squareallworthy asked: I heard you shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.
NPCs are like that. Some of them you can recruit as a companion, some are romanceable, some are punchable.
It was in the course of my playing a game with my friend who had never been in a fight before. In the game, you can punch other players to punch them for points. It was kind of a joke: I didn’t think I would actually hit anyone, and there was a punchable NPC in the game to see if anyone would punch him. I dunno. I am not a violent person. I haven’t been in a fight in my life.
So when I saw the punchable NPC and immediately thought “no, I will not punch this NPC,” and then watched as he was pummeled to death, I thought “hey, that was not a good idea.” And then I thought “no, I will not punch anyone in this game for the rest of my life.”
(I could have punched him for the experience points, but that would have been the wrong decision. He was supposed to be a punchable NPC. I felt bad for him. I’m not a sadist, okay?)
The most basic distinction I see is between “punting” and “chucking a punch” (a much more mild/injurient alternative).Punting seems to be a much broader category, including punching, which makes sense because throwing a punch involves killing someone.
While I don’t want to get into the whole “violence is bad!” thing, the most clearcut way in which punching and punching-related behavior seems to be different is that punching involves killing someone, while punting involves not killing anyone.
The danger of throwing punches and hitting anyone is that you’re not inherently violent. If you throw a punch and it connects, that’s a “punch.” If anyone else in the vicinity is hit, that’s an “unpunchable punch.”
Unpunchable punches are “unpunchable,” which by definition makes them unable to count toward punching, and is distinct from the standard type of punch. This makes it a hard rule about different categories of behavior; by the definition, punching is different from throwing a punch, but no other category is. Throwing a punch is also obviously against the rule, but yet another category has to be added for it, so the rule becomes a lot more awkward. What is the rule now?
(We need to go even further back to avoid the same objection, and this case is even more arbitrary: we don’t have a concept of “physical attacks” and “nonphysical attacks”, which would be necessary to make this distinction, but we have a concept of throwing a punch and not punching. Of course, if I’m understanding you correctly, this is not how the objection would sound to me – it would sound like a different kind of weirdness [citation needed]?)
As a rule, I don’t like to talk about what should be done to avoid violence, except in rare cases, such as the dust speck scenario above. I’m open to arguments that suggest that punching is some sort of good idea or good to avoid violence, but it’s hard to know which arguments, or to make the idea sound like a decision you were to make. (Also, don’t get me started on the exegesis of the dust speck scenario. I imagine that will be one of those questions that needs to be answered in schools in the near future
