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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hurtfultater" data-source="post: 2118419" data-attributes="member: 29120">I was referring to empathy and altruism in a pretty narrow and basic sense.  I probably didn't make that clear.  I can't comment on Out of America, having not read it, but I wouldn't hold up areas with child soldiers are janjaweed as functional societies.Those forms of entertainment take a great deal of empathy, as you have to associate the images with people and then project emotional states onto the emotional appeal.  Sure, we have to dial down your empathy to avoid being upset, but there's still quite a lot there.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.Cats do have altruistic instincts.  Haven't you ever seen a cat bring a dead mouse or snake as a present?  Grooming behaviors are also altruistic.  Cats (especially lions) can react to different emotional states in members of their social groups, and they vocalize and posture to signal these emotional states.  There's empathy right their.  House cats aren't extremely social creatures, anyway.  I was trying to stay away from social insects as they're so much simpler in behavior that how they function wouldn't be pertinent unless you had goblins with extremely powerful social instincts and very little agency.  I'm not sure you could have a society entirely composed of autistic people, and certainly not without high functioning autistics and people with Asperger's.  Perhaps a more apt comparison would be a society of sociopaths, and I'm betting we can agree that that one wouldn't work.The goal is to have a goblin population that can care for goblin babies (presumably as helpless as other hominid babies), can form recognizable societies, can make tools, can do things that require cooperation and have no immediate reward, and can regularly perform complex tasks.  No soup kitchens are needed.</blockquote>

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