(I’m not spoiler-fuzzing things here since I assume by this point in the thread, it’s only folks who’ve played the thing who are reading this far).
I think I had a very similar reaction to this game as you did, with some of the same questions about what multiplayer added and fuzziness about the mechanics of the throne (I similarly didn’t see how the AI stuff came into it in any meaningful way; it felt like legalistic sophistry that wouldn’t hold up to Western scrutiny*) – but nonetheless found it well-written and compelling! I wrote a characteristically long-ass review, because of course I did, with my general take, but in terms of some of the more specific questions/thoughts based on your post and Milo’s:
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Wow, I didn’t realize there was this much of a scope for different endings. I was playing Caroline and I got the “so you’ve been accused of war crimes” choice to flee or stay and face the music; I think my partner mostly chose oranges and reds, which correspond to rougher treatment for prisoners? It definitely felt like this stuff was out of my control, but that felt appropriate. I think I would have liked the story less if the stakes had been lower – similarly, the sequence with Daniel trying to join the protest and then getting arrested was a real high point for me, so I’m glad I got to see it.
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Was Caroline an internal opponent who needed to be framed? I was confused on this, I confess, since she seemed to be a reasonably quiet and loyal citizen as of game start, but she’s clearly being set up from the jump, regardless of how you play things with Matteo. Again, it just felt like an insane, insanely convoluted Kafkaesque thing to have happen to her, which seems right in line with the theme even if it’s not especially logical.
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On the thesis, my sense is that it’s about trying to create the experience of complicity with evil, in a couple different ways of which the Throne/light/number stuff might not be the most effective – details in the review.
Oh right, the asterisk. So here’s one game where my law degree is sort of relevant – so from an Anglo-American legal perspective, there are two possible scenarios for analyzing this, based on how credible the handwavey AI stuff is meant to be: 1) the Throne is just an algorithm, which basically translates what the military people decide into a war crime depending on whether Caroline does what she’s told or picks a random number with no context for what the numbers mean; or 2) it is an AI, and is taking the instructions it receives and then committing a war crime.
If we’re in scenario 1, this is just a convoluted application of the regular criminal law. Murder requires mens rea, which is fancy Latin basically meaning you intend to kill someone or are recklessly indifferent to the likelihood that your actions will kill. Obviously Caroline has no mens rea; obviously a soldier who sends a color corresponding to a war crime has it to some degree. At best, the indeterminacy of the algorithm might help you argue down from a first-degree murder charge to a second- or third-degree one, depending on how those offenses are defined in a particular jurisdiction (i.e. going from intentional killing to reckless disregard), but since it’s clear the algorithm was intentionally created in order to fuzz up accountability in this way, it seems hard to believe any lawyers would take that bait.
If we’re in scenario 2, where the AI is basically an independent mind being ordered to commit a crime, we leave aside the potentially-interesting application of the Nuremberg defense to a nonhuman entity because it’s not on trial, Caroline is. The question here is, are the Throne’s actions sufficiently linked to the direction Caroline provided to it that it’s fair to assign liability for its crimes to her? You can do this under the law of conspiracy, but that requires a meeting of the minds as to the aim of the conspiracy, which clearly hasn’t happened here. You could argue there’s an agency relationship, but again, Caroline’s lack of reasonable expectation that when she told someone/thing “5”, it would commit a war crime, means that the Throne isn’t acting on her behalf. So once again, there’s not really a theory that would plausibly lead to Caroline being liable.
All of this is very off-the-cuff analysis, of course, and could be there’d be more of an angle under the civil-law systems used in most of Europe. But still, I thought it was interesting to think about!
@MiloM I’d definitely be curious to read a post-mortem with some thoughts on your process and intentions, even if you understandably don’t want to provide definitive statements on how players should interpret everything in the game – for all that I’ve got critiques, yours is probably going to be the game I rank the highest in the Comp since it gave me a lot to chew on!