chapter three: direct derivation

it's a system, that's all. all it is is a car made out of paper and golf pencils that you have to figure out how to drive within three hours. if you don't, you're not really fucked, you'll just have to do better on the next one, when they move up to big rigs, then onward to bullet trains and yachts and kitty hawks and eventually interstellar transit wormholes. inevitable, really, the expansion of technology.

know what I've never understood? intelligence scores in role playing games. if you make an extremely intelligent character, and he really was smart, it wasn't just a statistic that affected a bunch of other statistics, etc., wouldn't he question the logic of the role playing game? ask himself, "what the fuck am I doing here? why are these people trying to kill me?" (as often this is the case.) would he take a clue from bad dialogue and obvious seams in the geography? there are a few random characters in grand theft auto 4 who only exist to walk around with grocery bags in their hands. there are much more obvious holes in that particular representation of reality, such as the minimal effort it takes to make a car explode, and the fact that, while it's implausible for a car to explode if you aim for the gas tank, it happens if you shoot a grand theft auto car anywhere- even the door- or the fact that if you fall thousands of feet, get caught in helicopter blades while jumping out from thousands of feet in the air, or get caught in helicopter blades while the helicopter simultaneously explodes thousands of feet in the air while you are jumping out, if you have a hundred bucks for medical fees, you'll survive and - wouldn't an intelligent person realize these things and ask a few obvious questions?

why call it intelligence, then? it's clearly a misuse of the word. the intelligence is on the other side of the television, every time. role playing games exist because sometime in the recent past our species reckoned, god knows how or why, that it needed to live vicariously through the more interesting lives of video game characters. one could argue that intelligence scores in role playing games are embellishments of the "role-playing" part: you can make your guy either smart or dumb, a decision based upon social anxieties which will be researched in anything but the hard drives of xboxes.

you could argue that it's a justification of anything bad the character will do in the game. "it's grand theft auto, sometimes you run over pedestrians." but that's an argument against yourself. then you assume that the game exists because you want it to, or need it to, as an expression of what you can't do. "since I can't be in grand theft auto, this other person has to be, and he runs over pedestrians sometimes, what do you know." they are mutually exclusive, yes.