#Your favorite game’s “awesome story” robs the player of a basic sense of agency

It is generally not awesome for the player character to join a cult, agree to assassinate their boss’s boss, cheat on their life partner, pick a side in a major power struggle, voluntarily inject themselves with an experimental nano-fluid, etc, without the player’s consent.

Right, so…please tell me a narrative medium that allows this. Somehow movies, books, comics, manga, and literal storytelling all get a pass on this?

I can sort of nod along with everything else, agreeing that there is some truth in the spewing. This statement is so pants-on-head foolish that every other assertion you make gets dragged beneath the water and drowns with chains made of the last page of shitty choose-your-own-adventure book. And for that level of strength in the chains to work, those assertions have to be pretty crappy.

Sorry, but no medium of media allows for agency. I don’t care if you have some of the best writing in a game (whether that means Planescape: Torment, Baldur’s Gate II, Disco Elysium, whatever), or if you want to go with the old choose-your-own-adventure books, but there is ultimately little to no player agency. If you want player agency in a game, you have one choice, and it isn’t a video game: TTRPGs. Even ChatGPT can’t match what a good GM can do, because they can allow you to break the mechanics of the game or add mechanics on the fly to fit what a player wants to do. A GM can literally respond to something a game creator never imagined within seconds. I want to see Planescape or Disco Elysium react to a player doing something they thought of that the game creator didn’t imagine. Buuuulllllshit. Player agency my ass.

Also, as the OP obviously fails to mention any games that he thinks is worthy of being an ‘awesome story’, I’m calling this as a troll/bait post.

It’s funny, I really liked the outfit for Berseria. Something about a not well-groomed-in-the-middle-of-fights look stood out from the crowd.

That’s what an article emphasized that I skimmed through. The sub had automatic pinging, and systems to automatically raise it to the surface if an untoward event happened. For communication and pinging to be lost, as well as the lack of floating submersible… It’s likely whatever happened buggered the whole setup. The banging also was supposedly heard in 30 minute intervals, but no one is saying how many of those intervals happened. The banging could be from anything. The deeps get strange, and the water distorts much of what we know. Multiple people with knowledge from other searches, like the 2014 MH flight, said banging was often heard during their searches but it was always from other sources.

An article on APNews said there were multiple backups onboard… Which sort of engenders the thought of why they needed multiple backups. I’d be sure to have A backup, sure, but multiple?

The mobile app is definitely what turned me back onto OSRS. I wish I had more time, because the gameplay is like comfort food to me.

The amusing part is that we can’t even guess (accurately) what the actual tell will be. Somehow I don’t think the time gap between blinks is going to be it. I’m betting it’s going to be slang-based. There’s a reason kids use slang readily, and it’s often to separate the worlds of adult regulators and the ‘more free’ children/teenagers. Imagine AI trying to keep up with the slang, but just like adults, it will be unable to use it in the same way with all the pseudo-information packed into it.