SPOILERS but

SPOILERS but...

How do we know everything that happened was real in the first place?

The scans, this new post - apocalyptic world, the ARK.

Was the game a visual representation of the main char slow death due to his brain damage?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=pVB_DI4ajKA
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead#Explanation
youtube.com/watch?v=J4tbbcWqDyY
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

pls respond

pls respond

I love this game and it makes me question reality in all kinds of ways. I think it does that very well for a lot of people.

And it was the right level of scary where I could play it without getting a heart attack.

Spoiler alert:
It's not real.
It's a videogame.

There's nothing to imply that all of the main game is just a hallucination of Torono Simon's head. so no?

I think you're just reaching at nothing user.

>visual representation
This feels like a stealth way of saying walking simulator.

there's no need to be stealthy, everyone already knows its a walking simulator

I mean technically, you need some stealth to get past the shoe horned in monsters.

...

that was the point user

Reminder that the WAU did nothing wrong. It preserved humanity in the only way it knew how, everyone who was under the WAU influence was living in a perfect virtual reality with no "coin toss"

the only time it lashed out was when it knew it was going to be destroyed.

Fuck you

Simon had no previous knowledge of underwater habitats and how they work, none of these people were familiar to him. If this was a fever dream it couldn't have things in it that Simon didn't know could exist.

Im just going to shill Blindsight because I recently read it and Soma cited it as a major inspiration. Great book.

You can read it for free on the authors website.

Just because it doesn't know any better doesn't mean it should be left to its own devices.
It's not unreasonable to not put your faith into literal artificial cancer.

The wau never lashes out at you dude. It probably bites your hand off because you're poisoning it, like an immune response.

Thanks user.

I was talking about how wau blew everyone's heads up in omicron because a girl was gonna go poison it

There are many cool ideas worth talking about in the game. Proven by the fact how frequently threads still pop up about the title, despite it being a walking simulator. I loved the story.

Just a random thing for now. The section where you boot up that staff member's conscience to get a password or some info out of him initially seemed pretty weak to me.

But much later I realized that it is that very area where you're shown that Simon mind was being preserved as a legacy scan and had been used as the basis for much of the related technology.

What I'm getting at is, they (Munchy etc.) probably did they fucking exact thing to Simon hundreds if not thousands of times. Booting up a Simon copy, essentially creating a new being, just like you are one during the entire duration of the game, and the kill it off once the test is over.

It's a realy edge case too with that staff member. Is he alive? He doesn't have a body yet. You talk to him for less than 30 seconds. You experience doesn't factor in as much in differentiating him from the freshly booted copy, but still... aren't you killing him every time you shut the simulation down?

>aren't you killing him every time you shut the simulation down?
That's a thought I needed before going to bed user. Thanks.

If you want to read a really fun sci-fi book with a vastly similar feel but still related themes of how such technology could change society I recommend 'Altered Carbon'. It's GOAT tier for sure.

Catherine describes when she gets booted out of a system as jumping around, like losing consciousness in one place and waking up in the next. I imagine it's a lot like waking up from anesthesia except without needing your body to wake up with the rest of you.
So if you were to not restart the simulation and keep it continuous, I imagine the guy would experience the same sort of thing, a gap in the experience itself.
You could argue that it's the resets that kill him, but I feel like that's closer to having amnesia more than anything.
You only kill him when you stop.

Some books in his room hint to underwater habitats or underwater monsters if I am not incorrect...

The same way we know whether any other single fictional story is meant to represent stuff that actually happened and not the hallucinations of a fictional character.

It's usually a mix of the story telling you so and how smart it makes you feel to insinuate that it's all a dream or whatever.

I don't know user, I wouldn't like to be preserved by this thing.

I ended up taking a new view on life or consciousness. Or perhaps not a new view but a discovered old view.

"Take responsibility for any lives you create, but cherish life still"

It's the reason I couldn't 'kill' any Simon copies, they have a real enough consciousness of their own, souls be damned, they feel real things. But it's irresponsible to bring them to existence in such a bleak non-future.

>You realize that for most of the game Simon is suffering because original Simon said "Do whatever the fuck you want with my brain scan"

>I recommend 'Altered Carbon'.

really hope they dont fuck up the tv series for it

Alright, but then how do you feel about leaving that one Simon copy behind? He doesn't have a suit to follow Simon 3 down into the depths, and is basically left up there with the monster banging on the other side of the door. In that scenario, wouldn't you think unconscious euthanasia would be better then being left to wake up all alone?

They thing is, that such a technology is so crazy. So outrages. It goes against nature in every way and the more you think about the more terrifying it gets I think if you truly grasp what's going on.

'Alive' as a term just doesn't adequately describe what's going on there anymore. It's a deeply unsettling thing if we were to approximate life that well with a mind scan. A conscience without a body. It's almost religous. Like a soul.

I do agree that the resetting without saving the memory, wiping the prior conversation is what feel like death in the traditional sense. You if you were to let him live longer and then reset him. You specifically would start to be able to tell the difference between the stored mind and the one that was allowed to 'live' for a while. Like you said, sort of like amnesia.

The thing is, it is based on the same person. But rebooting is not the same being. Just like two simultaneously walking, talking copies of Simon are not the same being. They're separate.

But are they alive? I don't know. I thought the whole Ark thing was just bleak. They're not even human anymore in there. They're literally the first and last beings to live in that state.

If I was to subscribe to the "it's all a dream" theory, I'd point out to the fact that Simon sees himself as a person before realizing that he isn't, so the plausibility of the scenario could be a similar deception for the sake of the player who needs to stay unaware.

maybe he could escape to the surface. it's not impossible

it's similar sleeping without dreaming or simply dying.
if there is an afterlife, you will feel the same.
or just simply passing out.

You have a point, it sounds merciful enough. But I'd like to emphasize that I'd not kill that Simon for the sake of continuity of consciousness itself.

Now that's a safe enough looking surface to explore.

That being said though, would there be any kind of interesting story to pull out of a meteorite destroyed surface? Doesn't seem like the type of story to have much of anything for simon to theoretically discover.

They're more alive than anything else on Earth, and potentially in space.
Survival is not the same as living.
>It goes against nature in every way and the more you think about the more terrifying it gets I think if you truly grasp what's going on.
Funny thing about nature, it's pretty fucking terrifying when it wants to be and sometimes it hits really, really hard in ways philosophy could only dream of.
Like the natural meteor that made SOMA the hell that it is.
If there is an afterlife, how does one escape to it when you're trapped inside a machine?
It's like with cloning, what happens to the soul the more you entrap it in the material?
The surface is pretty much just fire, forever, in SOMA.

I also posted this once before but gonna do it again anways.

On the ark, man. It's a computer right? They're all scans in there. Data. Minds. They're in a simulation.

So they 'live' right? They booted up. Simulation is running. You see it in the end. They walk they talk they laugh they're happy.

So they talk to each other. Dialogues. 'Hi, I'm Simon. I'm from Toronto. You wouldn't believe what happened to me or how I got here. But Catherine save me...'

They create new memories by doing that. The mind scans remember that. They have memories and make new one's too. Just like new people. A bunch of them in there too.

But... it's a computer. Memory. Is finite. It's not unlimited. You see it yourself when you pick the simulation elements for the ark to load. There is a specific, real number of memory allocated to that functionality. You run out of space there too if you're not careful.

So how long, until they fill up the hard-drives on the ark? Until there is no more storage space. They won't die right? They don't age. Which is majorly fucked up in it's own right.

But what happens then? Does the simulation break? Do they start suffering from some form of electronic amnesia? Man... I don't know.

Continuity of consciousness itself isn't such a good idea if the continuity involves being all alone in a situation that would most certainly drive someone insane.

I mean, in the end I guess Simon 2 could just choose to commit suicide himself right?

>"coin toss"
Annoys me its phrased like this, copying yourself isn't a coin toss, you wont wake up somewhere else, a perfect copy of you will, you will always be the same one

If there's one blunder about Soma's writing, it's this. It's not even close to the right analogy to use.

Is it at least plausible to assume Cathrine used this analogy to help mislead Simon into going along with the Ark plan?

that paradox is like the whole point of the game. it shows this many times. proven by simon in the end. on the ark he STILL didn't get it. still didn't grasp what had happened. he was happy. only the prior copies left behind get hit in the face with the fact that catherine was deceiving THEM. just the same way the narrative of the game was trying to deceive the player.

Very plausible.
Simon could've called it quits at the start and fucked everyone over, the deception made him much more predictable.
It also saved ARK Simon worrying about the Simon left back on Earth, which is a pretty dick move to do but again, it wasn't the pressing issue at the time.
The truth is probably gonna come out eventually.

I think what irks me about it is that at the very end after the ark launches, the Simon and Catherine left behind start to argue.
Even after the Ark's already launched, Catherine still uses the whole coin flip analogy, yelling at Simon that he didn't get it even though it shouldn't matter if he learns or not at this point, right? It's still not the right analogy in the first place.

What? Yes, of course. She was lying. It's not bad writing. It was a lie.

Didn't you get this? Add 1+1 man. You saw how Simon reacted in the end? He would never have done it if he really understood what was going on in advance. Because it is sort of futile. He wasn't as invested in this ark idea as much as Catherine. She wanted to see it trough and manipulated him into doing it for her.

I think I the beginning she was trying to be honest with him but then gave up. I don't remember. But he had a lot to cope with. Not sure if she was being dishonest right from the get go.

Just try to view this whole thing from her perspective though. Who she is as a character. Who is this Simon dude to her? A nobody. A lucky accident. A dude who has been dead for 100 years. Who does understand ANYTHING of what's going on. He is perfect for her. The perfect opportunity to fulfill her plan.

Catherine is also a terrible people person, and has trouble convincing people of anything.
The last time she tried she got her head caved in.

Catherine manipulated Simon, how is this not obvious?

Cat said that to calm Simon down, retard. She never really meant it. She never believed in this ''coin toss'', but she still needed Simon to believe in the whole ark project and the possible chance of continuity.

I mean, I already get that she was manipulating her to go for the Ark. What I'm trying to say is that there are scenes that are written in ways that contradict that, like And really, it's just a minor detail at the end of the day, still a great story.

>But... it's a computer. Memory. Is finite

Which is solved in our days by using the advantages provided by dynamic memory allocation which can be done while the program runs.

I think people forget that Simon is a old as fuck Legacy Scan and even then, it's when he had brain damage.

Is it really a stretch to believe that he didn't ever understand that the data was just being copied and not transferred?

Catherine is a cold as fuck ice-queen; she played Simon like a fiddle but in the end it worked out so for everyone except Simon 3.0 and 2.0, if you didn't pull the plug on him.

>the first time Catherine sees you hand fuck WAU

I-it feels good leave me alone I NEED IT

I hate the whole ''but Simon is a legacy scan meme'', I prefer he was fully functional but just wasn't ready to believe what was really going on.

He wanted continuity, just like many of the other last humans on Pathos 2, this is not denial carried over by the fact that hes a legacy scan, it's just his instinct of self preservation.

Hm, I think she still wanted to calm him down and not have to deal with his anger. But he was going to figure it out eventually.

I wonder how long it will take for the Simon on the ark to realize what really took place. For him the whole lie still holds up. I think it could be a while.

Besides. Structure Gel and WAU magic made the ARK possible so who knows.

I would have liked to see/meet Dr. Munchies' Legacy Scan as Simon 2.0/3.0.

I wonder how Simon would have reacted to seeing him again.

learn to spoilertag you fucking redditor

It would have been really cool if at the end when the camera zoomed out to show to destroyed earth it actually showed that there never was a metorite and that the entirety of soma was just a science experiment.

To me, there is not a moment in the game that really indicates he is not 100% functional because he is a legacy scan or because of his brain trauma.

I think it works well based purely on decpetion and the FACT being a copy feels like seamless continuaion. One stream of conscience. The game shows this multiple times and it's what makes Catherine's lie work. Simon basically thinks he was being teleported.

Of course being in a different body is kind of a dead giveaway. They get around that in storytelling by saying the mind blends it out at first. Which is also shown multiple times.

Still if no one explained to you what happened to you can't tell the difference between being a copied into a new body or being 'transfered'. You as a copy can't tell the difference, you feel the same. As you're a pretty much perfect copy of your original self.

But really there is no such thing as transfering data anyway right? It's is always copying, the question is whether you delete the original data afterwards or not. Even on your PC today.

'Transfering' is reserved a physical thing. If I move a real object from A to B. That's it. You can't to that do that to data. You can move a hard drive. That's it.

You can't rip a presons mind from the body and tranfer it. How would that work?

> when you're trapped inside a machine?
no, i am talking about consciousness and waking up

i think the devs went out of their way personally to avoid the "IT WAS ALL A DREAM DURR" ending in any way they could

WAU is under the impression that to save humanity it also needs to be functioning so it will prevent people from shutting it down.

You also alluded to the much more troubling question.
>if there is an afterlife, you will feel the same.
Though mostly I said what I said because I can't really take your word on what dying is like, because I assume you haven't died.

>He hasn't died already
What are you, a living faggot?

Hey, at least my consciousness isn't trapped inside Sup Forums.

Only if lead to Simon and co having to deal with the fact that their whole the entirety of their existence is to be part of a science experiment.

Otherwise, eh.

How do you know your own life isn't just you reliving it in a flashback before your death?

youtube.com/watch?v=pVB_DI4ajKA

Goodnight Sup Forums, thanks for the occasional good discussion thread. I leave you with this song about copies to listen too.

You can make up a any amount of garbage arguing under that pretense. Like God.

The coin toss was bullshit cath made up to give simon hope.

If she told him that he'd get copied and the copy would live on the ark would he still do it?

The coin toss is a perfect analogy for a delusioned person because the one that gets copied would think it "won" the coin toss.

that's a prototype. it gets better as time passes, you were probably its masterpiece at that point in time and you also weren't very monstrous.

That's philosophy for ya, man.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

God's alive, he just needed CPR.

That's pretty edgy m8y

God is alive as long as there are people who believe in him. That's what belief is.

He might be dead in your world but for all you know that could mean you've chopped down the last tree on your horizon so you can see the stars.

>surface is pretty much fire
not if you dont kill the wau

Punk isn't dead, it's just in a coma.

Sure you can look at it this way, though it doesn't make sense is some cases.

Yeah, then the entire surface will be robot cancer.
Terrific.
It wouldn't have the power or resources to pull that off.

>>How do we know everything that happened was real in the first place?

What would it matter if it wasn't?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead#Explanation

Nobody is saying that it was a dream, just that there was more to it.

The terminals, the monsters that look like brain tumors, the brain like setting, the somewhat omnipresent godlike ''resurrected'' person that guides you to destroy the WAU, its just odd.

*tips*

Kill yourself.

I dont know senpai, I dont think this will be getting any better.

youtube.com/watch?v=J4tbbcWqDyY

Don't mind me, just shilling.

Well it was technically transforming everything around it thanks to the structure gel wasn't it? Also plenty of organic material.

Will drop some dislikes here and there, thanks for linking your shit review senpai.

He doesn't mean he improves the model directly like a game prototype, he means WAU improved the process which the monster is a prototype product of so that the player never went awry like that.

Deep bro so deep

I know exactly what he means user.

Nice fucking meme *tipping* my trilby to you fellow gent user

>be nietsche in 1882
>be refering developments of the prior century
>'that's still to edgy for me be, brah'
k

>developments

Hmmm...

SOMA is a step forwards for game writing because now writers have taken advantage of their protagonist being uninformed and manipulated.

First time I played it, my very, very first guess at the start of the game was that you are the scanned brain in a computer and they are just running endless tests on you to figure out what kind of experience would help you fix yourself.
You are just a scan, so they can do anything to you, so they tried some nice soothing simulations and that didn't work and some guy went, fuck it, why not give him nightmare fuel, maybe that will have some effect.
And in the end you are just a program, running through a simulation, trying to desperately ignore that you have no place in the real world and that none of this has any meaning. At any time you might be deleted.

That's the bait and switch which the developers obviously went for, they wanted that to be everyone's early guess, which it was since it's such a predictable plot. But later events don't at all support the "The game is a scenario run on the scanned brain" theroy so much that it just simply isn't the case, the bait and switch exists in order to service the overall plot and message about what really makes someone human.