Yes and if there is some sort of cross-linking we may be forced to let a bad one out to save a favourite one. Or even nastier, forced to kill a good one to save the favourite.
(I’m guessing morally everyone wants to save little Toby so he’s probably the favourite…)
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Perhaps everyone who has not read this Steinbeck novella or watched the Hitchcock version, should do so while we wait for this event to happen.
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Just remember, this is just a game.
It does pay to also remember that sometimes in life, massively horrible decisions must be made: from deciding who to save first in an emergency, to the gamble of life threatening surgery for a life threatening condition.
Sometimes it’s impossible to know the right decision.
Theoretical puzzles like these give you insight into how you may react if presented with a circumstance of similar gravity in real life. It’s only natural for you to feel disturbed when presented with a situation where lives are in the balance. How you deal with this stress is what defines you as a person.
We all must work together to save the dreamers. There is every possibility there will be losses. If we don’t do it though, it may end with the loss of everyone. We don’t know how long they can survive in their current state.
A decision has been made to extract them. Our task is to facilitate this. Doing nothing is no longer an acceptable choice.
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I’m starting to think the extraction event might have a time limit. There’s a possibility we can get them all out in time, if we’re fast enough. That’s the reason they told us to prioritize. We get the important ones out first, then work on the others. Just a thought.
I mean this is the nicest possible way, but it’s naive to say “I won’t choose one life over another”. If we spend all our time trying to figure out a way to save all of them, we might lose all of them. I hate to be the buzz-killing realist here, but people are probably going to die. Nothing we can do about it. We just have to save as many as we can.
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Totally agree.
When it happens, snap decisions will need to be made & then it will be known. So in the end it may be very important to choose one over the other due to mathematical probability of survival.
This is not the same as choosing one over another because of personality, age or a character trait.
Every life that can be saved, must be saved. That is our goal.
We may need to get the weakest ones out first in order to save them as the system crashes.
We may be forced to juggle variations caused by our actions meaning a group effort to monitor their health and a change in plans halfway through.
We may just need to solve clues to unlock the final extraction sequence.
It may rely on group coordination under a strict time.
We simply do not know what is going to happen.
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I can see why you’re upset but this is different…it’s not just what you do but also the reason why you do it…if we are pressed for time and can only save so many people it makes sense to save the young first…but that doesn’t mean that we would want all old disabled people cruelly killed for no good good reason. You can’t really draw a comparrison between the circumstances in the ARG and what the Nazis did. Most of the others are young adults or younger, and nobody else is worse than middle age. How long they have left to live is a major issue…would you rather have families mourn losing young children after you saved an 86 year old for the sake of making a point that you’re not like the Nazi? Fear and emotional trauma cause people to do very bad things. We don’t calculate how many rations these people take, or how many kids they might go on to have, or how much they might contribute to society or not…it’s about two major factors a) not everyone will be able to make it and b) how much life would you want there to be lost? You can be a good and compassionate human being and value a child’s life over an old person’s in a crisis without you suddenly becoming a soul-less bastard that wants all old and disabled people killed for no good reason.
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I chose to have them pull the respirator out of my mother’s throat to allow her to die naturally in March! So don’t talk to me about making hard decisions! This ARG has now become garbage in my eyes because its using this stupid ethical thought experiment to evoke an emotional response and get controversy brewing, well I’m not playing this game, I’m out.
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I am so sorry to hear that man.
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I blasted them on their survey on this subject. This is supposed to be a game. Real life end-of-life decisions are gut-wrenching, and this is a kick in the teeth to anyone who’s had to make them. Said if this is what they consider fun, I’ll just drop out now and consider all my participation on this ARG a giant waste of my time.
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Think of it like this…you are with a child and an old person in a wheelchair crossing the street and you see a speeding car coming…you can grab the child but the old person in the wheelchair you just can’t. Is it evil or wrong to save the child because we “shouldn’t choose”? This is a real life situation that can happen…in fact rescue workers across the word do face these sorts of choices at accident scenes on a nearly daily basis…who’s most injured and who is most likely to make it. Would you face the parents of a young child and say you had the opportunity to save their child but didn’t because it is wrong to choose? It’s an absolutely horrific and traumatizing thing to think about but it is an important topic…because if we are ever faced with a situation like this in real life, time is absolutely critical…a lot of times it’s a matter of seconds that make the difference between life and death. We are each just one person capable of being in just one place and doing one thing at any given point in time.
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here is my 2 cents, after learning the extraction will be next week, i will be hugely upset if we don’t see element 6 this weekend, after they give us 1 every week for the last 5, it was sort of expected element 6 would be tomorrow, but with no current events in play, i’m not sure
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Me too, last weeks live drop had nothing to do with Simon or Alex, loop16 even told us to look out for Alex, the guy in the shop said he wasn’t him but they ended up with xbox cases anyway, which had nothing to do with Simon’s event or the ARG
Another thing, for the last year we have been opening glyphs via clues, once we got to the 10th glyph, then they just dropped the last 5 glyphs without any explanation or part of the story
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Topics like these aren’t wrong…they’re not “evil by nature” and they probably should be addressed more than they are in life. I have lived for decades of my life in very fragile and volatile socio-economical environments where tomorrow was never a given. We were constantly reminded of situations like these on a nearly daily basis where not only did we have to be prepared to choose but to be prepared to make the right choice because if you spend a lot of time trying to help someone with grave injuries to vital areas someone else who sustained a limb injury might bleed out when they were perfectly save-able…and then we’d have to live knowing we could have saved a life but didn’t because we chose wrong.
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Hey, I’m really sorry Mac. If you look back, you’ll see at the time I acknowledged then, the difficulty of the decision and I genuinely do understand, even if I choose not to share my own experiences here.
I absolutely accept that this part of the ARG has hit hard for you and I agree it’s a bit harsh.
For me I intend to try and approach this part as if it were an emergency.
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Odd that it has come to this. It’s like the collective community is given some God-like powers to deign who lives and doesn’t.
And therein lies the problem. Ethics are subjective. There is no way to be pragmatic here because we wish to save only those who we connect or relate to. Thus there is no way to reach the universally “correct” consensus.
As @Desdanova says, it’s akin to drawing straws. Wouldn’t want such a grim ending for an otherwise intriguing ARG.
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It’s just a game, a bit of fun. I realise that we all get very invested and absorbed in it but ultimately that is what it is. A lot of games we play have life and death elements to them, this is no different.
I have really enjoyed all the different things that have been introduced throughout the various phases and seasons to stimulate philosophical discussion, learn new skills, and discover new knowledge. I know more about cryptography, ciphers, audio analysis, phobias, satellite networks, Latin (
), medical conditions, hamsters, plushies, etc than I ever did before.
The latest puzzles trying to understand and liberate the dreamers has been really successful in my opinion. Just look at how divisive it has become - that is a sure sign that A&S got this right. I for one said yes to age and health, these are typical triage considerations. But in my comments, I suggested that every effort should made to save them all.
Let’s all continue to enjoy the remainder of this phase and I hope the ARG continues beyond Next.
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@jedidia please don’t kill your children while everyone is yelling for who should be saved and sacrificed 
enjoy your holiday 
I follow the same line of thinking of my fellow Etarcians, I pledge to do what I can to save all the dreamers. I know that this is probably impossible as these hard decisions have been foreshadowed by Emily weeks ago.
I’ve had plenty of rest, as you advised so long ago @emily and if we can’t get them all out, I hope the ones who remain trapped, you give them a good home with you in Edisonica.
I’ve decided if we can only get some out, let it be the young and those with loved ones waiting for them. People like Alexander, if it comes to it, we can give them the opportunity to live eternally and healthy as a digital ghost. And if they reject infinity and ask for death, well we cant deny them that.
@MacForADay I’m sorry this has hit so close to home for you, if I could I would change this final exercise for you. I’ve had some past life traumas show up in interactive fiction on me before quite unexpectedly, at the time I wasn’t ready to face it and I just had to keep my distance from it, it took time but eventually I started to find those scenarios more therepeutic than harmful, but every souls a different story so just do what you have to do for you, it’s cliche to say but only because it’s true, it gets better. Thanks again for all you do for this community despite how difficult life has been for you.
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This is your opinion, let me having mine. First of all, at the moment we don’t know how it will really work to save them (even if we can speculate). “It is likely” is not a certainty, there is still a chance to save them all.
About the “ethical decision”, i don’t forget phase 1 when they asked us:
There is a red button. If you press it, it will either give you a million dollars or it will kill one person somewhere in the world. Do you press it?
One last thing I don’t forget is that we’re close to the end of this ARG and something didn’t be used: our pass designation.
“Kilmerval -
Haha The divide [between designations] starts again
Anashel -
No, the number are not to divide, but groupe different profile that would not normally group. In part.”
We’re still waiting for these groups… 8 designations to save only 8 dreamers ?
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Like any good story or any good work of art, it should make us stop and think. Re-evaluate ourselves and our humanity. So I think that makes this ARG a success because it certainly has done that.
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