It's rather funny when we make extreme choices like blowing up Fallout 3's Megaton and observing the consequences like some kind of god. When we're doing destroying the world, it's as easy as reloading a save to erase the choices you made.
In real life, it's not so easy to do that. Say one wrong thing or make a mistake at work and people WILL remember you for what you did and how it affected them. Likewise, some games don't let you "take back" choices. Games like Telltale's The Walking Dead force you to make life or death decisions on the fly, then see how they affect others across multiple seasons.
Night in the Woods only lets you spend your day with certain characters, so if I were to choose to have a night out with Bae, I couldn't do something else with Gregg. I find it amazing how video games have evolved to the point that they're punishing players with opportunity cost, a high level concept which means that if you spend your limited resources doing one thing, you lose the opportunity to spend the resources on something else in the future.
Then we have games like Undertale, that totally bend reality in a way that makes you feel like the characters in the world, the game's save files, and you the player are all connected in same strange 4th wall breaking way. Undertale never broke the 4th wall though, it made this new perception of how a video game world and the player's world were connected. It looked so effortless and natural that I wasn't aware it was trying to be campy, or jokey, or video gamey, I just accepted that the game was intelligent enough to trick me into thinking that it was conscious of its own existence.
Essentially, do characters like Sans that carry the ability to travel through space and time have a soul?
At what point does a game behave in such a logical yet random pattern that it becomes just as real as a human? This isn't the first time I've had the sneaking suspicion that artificial intelligence, or a piece of software was "self aware." I realize this blog may be confusing, and that's okay. We are nearing a point in video games where they are getting increasingly complicated and multifaceted. I think to ignore such subjects and think of them as too heady or high minded is foolish. I enjoy talking about a game's base mechanics just as much as I do delving into the philosophical concepts behind the games themselves.
What do you guys think? Is it possible for video games devs to spend so much time creating AI for their characters, that the actual characters themselves become extensions of the devs that created them? Or am I just crazy? Probably the latter, but... who knows.