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Comment by ordu | Hacker News Reader

The strange thing I cannot play war games any more. Not after Russia invaded Ukraine. War now seems Really Evil and playing with it doesn't seem appropriate. I wonder does anyone else feel like that?

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Such a strange thing to say. Are you saying war did not exist before Russia-Ukraine war?

Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria...US instigated wars aren't evil enough for you?

No, they were far away and not my problem. It is silly from a rational standpoint, it is probably unjust from a Universal Justice standpoint, but I'm not talking about rationality or justice right now, I'm talking about emotions.

Understandable.

Sorry, let's hope for a quick and just peace then.

Nah it’s still ‘just’ a game for me. It would have to be exceptionally immersive to trigger that response - the Walking Dead games by TellTale for instance, caught me off guard. I remember there was one big moral choice that I kind of just say and stared at the screen for what seemed like half an hour before I could finally make a decision for my character.

But a birds’ eye view of a somewhat sci fi RTS? So far removed from real life and practical considerations that it doesn’t even blip the radar for me.

Why Russia / Ukraine? There is nothing particularly notable about this conflict compared to others. War has always been war.

Yeah, I think you are right. But I didn't feel it before it hit me into the face. Me personally. Wars seemed too far away to feel real.

I am OK with war games as long as there's no humans or human-likes in the game. ZK's sentient robots are fine for me, contrary to something like 0 A.D. (which even has female workers - maybe I'm old school, but that's even more a no-go for me).

In Total Annihilation, the Arm side had actual humans inside the robots. Has that lore changed in Zero-K?

I feel like such a pedantic nerd asking this, but the debate over people vs. sentient robots was the whole reason for the war!

IIRC the robots have won against humanity, but then the robots started to fight among themselves for resources. The player is one of those robots who has some sort of amnesia. Well, this matters as much as the details of the trees in a racing game, in my view.

Well, now I kind of feel obliged to share this reaction to (a) Zero-K story by... "Hitler" :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IP1mp3cgRo

(I'm not exactly sure what the current official lore is - at some point it has been added to the campaign though, but also of note : both TA faction have been compressed into one and then split into 11+1+1 factories for gameplay reasons.)

same.

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