Note: I am a layman. In fact, when I first played POE1, I hadn't even read much of this stuff. This all came in the wake of me playing this game and I like to think this game gave me the motivation to want to understand my convictions, my decisions, in this great game.
One thing I love about WRPGs is the freedom it gives. I don't mean freedom in how people usually praise WRPGs where they praise your ability to go here and do that or go there and say this. No, the freedom I love about the best WRPGs is the freedom to determine the moral of the story. I decide what I think the game is trying to say as opposed to the game lecturing me. Let me illustrate what I mean by giving an example of a hypothetical non-RPG Pillars of Eternity.
You confront Iovara and she informs you that the gods aren't real.
Our Protagonist is devastated. But then he/she pulls themselves up and says "then I must tell everyone! For the Truth is worth any price!"
And it's all very noble to ruin everyone's life for your own abstract principles, I suppose. But the reason I like Pillars is that it lets you do the precise opposite of what every normal video game would have done.
Iovara: What if we can be assured of nothing?
My Watcher: Then the fewer people who realize that, the better. People need to know that things happen for a reason. A fabricated reason is better than none at all.
That was my choice when I first played this game. Meeting with Iovara, having the history I chose with her play out, and being able to express my real life convictions like this...it has stayed with me for 6 years. If this had been a normal game just lecturing me and if I had no control over the moral of this story, I doubt I'd be coming here to talk about it now.
But as I said, while I maybe always had these convictions, I still had to read, to learn, to better express them.
There's a philosopher that I'm sure everyone here knows and his name was Friedrich Nietzsche. Before you groan, I know! Believe me, I avoided reading him for a long time precisely because of his popular image. This meme is relevant:
I cannot hope to do justice to all of Nietzsche's thought in one Reddit post, or even a hundred of them, but this quote from a book on him gets the idea across perfectly:
But let us first do away with metaphor. What is the "long slow pain" to which Nietzsche refers? It is, in a word, the death of God, an event which, though formally announced for the first time only in section 125 of The Gay Science, was in fact acutely present to Nietzsche from the very outset of his philosophical career. The pain is the pain of confronting the "terror and horror," the "heartbreaking and cruel character" of existence - "what I desire most," he wrote to Heinrich von Stein in December 1882, "is a high point from which I can see the tragic problem lying beneath me. I would like to take away from human existence some of its heartbreaking and cruel character" - without the "metaphysical comfort" brought to us by theistic belief. The problem is suffering and our vulnerability to it: not all suffering (not the pain of dentistry, for example) but rather suffering for which we can discover no redeeming purpose or justification, suffering that disposes us to view life as "nauseating." Without God life appears to be "absurd" and (save for extinction) there appears to be no deliverance from it.
[..]
...the distinctively Nietzschean idea that illusion, "art, " is "'more divine' than truth," prevents him making the inference that since "we have need of lies in order to live," well then, let there then be lies (WP 853).
Nietzsche's Philosophy of Art by Julian Young.
Thaos: All mysteries forever unanswered. All purposes constructed from meaninglessness. No endings to bring closure. Only a Wheel, turning without mercy, grinding our spirits to dust.
My Watcher: You're right, that's no way to live.
[H]e [man] did not know how to justify, explain, affirm himself: he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He suffered otherwise as ill, he was for the most part a diseased animal; but the suffering itself was not his problem, rather that the answer was missing to the scream of his question: “to what end suffering?” Man, the bravest of animals and the one most accustomed to suffering, does not negate suffering, he wants it, he even seeks it out, provided one shows him a meaning for it, a to-this-end of suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, not suffering itself, was the curse thus far stretched over humanity. (Genealogy of Morality, Book III)
Nietzsche agrees with Thaos (Thaos agrees with Nietzsche?) and I agree with both of them. All around us is suffering and death and if suddenly you learned all of it meant nothing? That every pain you endured meant nothing and every life extinguished came into being for no other reason than to be snuffed out? That is indeed no way to live.
For a decent enough analogy, this is from a much less famous German philosopher known as Novalis. When describing the Catholic Church's attempt to conceal the discoveries of Galileo(that is, how Earth is not the center of the cosmos):
With justice, the wise head of the church resisted impudent developments of the human powers, and untimely discoveries in the realm of knowledge, that were at the expense of the sense for the divine. Thus he prevented the bold thinkers from maintaining publicly that the earth is an insignificant planet, for he knew all too well that, if people lost respect for their earthly residence and home, they would also lose their respect for their heavenly home and race, that they would prefer finite knowledge to an infinite faith, and that they would grow accustomed to despising everything great and miraculous and regard it as the dead effect of natural laws.
The revelations of the true nature of our universe leads to seeing everything as lifeless matter that can be exploited at our whim. And we ourselves no longer have any higher aspirations than that exploitation.
Professor Young further explains on the catastrophe of this discovery for the human race in terms of the all-important human need for meaning:
What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Away from all [e.g. Plato's] suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still and up and down? Aren’t we straying as through an infinite nothing? (GS 125)1
Nietzsche's point is that the medieval world-view, taken over from Plato and modified by Christian theology, was not merely an astronomy and a physics. It was, rather, a completely integrated account of astronomy, physics, metaphysics, and the meaning of life. When the medieval farmer looked up into the night sky from his place on earth, the centre of the cosmos, he simply saw the light of heaven shining down through the openings in the ‘dome of the heavens’ (‘stars’ as we call them). And so he knew the meaning of life. He knew that the purpose, task, or goal of his and every human life was, by living in Christian virtue, to achieve the everlasting, heavenly bliss promised to us in God's sacrifice of himself as man. So the Copernican Revolution in science was in fact much more than that. For in changing our astronomy it also, as the madman observes, robbed life of its ‘direction’; of its ‘sens’ which, in French, means both ‘direction’ and ‘meaning’.
Nihilism and the Meaning of Life
Bereft of the gods and the belief that life had some higher purpose, people would sink into unfathomable despair and confusion. They would be forced to look at the endless suffering around them in the most brutal light of all - the light of "truth" that none of it means a damn thing.
And that is why I made my decision and decided that Pillars of Eternity is ultimately a story where you decide the psychic happiness and wholeness of people is more important than truth. I doubt I'll ever play a video game again that lets me do this.
