NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2118011" data-attributes="member: 27012">Read Keith Richburg's Out of America, particularly the sections about Somalia and other parts of Africa where there are lots of children running around with AK-47s.  Think Lord of the Flies with guns.  You can find the same thing in other parts of the world and in other periods of history, so I'm not just picking on Africa or Africans here.  Yes, it's possible to crush the empathy and altruism out of people and really mess them up if you get to them as children and give them no hope for a better future.  And given the amount of supression of empathy required to enjoy a great deal of entertainment, be it watching armies of goons getting mowed down by the hero of a movie or playing first-person shooters or games like Grand Theft Auto, I really don't find this all that difficult to imagine.The goblins in my game lack real empathy, even between mothers and children.  Why do goblins have children?  Because the male goblins don't give the females much of a choice.  How do goblin children survive?  Oh, their mothers do take care of them.  Not because they love them but becuase it gives them a little group of extra hands that they can control because they are bigger and, well, no other goblin is going to care for them.  But if it comes down to mother or child, the goblin mothers will toss their children into a meat grinder to save their own necks.  Ugly?  Absolutely.  But I want my goblins to be nasty, brutish, and short lived.  I don't want them to be misunderstood products of a bad upbringing who would be just like any other person if only they were raised right.  My goblins are Evil by nature.Look outside of primates.  Cats for social structures but have no real empathy or real altruism.  Read an article on training cats.  And, yes, they do have a social order that operates on non-empathetic terms.  Heck, look outside of mammals at bees and ants.  Very complex social structures.  No empathy.  No conscious altruism.Yes.  But it's not necessary.  Like I said, it's important to having a "good" society but I don't think it's necessary for an intelligent creature or society.  And if you don't believe that intelligent creatures can exist without empathy, you should take a look at the latest research on autism.  And, yes, people who are autistic can be fully functional members of society.Is the goal a successful goblin population that can build a rocket to put a goblin on the moon or to have menacing hoards of intelligent monsters that the players can kill without worrying too much about the moral implications?  No, goblins that lack empathy and altruism are never going to run soup kitchens for the poor or nursing homes for old goblins, but is that really a problem?</blockquote>

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