Trashbones

joined 2 years ago
[–] Trashbones 1 points 1 year ago

There's actually a book series I enjoy, the Bobiverse series, that does an interesting take on it. In it a human, the eponymous Bob, gets digitized and becomes the AI of a Von Neumann probe. He's given the mission to make copies of himself, explore the galaxy, and build colonies for humanity.

Later on in the series...As he makes more copies of himself, it's found that the personality of the copies diverge more and more the farther from the original that they descend, and they eventually devise a statistical way to measure this divergence. No two extant Bobs are ever the same person, even though they're identical copies.

However, it's also discovered that if a Bob makes copy of himself, shuts down his original AI matrix, and only then the copy is turned on, that Bob will have no measurable divergence from the one he was cloned from. It's measurably the exact same individual, and it implies that in-universe there's some fundamental, tranferable property of identy. Arguably some kind of "soul".

Not only that, if the original AI matrix is turned back on then that one starts displaying the divergence that was expected of the copy. This is used in one case to transmit the data of a Bob to a waiting, empty AI matrix around another star to avoid physical travel and side step the teleporter problem.

There's a lot of sci-fi hand waving in it, but I thought it was a fun way to approach the question.

[–] Trashbones 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Maybe try Hades or Dead Cells if you like roguelites/roguelikes? Fundamentally different genre but gives me a lot of the same vibes. You inevitably die every run, but you keep all the meta-progression/upgrade resources you found during that run. So really, dying actually just gives you a chance to spend those resources to get stronger rather than taking away your progress.

Roguelites sound like a good fit for you in general if you like challenging, arcadey games that don't punish you too severely for dying. It's usually expected that you die a lot lol

[–] Trashbones 1 points 2 years ago

This game is actually a bit before my time since it was released two years before I was born, but the original XCOM game (aka UFO: Enemy Unknown) is still one of my favorite games of all time. And it's just gotten better over the years with fixes and modding through OpenXcom.

I like the modern Firaxis games a lot too, and Xenonauts even moreso, but nothing has quite hit the same as the OG.

[–] Trashbones 1 points 2 years ago

Couldn't agree more, even as a very casual fan of the Souls games! There's a lot of things I think later Souls games got better, though that take is probably controversial, but what I think DS1 undeniably nailed is the level design.

The way the different areas all interconnected so seemlessly is a feat of level design. Not every individual area was perfect (some weren't even good cough cough Blighttown cough) but the overall design of the whole game still holds up so well.

[–] Trashbones 12 points 2 years ago

After using it for a few days and having an account for a few hours (this is my first comment), I don't think it will ever directly compete. But I think it does have chance to represent a "significant minority" of internet traffic if it doesn't peter out early on, and it may already be passed the threshold for that happening.

You'd never say email can "compete" with twitter, but it's still a significant way people interact with the internet. If lemmy does for independent communities and niche forums what email does for messaging, I'd consider it a huge success!