Survival through hunting?


junaid_hussain

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In one of the videos, they ask if you would eat a deer carcass that you come across...so there will be eating of animals. And you'll have to fend off animals, which would likely include the possibility of killing them...so the only thing left is, can we cook?

Though the first thing that came to mind when reading your post was: Why do animals have to be NPCs? I don't realistically believe that they would do this, but what if people were given control over animals as a multiplayer component?

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hmmm Cannibalism could be an interesting twist to the game, but I can't see it happening.

If there was an MP component, perhaps in a sequel, i'd like to see something where you can either cooperate with fellow players by working together and sharing resources, or plunder their loot in a bid to be the remaining survivor, or perhaps hunt and cook them as in the previous post.

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Yeah I wasn't serious about the long pig. What I really want in an open world game like this would be the chance, like you said, to have another player share resources and explore the world with you, but I really only want the ability to add one additional player. LAN co-op would be great and although I realize it is out of the scope of this game perhaps the devs would look into it for any subsequent titles in the series.

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[...] but I really only want the ability to add one additional player. LAN co-op would be great and although I realize it is out of the scope of this game perhaps the devs would look into it for any subsequent titles in the series.

That would be awesome, especially since several of us are giving our additional copies to people we're close with. I'd enjoy getting to survive with my boyfriend, @Harsh. I game extensively with him already and would trust him with my 6 o'clock. This would certainly give us another option for bonding time. ^^

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I like the pet idea. Could provide:

@ArrayKnight This would be great. I like the idea of having that lonely wolf stalking you for 1-2 weeks, and over that time, you start to share you food with him, getting him to the point of basic training, for him to over time get closer and closer to you, to sleeping at night with you, then as a protecter and companion.

Though there is the downside of having to find additional resources to keep your pet alive.

This is a downside, but if you read my comment above, he could help find food, kill small animals and so on. Your pet becomes your helper, and survival partner.

The real question, can we hunt and cook human NPCs?

@LoganG This is interesting, and it what my idea of the game becoming. Having to make those IRL decisions, and making a true survivor game. If wolves and bears can eat you, why can't you eat them, and if they eat humans, why can't you too. This is my vision of the game, being true to life, and if i was in that situation in life, i would like to see that in TLD.

To be honest, my expectations might be a little high here, but truthfully, if this is going to be a survivor game, why couldn't that possibility arise ??

Why couldn't it be that you have survived for nearly 12mths and in that time gone a little stir crazy due to the complete utter loneliness, no human contact in all that time, but you do find a frozen human carcass that could ultimately give you (and your pet) food for another week or 2 ??

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@TattooedMac I think that if this was a game made as realistic as possible it would have to include cannibalism as a form of survival, at least as an option for survival, but seeing as how it is a game/simulator, and seeing as how it should try to avoid major offenses such as letting you chow down on some random person, or even worse some person you develop an emotional connection to, I doubt it will be in the game. Though, it would make for some pretty serious moral dilemma if the only thing that would stop you from dying was a chunk of your dead friends butt to munch on.

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I don't see a moral dilemma in eating another person, if they're already dead and the only other option is that you die. In a situation like that, you do what you must, if you have strong enough will to survive (just ask the guys who crashed on the Andes). I would draw the line on killing the other person for the pure intent of eating them, but someone who's already dead won't mind.

The reason we find cannibalism so horrible is that we have lived so long in environments and circumstances where it has not been necessary for survival. In my opinion, a more serious issue than any moral consideration is whether eating the other person poses a health risk. I remember reading about some jungle tribe that had unusually high occurrence of some disease you can only get by eating another human (they had the tradition of eating their dead).

I think I should add a little something that may explain my stance on this issue. I have a lot of food intolerances, which makes it really hard to ensure a balanced diet, so I have very little patience on people who get picky about food on ethical grounds. I cannot afford that kind of luxury. And yes, it is luxury to limit your diet just because you find certain foods unethical.

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Well, all´s about survival, ain´t it? Morality is something our human mind set up, a wolf won´t never reflect about morals - it reflects about that strange feeling in the belly. This is a dilemma I often discuss with some animal rights activists as I am a hunter in RL. The feeling for survival is an instinct, nothing more. We can be glad that we can afford morality in our civilized world, morals offer security. But as was mentioned before, morals get less important when all´s about survival.

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@LoganG As the posters below, i don't see it as a moral dilemma, and if that then comes down to someones belief or religion about eating another, then they choose not to. If this is in the game, and someone does say NO i will never then it will be a test for them, to live or die.

This is the sort of thing that has drawn me to this game, and i want it to be a RTL as possible. I know i for one would chow down on my mates butt if he passed away.

This is the sort of debate I'm looking forward to in the forums, because there will be a lot of morals being pushed to the limit in this game . . . . . . @Raph hint, hint . . . .;)

@TarjaS What you are thinking about is the Madness one gets if they eat Human flesh for a considerable amount of time. It has been found in those tribesman you are talking about, that they started to get tumour/legions on the brain in certain spots that send them mad. Thats all i know about them, but its not the blood but something in Human flesh that does it.

In small amounts its OK to eat, but in continuous eating, over time it can send you mad. . .

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@TattooedMac: It's not eating human flesh itself, it's the diseases contained within. If you a person it may make you sick, it may not. What you are talking about is kuru a disease carried by flesh (particularly the brain) and sometimes surgical instruments. Other examples of diseases transferred by cannibalism include BSE (cows) and scrapie (sheep). However, the more human flesh one eats, the more likely it is for diseases to develop, but there is no necessity of one to develop at all.

Sources:

http://askville.amazon.com/medical-side ... al_aspects

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I started thinking about the health risks in general and, basically, the more you think about it, the scarier it gets. For example, there's Trichinella spiralis in bears and rats. Rabies is present in many parts of the world. I think it has been eradicated from UK, and here in Finland, it is rare, but wild animals coming from Russia or illegally imported dogs may carry and spread it.

The latest possible risk we'll be facing soon is something that wild animals can carry and spread to berries in the woods, so you need to heat the berries before use (that has traditionally not been necessary here). Don't remember what it's called, but I remember the article said there's no cure.

Then there's the question of "how spoiled is too spoiled?" The use of spices started with making almost inedible meat taste good enough to eat. Modern people would probably get very sick eating something medieval people considered still edible.

And getting back to cannibalism, there are all sorts of diseases you can get from blood. I wonder, would cooked meat from somebody with HIV or hepatitis be safe? The guys who ate their friends after crashing in the Andes ate most of the meat raw, and I'd say that was a definite contagion risk (although they were a rugby team, so probably they were healthy).

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  • 1 year later...

TL;DR: I think cannibalism fits the game, but many others find it unacceptable, so, in the end, it would hurt the game.

I've suggested anthropophagy (sounds a lot more PC than "cannibalism", doesn't it? ;)) along with other things in a thread I started.

Some people responded with doubts about age-related commercial rating of the game, others found that it wasn't a feature worth introducing due to the risk of disgusting possible players, others found it unbearably loathsome to even discuss the matter. I think we were responsible enough to avoid a flame war, but that was a close call.

My opinon is that a videogame is just a videogame, so nothing you do is really unethical (otherwise, I'd find all videogames concerning war unethical) -- or ethical (otherwise, I should consider myself a hero). And I think that, if a videogame (or movie, or cartoon/anime, or comic book, or novel) has the power of desensitizing you to some kind of horrible thing in real life, then the problem doesn't lie in the game, it lies in you (if this is the case, get help!).

More, I think that an "open sandbox" game should allow you to make as many choices as it is technically possible. That gives you role-playing freedom. It's up to you what kind of character you want to play. I'll cite the case of a well-known game about an underwater city and genetic engineering, where you could choose to kill young girls -- children! to gain a substance that functioned much like XPs (experience points in a role-playing game) useful to gain superpowers. If I hadn't the choice to cannibalize the little girls, my choice of not doing it (that was rewarded with an exceptionally heart-warming ending to the game) would have been meaningless. There's no freedom if you can't choose between right and wrong (see Stanley's Parable for a meta-exploration of this issue in videogames). Someone said (I couldn't find out who, despite a fair amount of googling): "a virtue that didn't undergo temptation isn't a virtue, it's just a hypotesis". If we want a game where moral decisions matters, abominations should be allowed.

Other videogames allow cannibalism, I instantly think of NetHack (doing it came with severe penalties) and Gods Will Be Watching, which is all about surviving (I''m talking about the free browser game, not the commercial adventure, which I didn't play), but I'm sure there are more around (I'm pretty sure that Slaves, a tradable good in Elite II: Frontier, instantly turned to "Meat" as you stepped in space if you hadn't a cargo hold life support system installed in your ship).

And a lot of videogames let you do things that are far worse than eating the flesh of an already dead fellow human (Floor 13 pops up to mind: you could assassinate, abduct and torture people just to keep the public trust in the present governing party high!).

However, from my very limited experience in these forums, it seems like the issue is felt by many players/backers interested in this particular game as too controversial, up to the point where implementing anthropophagy could hurt the game way more than it could benefit it.

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I don't know if you are talking about me, but if you do you may still be misunderstanding what I was saying. Cannibalism doesn't offend me personally and I would play the game that way and eat human corpses. What I have a problem with is that you introduce an issue here out of curiosity and seem to not care too much about the implications for the game. It is the same reason that there are no dead children in most games, and that there are no female corpses. Too many people would somehow feel uncomfortable with it. One could call it hypocrisy but it's the way it is.

Another thing many games you cite are first person shooters and there is already so much mindless violence in them that no one would care anyway. Many people would not play such game with nor without cannibalism. TLD is very different to these games, I could imagine to play it with my nephew (10 years) to teach him some things about real life, and about PC games (he's playing only Nintendo), but I would feel like an ass if we did really sick stuff like eating humans.

You are also bringing forward the matter as if it was something that would enrich the game in oh so many ways. But what would it be? You click on a human corpse, a screen goes up where you harvest meat. Human meat is added to your inventory. What's so great about this? It would perhaps be possible if it wasn't that we are talking about a game that measures everything in spreadsheets and kilograms. If it was sensible you'd se the protagonist in complete desperation, finally bend down to a corpse then the screen goes blank and demoralizing music plays. But "Human meat (15) added to inventory". I mean how stupid is that.

I also mentioned that the moment it is decided that there is cannibalism in the game, it is almost a certainty some perverse sicko will make a video and upload it to youtube, in which he boasts that he only plays TLD because he wants to eat humans, and how this is his desire his whole life. It is almost certain some people will eat humans to make fun about it etc. It's perhaps that which would damage the game most, that it invites all kind of immature behaviors. In real life a very few people had to eat human meat to survive, but I am sure no one made fun of it, or did it out of perversion.

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I was talking about the many forum users who pointed out the various reasons why cannibalism would be offensive or annoying to many potential TLD players or detrimental to the game (and you must admit that, among them, you were one of the most energetic debaters), since in this thread cannibalism was being discussed, I was offering the conclusion I came to in that other thread: many think it's a good idea (me included), but others pointed out that it would spoil the game for many potential players, so maybe it isn't a discussion that is worth pursuing further.

I proposed anthropophagy simply because, in a game session, I was very low on food and my condition was under 10%, I searched a frozen body hoping for something useful, and I found nothing, so I thought that, since this is a survival game that is advertised on its site to be about "morally challenging scenarios that push players to answer the question: <", being able to resort to cannibalism in desperate situation would just fit in the game.

Bioshock (the one about the underwater city) isn't a just shooter with mindless violence in it, not at all. It's very dark and violent, but it has brilliant storytelling worth of a 20th century dystopian novel, a thick atmosphere that creeps right into your bone marrow, and you are free to make some moral choices, which is becoming a staple feature of many games, like the Deus Ex series, games that can't certainly be called "shooters with mindless violence in them".

I really don't think that putting something in a game could cause real life consequences such as the one you prospect. If someone gets excited at simulated cannibalism to the point of really doing it, then his or her mind is already rotten, the problem pre-existing whatever may be in a game. Otherwise, we should wipe out all existing works of Marquis de Sade, because they contain things that will be unmatched in videogames violence for a long, long time. (The strongest critical treatment of violence in mass-media I ever encountered can be found in Austrian director Michael Haneke's "Funny Games", but I must warn everyone who didn't watch it that it's unimaginably disturbing - more, I really don't agree with what the director was trying to achieve with it).

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Then we will reply: "rape has nothing to do with survival, and beside that, that would make the game virtually unmarketable".

Maybe I'm not good at explaining myself (I'm AWFULLY verbose and my English is quite far from perfect) but what I was trying in this thread was to convince the other users who were discussing the technicalities of cannibalism that maybe this game shouldn't contain cannibalism, even if I think it would fit.

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Then we will reply: "rape has nothing to do with survival,

Of the individual or of the species? I am not sure you have thought this to the end.

I thought you were interested in discussing reality. Like reality-reality. What do you think will happen when you take away the law and veneer of civilization, like in our little post apocalyptic scenario. You would see a return to the law of the jungle, and an inflation of every imaginable form of capital crime: murder, kidnapping, slavery, rape, incest, pedophilia, sadism, cannibalism, and so on. You would have groups of men going around and doing whatever they want and taking whatever they see. This would go on until a new form of society is found, and that could only be feudalism, in which the fittest are elected protectors and barbarism stops, for the sake of subservience and opression.

I guarantee you you don't want that level of realism in the game. Of course large groups of people would live in harmony but horror would always be around every corner. You already said convincingly that you don't want cannibalism in the game, but you said it would happen in reality. I agree with that, I am just saying, you don't want this reality to be depicted in its entirety, unless you accept that this will be the most depressing game in the world.

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