‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 619

Jane may not have a high opinion of the Game.

Random trivia: One of the reasons why "the Game" became THE game after the Ending was because of the so-called Dead Ones. Nostalgia, after all, can be a powerful motivator.

Southern Tour is completed! Thanks to all who came! It was a blast meeting you all!

51 Comments

This dystopian future just got a lot creepier.

Kill the Game; save the world! Gasp! Her real name must be Patricia!

Unless the game is eating up too much of the world’s remaining virtual resources then I doubt this would change much. All those people who’d be leaving the entertainment of the game wouldn’t really have enough of value to contribute to preventing everyone from dying. It is clear that the technical skills and the ability to teach them are almost completely gone, and that’s before we even get into the virus problem.

The game is literally deciding who lives and who dies. Danni getting into the game was more worth then her Parents working themself to death.
Somebody was almost executed for “darng” to place a portal into the game.
Sounds like ending this escape so people start focussing on fixing the real world might not be bad idea overall.

Granted, I am not quite sure her idea would really turn out beneficial in the end. Humans need dreams, a escape, hope. I think the game is more beneficial in total then it is harmfull.

I doubt that technical skills are almost completely gone, just that those remaining (other than Kat) are unequal to the task of keeping D in check.

Also, keep in mind that L.i.F.e. is only entertainment as far as Citizens are concerned, they’re expected to work the farms, which are probably enclosed aqua/hydroponic biocycling systems rather than open-air fields and orchards of lush vegetation. In other words, like working in a sewer where you had to be very careful not to hurt anything. Outsiders can make money as entertainers in L.i.F.e., but Citizens can only make money as entertainers by being in the Game, to access L.i.F.e. they have to make money with IRL jobs. I suspect Jane doesn’t really know what “working the fields” is actually like.

I’d guess that a lot of Outsiders don’t really get the real criteria for being imported…a family which already had a daughter like Mae, for instance, would probably be passed over even if they were accessible. Then again, I’m still interested in who sent that medi-bot. Kleya has admitted nothing, of course.

It’s Bread and Circuses. Pacification through entertainment.

The American Revolution started in pubs and social clubs, with people talking endlessly about their dissatisfaction. Imagine how much more active people would be today if they were out socializing as their primary means of entertainment instead of watching TV and playing video games.

Now multiply that by the effect of a virtual world that is far better than the real world you live in. And a game that is even better than that.

Hmmm…Jane seems to be…projecting a bit here.

I doubt that most or even much of the popularity of the Game is from people trying to catch a glimpse of characters left behind by since deceased players. Kleya’s purported ignorance of the Game is treated as fairly normal despite the fact that she’s clearly highly computer literate. That would imply that most people in L.i.F.e. were not initially very familiar with the Game, which after all required a high-end specialized interface.

She’s also likely overestimating what it costs to keep the Game running. The situation with the Mani tree-enslavement Special is probably abnormal, that’s a custom Special that was designed to be used by an active player. I can see it causing rendering time and overusing resources alloted for Specials (or some update of the Special system broke Jane’s dolls, and it has nothing to do with the Mani-trees). But normal AI’s shouldn’t need rendering time or even to run when no active players are around.

The crucial resource for playing the Game would be Kido availability. But how much more useful is a Kido than an ordinary interface if you aren’t playing the Game? Well, Danni certainly seems to benefit even in L.i.F.e. from having a Kido, I bet Mae would like one too.

Besides, TENka has reasons for keeping the Game running even if it does eat resources. For one thing, we have Dr. Grace’s plan to bring D under control. Then there is whatever Saisuke is doing…whether that’s just social control or has some deeper meaning. I think Saisuke is probably the President, or an agent using an account that can be controlled/claimed by the President. If Jane did succeed in wiping out all the AI controlled accounts, TENka would probably just spend time having expert players start and level up new villains to take their places, then leave them under AI control (and Jake would flirt in-game with his own creations…so creepy). So Jane’s strategy would only increase the resource drain, at least on availability of programmers.

Agreed, my impression of L.I.F.E.’s and “the game”‘s popularity is that it’s the new Facebook and TV, not that it has avatars of dead people in it. Like Facebook and TV, I’m sure people are abusing it. But unless you can prove a significantly abnormally large number of people are abusing it for reasons unrelated to end-of-the-world depression, then shutting it down would be a very bad idea.

I think Jane is talking about servers, not kidos. But I was under the impression that city computers were failing due to software issues, not hardware. Shutting down these computers would be completely pointless, plus it would make people more depressed. So Jane’s logic is wrong twice.

Hmm. It doesn’t make sense for the President to run that avatar. Remember, the President freaked out the last time they thought they found her. I also think that Saisuke is searching for Kat. But I have someone else in mind for his identity. (don’t want to spoil it for everyone if I’m right)

If you’ll recall, your avatar stays in the Game even when you log out. That means that even people who are now dead still have an avatar in there.

Yeah – if we remember that most, if not all, of the trees on the island are former PCs, then each and every one of them has an AI assigned to them in the unlikely event that, while the user is logged out, someone defeats Iemis and reverts his tree curse – essentially petrification, but not elimination of the character from a *technical* standpoint.

Just, you know, in case they want more than bland dialogue in the end for a bunch of characters who have been I Have No Mouth And I must Scream’d.

I’ve kinda always had a personal pet theory that the company’s president is Kat’s brother.

There isn’t really much to support this, but just the way that everything was set up…

We’re told that Kat’s mother is dead, and flashbacks from Kat refer to Kat’s father being “taken” /before/ Kat’s mother is said to have died. Still, the person on the TV screen (conveniently obscured) seemed to be very eager to blame Kat specifically, and the company president seems to have this /thing/ about controlling the virus. He also seems to hate/not care about Jake, according to what Jake has to say on the matter.

It wouldn’t surprise me if this was Kat’s older brother, who grew up hearing his parents (especially his father) constantly praising his /far/ more intelligent and talented sister… and her friend. Growing resentful the whole while, and then jumping at the chance to tear everything down and vilify Kat and everything connected to her. Maybe even arrange for it to happen. 😐

I do find Saisuke to be a very suspicious character. He seems far too “perfect.” Manages to conveniently avoid anything that would endanger his stats and reputation, and seems to hold favor with the corrupt systems of power in the Cities. As far as wild theories go, I’ve wondered at times if he’s actually Kat’s father. Otherwise, perhaps just someone with a grudge and a lot of power at their disposal. I can only hope our group stays far, far away from him—I’m not under the impression that the person behind him is even remotely heroic. Rather the opposite. >_>

Brother? Where did you get the idea that Kat had a brother? And I’m fairly certain it’s been confirmed that the person on TV was her father.

As for Saisuke, its fairly simple to avoid troublesome quests and such if you know they exist. It’s not like nobody’s ever played this before, or it’s new content.

I think that it’s because there are inconsistencies with it being her father, since the narrative suggests he was taken away by force rather than abandoning her family.

Of course, the only reason it would be her brother is because everyone has to be related to Kat somehow…which isn’t the case. Most our characters appear to have no prior connection to her at all, let alone being a relative.

There is a certain narrative economy aspect, in that the “whodunnit” aspect of the story demands that the main bad guy be identifiable early on, that’s why I suspect Saisuke, who otherwise plays no real role in the story. It would certainly work better for me than it suddenly turning out that Kat secretly had a brother all alone, who was known to all the characters but never discussed other than as the president.

Well, Saisuke doesn’t real seem to be mentioned except as a famous player who rivals Bandit. And he’s supposed be highly attractive as well. But since he hasn’t been mentioned in forever, my guess was that he was just the current celebrity fad.

Aneeka says right below the comic on this page: “Random trivia: One of the reasons why “the Game” became THE game after the Ending was because of the so-called Dead Ones. Nostalgia, after all, can be a powerful motivator.” So yeah, a big chunk of the popularity of the Game is from “people trying to catch a glimpse of characters left behind by since deceased players.”

And Jane’s plan is finally revealed

Congrats to those who guessed correctly that it was a full Game takedown request, and not just the AI ones.

And yeah – it turns out, the Game is using a lot more resources than expected.

I wonder though, if perhaps the argument that the reasons Whispers aren’t monitored has to do with the Dead Ones basically having a similar feature in the same resources – that could eat up a lot of space, especially if AIs are just outputting their debug statements into the Whispers.

Jane does not realise,
that this is not a choice but a trade
To take on the goal of another
and leave a new friend imprisoned.

Okay, so Danny might not die, but would at least be imprisoned in a broken body that cannot dance.

About that – Danni can dance in L.i.f.e, without The Game.

Now, if Jane asks for L.i.f.e to ALSO be destroyed… then yeah, poor Danni will indeed have nowhere to escape to.

Danni can’t dance in L.i.F.e., because Citizens need to pay money to access L.i.F.e., especially using a Kido, and without being in the Game Danni can’t make enough money to afford Kido access. Her family apparently can barely even afford basic rations/life-support for her anymore.

They were on the verge of being ‘deported’, they’re so poor.

She’s got a point.

On the other hand, for a lot of people apparently The Game is the only thing keeping them going /at all/…

Interesting reveal. But I can also see Brandon’s point. Life should be enjoyable, too.

I thought she just wanted to AIs dead, not the entire game.

Oooh, good point about the Dead Ones.
Anyway… yeah, I’m not feeling it re: Jane’s plan >_>

Woah.. that’s .. wow. Ok things are about to get real interesting.

As Jane said “Living ones watch, avoiding duties to hopefully spot a beloved Dead One.”
I believe that Jane is saying that people watch the game instead of getting around to fixing the world.

Ehhh, seems like Jane has mistaken a symptom for the disease. Depressed, mourning people aren’t going to suddenly turn around and rebuild the world because you take away their “fix”. They’ll just find a new one, or just as likely fall apart completely. The only time that kind of solution works is if you can provide a lot of emotional support after you take it away, and that… is clearly not on the table.

Oh, I don’t know.

I think she’s mistaking her own disease for being a lot more prevalent than it really is, and you could be right that her proposed fix wouldn’t work for everyone. But acceptance is a crucial stage in grieving, and certainly if the Game were solely or even mostly about people getting a chance to see people they’ve lost, it might not be a bad thing to scrap it…for most of them. After all, they’d then have chances to turn to each other rather than the Game.

I just think that Jane’s wrong about how many people are into the Game because they can see the avatar of a lost loved one. And I think she’s wrong about the resource drain, she isn’t a programmer herself, as she now admits, and her husband was apparently not a supremely expert one.

The most valuable resources are human hands and human minds. No robots, remember?

Translations:
“He’s busy, busy being a Dead One in the Game”
He’s too busy playing the Game to help me.

“Dead Ones are remnants…You played before, once ago, with another name, another character. That lives on in the game busy busy with its pre-ending life.”
The Game is pre-ending; people escape into it to recapture what is gone, to
feel the sense of accomplishment that came from winning. Kat plays to
remember those times as well. But people playing the Game are trying
to live a life that no longer exists, a life that is dead.

“Here is the game, where are the lives? Hiding inside, where nobody survives. Watch them come creeping out for the fix.”
People playing or watching the game are inside, on a computer, only
reluctantly coming outside to deal with survival.

“Dead Ones roam, eating resources to produce a fake life.”
Players of the Game consume resources, but produce nothing for survival.
Worse, players are invited into cities, and have theirs needs taken care, for
the prestige of their city.

“Living ones watch, avoiding duties to hopefully spot a beloved Dead One.”
Game watchers stay logged on as much as possible, hoping to watch their
favorites in action.

Jane wants people to get off their butts and get a job, but people just want to stay online, for Fear Of Missing Out, and because, you know, life is hard. But, a computer game isn’t going to make life easier.

Note that Jane isn’t talking about getting rid of L.i.F.e. So Danni would still be able to dance. Without the Game, her ability to do so would actually make her more valuable, since people need entertainment.

BINGO. And Jane finally nails it on the head. The game is like television on steroids. Imagine how much our society would accomplish if not for television and computer entertainment. “Television is the opiate of the masses”. Which is why governments love television and computer games.

Jane realizes what THE GAME is doing to society. Smartest crayon in the box.

Humans have always craved entertainment. We are not machines who can just work and accomplish things. Without TV, people would make the same point you made, but about writers, musicians, poets, painters and sculptors. Also comic-writers. 😉 And without internet you wouldn’t have been able to post your comment. 🙂

It’s not the TV’s fault that it’s being abused by the government. You can’t blame a knife if it’s not used for cutting bread, but for cutting people. So what if it’s an opiate? If it’s taken away, people will find a different one or become like a machine or commit suicide.

I agree with Alex. shutting down the game will not magically fix the problems society has. Also how many people are outsiders with no way to get to a city? such as the family Kat hangs out with when she’s in Life but not the game. What other choice do they have? So even if society as a whole is getting to carried away with the game, forcing everyone to go cold turkey is going to cause much more harm then any good that would come out of them not being so distracted.

Ok, let’s assume for a minute that doing so would benefit the world in the long run. Would even be a true heroic move to make. It would not, however, be seen a heroic move to make. Kat would be made out to be a villain. As well as the second coming of the Deconstruct Me.

The surviving people would lose so much. Social interaction, communication, and income. Let alone people like Danni who need it to feel like their old selves due to immobility.

Sure, maybe the game is using up a lot of resources, the dead ones eating so much. In this case the better option is to ‘reset’ everything, and make it look like it was D reacting to someone or something. However, this would just confirm to Jane, and possibly others, that Kat is indeed who they suspect her to be.

Though it if it does happen, then TENka may actually turn that into a benefit for them. With less AIs roaming around they could use it to upgrade the graphics as they had been saying they would do. It would just be a large PR boost for them in the end. Saying they took out another hacker and upgraded the systems.

Labor.
Civilization is not in a good spot. It’s infrastructure is falling apart, and it seems to me that the infrastructure should be self-repairing – they had cars to drive for you, robots to perform various labors, etc. Now cities have limited resources…

And significant segments of the population tie themselves into their computers, for how much of their day? Would kicking them out of the system be the kick to get them cleaning up their cities?

Honestly, do we have any reason to believe more available labor can actually be turned into more resources? Cities have a population limit. They don’t let outsiders in. This suggests that whatever farming they’re doing, they can’t just scale it up; limited space/energy inside of solar lamped bunkers, or something? With the magnetic poles even going out of whack and multiple supervolcanoes, it seems likely you can’t just… find some dirt and plant. If they had people teaching how to use the old tech to make more such places, sure, that might pan out eventually, but people with technical skills are so scarce that most cities can’t even get one.

Just… it sounds nice, but I really don’t get the impression that the problem is people not trying hard enough to live. More that there’s just… only so many people the resources can be scaled to support.

Yeah, that’s my impression too.

Brandon said that regular Citizens just couldn’t stay sane if they didn’t have L.i.F.e. and the Game to distract them from the suckitude of their lives, Jane shot him down but I doubt she actually knows what it’s like. And the really crucial thing is programmers skilled enough to repair/hack into advanced systems. That’s not a job you do by grinding mercilessly at a keyboard (or Kido) all the time, it takes a certain amount of creativity and that needs downtime.

Then there is the whole anti-hacker/anyone that actually worked with advanced technology thing…Sandra and Paddy give some impression of how dangerous it can be for Citizens to even have the right skills.

I suspect that there are a lot more technically skilled survivors than TENka or the Cities know about, but most of them the same attitude towards importation as Kat, if with less absolute reasons. The ones that try to get into L.i.F.e. or the Game probably are oddballs with suspicious motives or part of the Outsider anti-TENka factions.

I think it’s more than just a distraction to keep people sane in spite of hard work: the lengths people are willing to go to watch the game is in fact a major motivator for people to work hard in the first place…

In a world where efficiency gains let people sustain themselves working only a fraction of their time, some other motivation is needed to keep them doing further work. In our “advanced” civilisations today, that’s consumerism. In a world where physical consumerism is severely limited by the lack of resources, virtual objects of desire such as The Game are the only possible motivation.

So contrary to what Jane (and apparently many commenters here…) think, the game not only doesn’t distract people from doing useful things — but indeed it *motivates* citizens to crank out the extra food they ship to outsiders.

Of course it also keeps TENka in power; and with power comes abuse… But all in all, I’m pretty sure it’s better for most people than not having such an organisation at all.

This is a pretty good point. But I doubt it applies.

We’ve seen TENka’s Reality. They live pretty high on the hog from the perspective of everyone else…but they’re barely holding on. The reasons why people will be more productive to gain access to “luxury goods” are mainly important for understanding how to motivate people who aren’t going to die or anything if they don’t work as hard as they can.

That doesn’t describe TENka. I doubt it describes anyone except fairly capable hacker Outsiders, ranging from Superbug to Kat. Hackers do occassionally show up in L.i.F.e. (though probably mostly only committing petty crime rather than causing shutdowns and stuff).

Well, it’s true that even TENka has trouble keeping the city running — but at the same time they *do* produce extra food they can ship to outsiders… So I think my economic theory is still valid 🙂

(Though of course I have no idea whether that’s what the author actually had in mind…)

And now Kat learns that being a good guy comes with hard choices 😛

Hey Aneeka? A bit off topic, but do you have all the old vote incentives posted somewhere we can go back and see them? I’ve been re-reading the archives and those links are pretty much all dead as a doornail.

I’m with Jane on this. Kill the Game, but keep L.i.F.e up and let people communicate and entertain one another there. It takes a lot of technical resources to keep something as large and complex as the Game running, and if TENka is spending programming power doing things like making Specials more complicated, they’re not just in maintenance mode. And we have in-story evidence that the shortage of programmers is costing lives (Brandon’s city). L.i.F.e. is clearly simpler to operate and uses fewer resources, but provides for sound psychological needs. There could even be open-access sports events (or similar) in L.i.F.e that wouldn’t require insane (and sometimes deadly) levels of obsession to access. More to the point, focus on training more programmers and technicians in L.i.F.e.

At minimum, save the state of the game and come back to it later if the resource situation improves.

However, I suspect the main reason the Game is still up is that D zaps anyone who tries to turn it off. Of course, this means Kleya COULD probably kill the Game, if she were talked into doing so.

And she would then get blamed for causing the Second Ending. :rolleyes:

…is it just me or can you relate what Jane’s saying to religion? (and can the Game be considered something similar to religion at this point?)

Very interesting.
I am relating what Jane is saying to things that happen in non-fictional life, when stadiums get built for huge sports events and sportsball league thingies in areas that could really use more resources to care for the population instead.

actually I’ve been relating the Game more to religion because of the last panel – they give some hope of an afterlife, while also being a crutch in desperate times. (I’m not counting LIFE because it has more actual uses, such as communication/connections)

On the flipside they require funds/donations/etc that could be used to help more directly instead of maintaining the place of worship.

Building stadiums/sports facilities is NOT a direct swap for “useful” infrastructure. They basically function as an upgrade to morale with bonus health points! Just like how good sports programs in schools improve grades, sports programs in cities improve wealth in unobvious ways.

I seriously doubt that removing the Game will fix ANY issues whatsoever. Kat is naive enough to be persuaded tho.

Character question. Since we were first introduced to Jane, i had been assuming that her dress was partly gauze, hence the curved lines over skin. But now we’ve seen her close up and i’m wondering if maybe there is no gauze, but we are seeing her actual skin with dozens of hairline thin scars. It would go with her personality, certainly.

What does everyone else think?

It’s an avatar, all of it exists as a texture that a smart wrapping program has turned into a texture for an appropriate model. There is no meaningful distinction between “skin” and “bandage”.

That said, I’ve always read it as intended to convey a mummy-like impression, dry gauze over dry flesh.

Hmmm. Is Jane perhaps a Dead One herself, an old character of Kat’s from before?

Some of her backstory seems a little off for that, but is it misdirection? Would Kat have been able to create an AI / avatar complex enough to successfully hide the fact that it was a Dead One?

Jane does seem rather… off. That’s easily explainable if she has suffered tremendously in real life, but programming in a bit of apparent insanity into an AI / Avatar in order to help disguise the AI’s imperfections is also plausible.

Still, it really doesn’t seem very likely, but there are enough similarities between Kat and Jane that I have to wonder.

No, Jane exists outside the Game, the AI’s that control the characters of deceased players don’t. L.i.F.e. has AI’s, most of which have been removed as it’s become more populated, but these don’t play the Game (even if, like Jake’s creepy twins, they have the right programming to do so). Also, Kat would know immediately if Jane were an NPC rather than a legit outsider. So would Sandra and TENka. Of course, if would probably be technically possible for Kat to rig up a dummy transmission node and fake a Kido that was actually run by her own AI, but she’d be able to turn that off at her end without ever tipping off TENka that it was anything other than another Outsider failing to survive.

Kat had no motive to allow Jane to take her top spot, nor to allow Jane to shove Danni down to sixth, if Jane were just an AI being run on remote hardware spoofing a Kido from a communication node that Kat owned. If she did, then she would have to be the one that were deeply psychotic.

Also, Jane is only pretending to be insane. She can turn it on and off like a switch, we’ve seen her do it.

Given the hope and motivation The Game provides, killing it might not necessarily be beneficial to the surviving population.

However, it could be interesting to ask D to do some digging and find out how many Game avatars have been roaming around for more than X period of time without their owner logging in, and what proportion of system resources that uses…

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 619