcing the hero to confront previously held notions about his or her reality, and the place s/he must hold in that natural order. As a result of this shift in perception, the hero becomes more than s/he once was. This, in a nutshell, is the Hero's Journey. False beliefs are replaced with real or true ones. This is a pattern that is repeated throughout Star Wars IV. Luke encounters a threshold event when his foster parents are killed, which sets him out on a quest to rescue a princess and become a Jedi. In the end, Luke must "use the force" by letting go of his reliance on previous tools (his X-wing's targeting computer) in order to destroy the Death Star. This is a repeated pattern of a shift in perception, in which new concepts take the place of old ones.

What does this have to do with Vendetta Online? Games are also stories. There must be a certain logic that holds up within the game, however, in order to create a "journey", should there not also be a series of "threshold events" (another term might be a rite of passage) that re-align perceptions within the context of the game universe?

It's easy to sidestep the issue, so long as a certain natural "ordinary reality" holds up. What sort of event forces one to question or examine previously held notions about that ordinary reality?

Ancient wisdom texts, including Vedic, Hermetic, and Ecclesiastical traditions suggest that this is part of a larger pattern, possibly in the shape of wheels within wheels (Samsara, Mandala, "all things return to where they once were"). The story, in essence, is a "larger wheel" within an even greater wheel (audience, experience), and the threshold event is a smaller wheel that helps to turn the story. What does this mean about the structure of Vendetta, and games in general?

There is not a simple answer to this question. Heraclitus wrote "Eternity is a child playing checkers" at around 500 BCE, evoking both the eternal and a game in one brief phrase.

The final scene of the movie Inception involves the main character walking away from a spinning top, leaving the question of "what is reality" unanswered. In the end, maybe it does lead in a great big circle, but at least I am here, able to pose the question. Descartes might say this is the only real proof of existence, but that's something I will get into next time, if there is time.

i only red the last paragraph, bc this is too long, but I tink u mean Descartes.

Right... Descartes. Thanks for catching that.

What if there's no afterlife and we're living millions of lifetimes in a larger being's head?
What if that larger being was killed? Would we experience two deaths?