sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Deus Ex.
I never even owned a legit copy untill it came out on Steam like a decade later.
Kid at middle school just burned it onto a CD-R, gave me a post it note with the install key.
He kept saying this game wasn’t like anything else, it was a ‘roleplaying shooter’.
I just had to provide him the blank CD-R to burn, and I think a brownie, or cookie, at lunch.
So uh yeah, that’s how I originally played ‘the most important videogame of all time’.
Beyond the gameplay and game mechanics, uh, wer are currently now more or less living in a world that more and more resemble’s its canon storyline everyday.
Back in 2001, it was a wild sci-fi/cyberpunk concept for… the entire internet to be routed through a centralized system for surveillance and archiving.
Now that building just exists in Utah and is run by the NSA.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
It was a wild concept for a prototype AI to tell you:
“The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.”
“God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary.”
“The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.”
“You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands.”
So uh, yeah, that’s… basically currently happening, we sure are at least really trying to build AI, and more and more people are falling in love with AI bfs/gfs, tiktok/instagram/social media are the precursor data-mining algorithms that most people these days are addicted to, to feel observed and be judged, more and more people relinquish their cognitive abilities to some kind of ‘AI’ to just do all their thinking, their critical evaluating for them, their judgement formation.
Anyway, 9/10 game, pretty good but kinda janky in spots, lol.
CancerMancer@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
Deus Ex and the Metal Gear Solid series both have some shockingly prescient plot points. In 2025 playing these is a trip.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
Yes, particularly MGS 2 was absurdly prescient with the entire concept of… the vast majority of the internet being unordered and uncontextualized noise and chaos, and… there needing to be a way to structure it, but also, there is essentially no way to do that that is not also going to manipulative/exploitative.
We also now do pretty much live in PMC world, it just isn’t as… stylish? I’m gonna use that word.
Our world is agruably at least as absurd as the MGS plotline, but in different ways.