North Korea is the weirdest country in the world

There are many YouTube videos (as well as outright documentaries broadcast on TV and other publication platforms) made by people who have visited North Korea. And all of them paint a picture of it really being the weirdest country in the world.

Many have said that, at least from the point of view of outsiders visiting the country, North Korea is like a real life version of The Truman Show. This is probably actually quite an apt description.

When foreigners visit the country, not only are they very tightly watched and chaperoned everywhere they go, and maintained in a very strict and tight tour schedule, but every single thing they encounter, no matter how tiny, is tightly scripted and acted, and the vast majority of the things they see is nothing but glorified facades and stages.

Visitors are, quite obviously, kept only in very tightly controlled (and extremely limited) parts of the country, where they can only see what the government wants them to see. They will be accommodated in one of the very few luxury hotels in the capital city, and their tour schedule will strictly take them to tightly controlled locations in order to see tightly controlled performances. And, of course, "tour guides" will be constantly chaperoning them everywhere, and extremely likely a bunch of unseen government agents (who are not only watching the foreigners, but also likely the "tour guides" themselves, to check that they perform their duties exactly as commanded and do not deviate in any way.)

These "tour guides" are always extremely happy, positive and wanting to give a good time to the visitors. So much so that it quickly starts feeling a bit uneasy. 

Needless to say, the visitors are absolutely and categorically forbidden from going anywhere on their own, without being chaperoned. (Even if in a few places they are seemingly allowed to wander around on their own, they will still be very closely monitored.) 

The country is famously and notoriously poor, always on the brink of complete economic collapse and famine, yet in these tightly guided "tours" everything will look as luxurious and grandiose as possible. Luxury hotels, luxury restaurants, grandiose monumental museums and event halls, streets that look like straight from the richest parts of Japan or South Korea, with (seemingly) dozens of restaurants, karaoke bars and so on. Obviously the visitors will only be guided to a couple of them; they can't themselves choose which one they will go into. Quite likely the rest are just empty inside, with only the outside facade making it look like there are businesses inside, when in fact there aren't.

It's like one big Hollywood studio set, spread around the capital city and a couple of closeby towns.

Not every single person that the visitors will see is a tightly controlled actor (like in The Truman Show). Many of the "normal citizens" strolling around, particularly in the middle of the capital city, may be, well, "normal" people rather than governmental agents. They may well be normal citizens living their normal lives in the buildings around. However, even their behavior is tightly controlled.

This is because only the citizens who have shown the most and strongest loyalty to the ruling party, to the leaders, those who have accomplished themselves in this regard and shown that they are good Korean citizens, are allowed to live in the center of the capital city, particularly the areas where foreigners are allowed to visit. These people have been inculcated and indoctrinated since childhood to be extremely loyal to the regime, and they know very well what will happen to them if they were to show any dissent whatsoever, no matter how minor. They know perfectly well that especially when there are foreigners nearby, they are extremely closely watched and monitored, and they know what will happen to them if they don't smile and show happiness to the foreigners, as if they were living the best lives possible.

So, in this sense, also normal regular citizens that foreigners might see are also "actors": They are tightly ordered to act happy, and even if they were to talk to the foreigners, to only say certain things. Deviating from this even slightly would be catastrophic not only to them personally but also their entire families.

Foreigners will be toured through dozens of different museums, exhibits and demonstrations. There may be musical performances, dancing, martial arts demonstrations, all kinds of things. All tightly choreographed to give the foreigners as a good picture of the country as possible. 

The actual reality of things still sometimes manages to seep through all the choreography and facades, though.

The visitors may be driven along a huge multi-lane highway to their next destination... but the highway will be virtually empty, with only the very occasional other car driving in the other direction. Something you pretty much never see in actual rich countries. Ironically, such highways will often look outright post-apocalyptic.

The visitors may be taken to huge luxury restaurants and offered luxurious five-star meals... but the restaurant will often be completely empty other than for them. Dozens and dozens of empty tables around them, with nobody else there. Perhaps one or two of the other tables with some people in them at the very most, but often not even that. It is amply clear that the meal was prepared only and solely for the foreigners, and there is no other activity in these fake restaurants.

What makes this whole thing bizarre and weird is the question of "why?"

Why is the North Korean government so insistent, so obsessed, with keeping up appearances and giving this picture to foreigners? Everybody knows that it's all fake, that it's all for show, that it's all staged, that it's nothing but theater with expensive props, just to try to give foreigners a false picture of what the country is like.

Everybody knows this. Doesn't the North Korean government know this? They must know that nobody believes them. Or are they really so utterly delusional that they honestly believe that their theatrics are actually fooling the visitors and the rest of the world?

The thing is, it's not just the theatrics, the acting, the choreography and the facades: It's how much it costs. The North Korean government has spent and is spending absolutely humongous amounts of money to keep up this facade. And for what? For a few hundred visitors per year? They are literally burning through enormous amounts of money and resources to try to convince a few hundred people per year that it's a great country. And this even though everybody knows it's all fake.

So why? Why all the theatrics? Why spend so much time, effort and money on foolishly trying to create an illusion that is fooling nobody? Are they really this delusional?

It really is the weirdest country in the world.

North Korea is not the only country that's as totalitarian, oppressive and tightly closed. Perhaps less known and less famously, but not in any way less totalitarian and closed, is Turkmenistan. Trying to visit that country is even harder than North Korea, and the government is not much better there. But the thing is, Turkmenistan doesn't even bother trying to keep up a facade to the rest of the world. (Well, except for their international airport, which is absolutely humongous and mostly empty of any passenger traffic. I suppose they are trying to keep up some kind of facade for people who land there on connecting flights. Which there are something like a hundred per day. On an airport that's designed to handle tens of millions of passengers per year.) 

Why do countries always use a local coordinate system rather than a global one?

Suppose you want to know the exact coordinates of a particular point in your property, to the centimeter. In many countries there are services (oftentimes governmental services) that you can commission to do this measurement and give you all the exact data of one or more such points in your land or property.

However, pretty much always what they give you are coordinates using a coordinate system that's local to your own country. Very rarely if ever do they give you the data in a global coordinate system, like the standard GCS system, or the ECEF system.

But why is that? Is it just tradition? Stubbornness? Hesitation to move to a global standard from a long-established local one?

No. The reason is a lot more practical than that. And that reason is: The continents move.

That might sound a bit of a surprising answer at first, but it indeed is literally the reason. Giving the coordinates using a global coordinate system like the GCS or ECEF is not practical because continents move. And they move surprisingly fast. This would cause the coordinates of that particular point to deviate more and more as time passes.

Indeed, if you measure the exact coordinates of a particular point on the ground today, using a global coordinate system, and you do the same measurement a year later, you'll find out that the coordinates will have drifted by 10-20 centimeters (sometimes even more, depending on where you are on Earth). When you need the coordinates to be accurate to the centimeter (or sometimes even to the millimeter), them drifting by this much is just completely impractical.

A local coordinate system for each country, however, is not fixed to the global latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the Earth, but to the land itself. They are defined so that certain points on the ground do not move (or move as little as possible). Or to put it other words, for all intents and purposes the local coordinate system moves with the continent. This makes sure that exact measurements of particular points on the ground will remain relatively accurate for decades to come (with any drifting being in the range of less than a millimeter per decade, or so.)

These exact measurements are often necessary for all kinds of land surveys, city planning, construction work, road planning, and so on. They give you a quick way of knowing the exact distance, to the centimeter accuracy, between two points within the country. And, more importantly, it gives you way to know the exact distance from a newly-measured point to another existing point. All kinds of construction projects use these measurements and this data all the time.

There is also another, perhaps more secondary reason to use local coordinates rather than eg. GCS:

The GCS coordinate system in particular models "sea level" as an exact mathematical oblate spheroid, with particular standardized dimensions. This is a close approximation to Earth's actual sea level, but it's not exact, because the actual sea level is not a mathematically exact oblate spheroid.

This can cause surprising results particularly in altitude measurements. There are many parts of the world where, if you were to use GCS coordinates to measure altitudes, it would seem like certain rivers are flowing uphill. Indeed, according to the GCS coordinates the end of a river may be at a "higher altitude" than the beginning.

Of course this is just a quirk of the GCS system itself, caused by its oblate spheroid to just be an approximation. A very close approximation, but still just an approximation. (Also how gravity works on an oblate spheroid plays a role in this. It's complicated.)

Many local coordinate systems also fix this problem, using more accurate "sea level" geometry for the country, and in them all rivers flow downhill. (Although there are still some local coordinate systems that have not fixed this, and still have this same problem. Several countries have tried to move to a more accurate local coordinate system in recent decades to fix this problem, among others.)

My prediction on the upcoming Switch 2 sales

Nintendo consoles have become somewhat famous for their intermittent generational popularity, starting with the Nintendo 64 console. In other words, the success of their consoles seems to alternate between each successive generation:

The Nintendo 64 was relatively successful (although people often overestimate how successful it actually was, but it was by raw numbers quite successful), the GameCube was less so, the Wii was an absolute monster, the Wii U was an utter disappointment in terms of sales, and the Nintendo Switch was another absolute monster of a console, in terms of units sold and overall success (surpassing even the Wii, and by quite a margin, becoming the third most-sold console in history.)

This kind of alternation in success is not really seen, at least not that prominently, with the consoles of the other two major competitors, ie. Microsoft and Sony.

One of the reasons for this success alternation with Nintendo consoles is probably what could be called "generational fatigue" or sorts (referring to console generations rather than human generations).

Since pretty much the very beginning Nintendo consoles have been seen primarily as "for kids", the console that parents are most likely to buy for their kids, while the Microsoft and Sony consoles are more seen as "for hard-core gamers". While the division is not this strict in reality, it still arguably exists.

Hard-core gamers generally want the latest-and-greatest and are usually eager to get the latest console. However, parents buying a console for their kids do not think like this. Instead, they tend to think more like "we already have a Nintendo at home, why do we need another one?"

Parents don't see the value in the "latest and greatest". A console is just a console. If you have one, doesn't that suffice? And, quite likely, this happened again and again: "We already have a N64 at home, why do we need this GameCube thingie?" "We already have a Wii at home, why do we need this Wii U thing? It's just the same."

This might have caused this sort of intermittent buying pattern by parents: The next console launch comes "too soon" after the last one, so parents don't feel any incentive to buy it because they "already have one at home". However, since enough years have passed by the time of the release after that, the kids have grown up, and a new generation of kids are without a console, so the new parents buy the newest one for them, especially since the 15-or-so years old console doesn't see much use anymore.

The Nintendo Switch is currently the latest-and-greatest console, not just by Nintendo, but overall. It's currently the third-most-sold console in history, only behind the PlayStation 2 and the Nintendo DS, both obsolete (and not even all that far behind them, in terms of units sold).

The Nintendo Switch 2 will be soon launched, as of writing this blog post.

If we look at history, all the signs are there: It's extremely similar to the current Switch, and most parents who buy such consoles for their kids are likely not going to see much value in spending a huge bunch of money for a console that looks and feels so similar to the one they already have at home. "We already have a Switch at home, why do we need a new one?"

This has all the same hallmarks as the Wii U fiasco: It looks and feels way too similar to the previous console: Name's the same, looks the same, feels the same, and the marketing isn't doing enough to make it clear that this is an entirely new console.

However, there are some differences compared to the Wii vs. Wii U situation:

For starters, the problem with the Wii U was that many people thought that it was some kind of add-on peripheral for the Wii (essentially a new controller with a screen on it). They didn't actually realize that it was an entirely new independent console with better specs. Nintendo's poor marketing didn't do enough to make that clear.

The Switch 2 is, however, quite clearly a new console, not just some kind of add-on peripheral for the original Switch. I don't think anybody's confused about that. (However, there's still the problem that it looks and feels so similar that many parent's will not see any value in purchasing it if they already have the Switch. It just looks like a slightly upgraded Switch. Which, to be fair, it kind of is.)

Secondly, the Switch has been much more widely adopted by even the more "hard core" gamers. In other words, the ones that will buy the latest-and-greatest and not suffer from "generational fatigue" so much.

Particularly this second aspect is likely to make the Switch 2 more of a success than with the Wii vs. Wii U situation.

However, I highly doubt that it will reach even close to the absolutely humongous sales numbers of the Switch. That's just not going to happen.

There's also another big problem with the Switch 2: Its price. It's significantly more expensive than the original Switch, and this can be quite a turn-off for many people (both parents and for gamers buying the console for themselves.)

So, how much will Switch 2 sell?

The Nintendo Switch, as of writing this, has sold about 150 million units.

I predict that the Nintendo Switch 2 will sell during its lifetime perhaps 100 million units. Maybe a bit less. Let's say 80-100 million units.

A different approach at convincing someone why 0.9 repeating is equal to 1

For some reason some people have an extremely difficult time accepting that 0.9 repeating is equal to 1. Not that it merely "approaches" 1, but that it's exactly equal to 1. They are just two different ways to write down the same value.

Some people are so incredibly obsessed with trying to prove that they are not equal that they will go to incredible lengths to try to do so. They will start arguing semantics, they will try to muddle the definition of an infinitely repeating decimal, and some may even attempt to invent completely new mathematics in order to somehow make the two things not equal. They are so obsessed with this that there's absolutely nothing you can tell them that would convince them otherwise. Nothing. You can try, but you will fail.

Regardless, even if it's rather moot (and will never, ever convince these people), here are two slightly different approaches at showing the equality of the two things. Instead of trying to prove it yourself, try to make them do the work.

Approach 1: Repeating decimal patterns as a fraction

It's a well-known result that every real number which decimal representation has an infinitely repeating pattern starting at some point after the decimal point is a rational number, and this is actually relatively easy to prove. And, in fact, this is a (well-known) one-to-one relationship: In other words, if the decimal representation of a number has an infinitely repeating pattern after the decimal point (not necessarily starting immediately after the decimal point, but from some point forward after that), it is a rational number, and if it doesn't have such a pattern, it's an irrational number.

This can be more succinctly (and mathematically) expressed as: A real number is rational if and only if its decimal expansion is eventually periodic.

And since such a value is a rational number, it can be written as a fraction, ie. the ratio between two integers. And, indeed, all values whose decimal representation has an infinitely repeating pattern starting at some point after the decimal point can be written as a ratio of two integers, ie. a fraction.

As an example 0.4 repeating is a rational number and can be written as 4/9.

Since this is a proven mathematical fact (and it's actually relatively easy to prove yourself), that means that 0.9 repeating is also a rational number which can be written as a fraction, ie. the ratio between two integers.

So the question is: Given that proven mathematical fact, find out what those two integers are. In other words, what is the fraction that gives 0.9 repeating.

If you want to present the argument to someone succinctly, it could be something like this:

"It's a known result that a real number is rational if and only if its decimal expansion is eventually periodic. This is easy to prove. That means that 0.9 repeating is a rational number. This also means that, as a rational number, it can be written as the ratio of two integers. Calculate what those two integers are."

Approach 2: Calculate the difference

If two values are equal, then their difference, ie. one subtracted from the other, is 0, pretty much by definition.

If two values are not equal, then their subtraction will differ from 0, again pretty much by definition.

Thus, if the real number 1 is different from the real number 0.9 repeating, calculate their difference, ie. the result of their subtraction. If they are indeed not equal, then the result has to be a real number that's different from 0. What is that real number?

(Note: There is no such a thing as "the smallest real number larger than zero". Such a thing does not exist, and it's logically and mathematically impossible to exist, especially in the set of real numbers. This is a quite famous and extremely trivially provable fact of arithmetic.)

This could be succinctly presented as:

"By axiomatic definition, if two real numbers are equal, their subtraction results in 0. Conversely, if two real numbers are not equal, their subtraction results in a non-zero real number. Calculate the subtraction of 1 and 0.9 repeating."

Why is the triple-slit experiment so uninteresting to scientists?

Some time in the early 2000's I read an article about how a laboratory had conducted a three-slit version of the famous double-slit experiment for the first time in literally 200 years that the double-slit experiment was a thing that physicists were interested in. The experiment appeared to confirm the predictions.

Even then, the experiment was flawed: It turned out that one of the slits didn't close completely, and left a tiny gap even when it was supposed to be closed. But instead of fixing the mechanical issue and redoing the experiment, they just mathematically compensated for the flaw.

For reasons that were never explained in the article.

All of the above is completely incomprehensible to me.

The double-slit experiment is one of the most famous experiments in quantum mechanics, and in fact in the entirety physics. It's one of the most studied and researched experiments in human history. Thousands and thousands of research papers have been written about it, and it's one of the most fundamental experiments that underline the entirety of quantum mechanics and particle physics, and has immensely profound implications to our understanding of the universe. It's an experiment that has been repeated probably hundreds of thousands if not millions times over the last 200 years. Expensive high-tech labs conduct the experiment, physicists conduct the experiment, physics students conduct the experiment, probably by the thousands every single day.

The double-slit experiment is probably one of the single experiments that has received most work and research in the entire history of humanity.

Thus, one would think that the triple-slit version of the experiment would be of similar interest to physicists.

But astonishing that doesn't appear to be so. It took a whopping 200 years before someone did the experiment in a laboratory setting. And this even though the technology to do so has existed for something like a hundred years. It took 200 years for anybody to do the experiment and publish a paper about it. The article quite specifically mentioned that this was the first time that anybody had done so.

And even then, the experiment was flawed, but apparently the authors were so uninterested in the entire thing that they couldn't even be bothered to fix the flaw and run the experiment again. That's how utterly unimportant they seemed to think it was.

On top of that, this paper in question, as well as the article talking about it, was not considered any sort of landmark experiment worthy of notoriety. The paper (and article) in question appears to be so non-notorious, so forgotten, that I can't even find it anymore, no matter how much googling I do. From all I have found, it appears to have completely disappeared from the internet.

I cannot even begin to comprehend this. This complete and utter lack of any interest in the triple-slit experiment, considering how fundamental and ground-breaking the double-slit version is. It just doesn't make any sense.

The vast majority of black holes do NOT have an accretion disc

The video game Elite: Dangerous depicts the Milky Way galaxy, including the numerous black holes that are known to exist there. If you go to such a black hole, it will be essentially invisible, the only way that it exhibits itself is by how it distorts the background (ie. gravitational lensing.)

Many people believe this to be unrealistic because they have this misconception, no doubt spread most prominently by movies like Interstellar, that all black holes have a very prominent bright accretion disc around them. In fact, when mentioning black holes, most people probably envision the image of the black hole in Interstellar in their minds.

In fact, there are some YouTube videos that take footage from Elite: Dangerous depicting a black hole and adding an accretion disc in post-processing, and the comment section of such videos will invariably be full of people commenting on how much more realistic it looks and wishing that the game implemented that kind of visuals.

The problem? The way that the game depicts stellar-mass black holes is actually realistic!

The fact is that stellar-mass black holes do not have any sort of visible accretion disc. They are too small for that. They are, indeed, pretty much like the game depicts them: Completely invisible, them being "visible" only in how they distort the background. There's nothing visible orbiting them.

If a stellar-mass black hole has a very closeby normal star, gas from the star may be falling into the black hole in a spiral pattern forming a sort of accretion disc, but even then it would be extremely faint, probably too faint to be seen by eye.

Only supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies (and a few other places) may have a prominent visible accretion disc. And even with those it's theorized that not all of them might have one (for example, it's currently unknown if Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole in the center of our Milky Way galaxy, has a visible accretion disc. It's not a given that it has one.)

In other words, the depiction of the black hole in the movie Interstellar is not unrealistic either, but that's because it's a supermassive black hole, not a stellar-mass one.

Why are there so many underground bunkers nobody knows anything about?

There are countless stories and accounts of people wandering in some forest and randomly encountering some, often quite unassuming and inconspicuous, small concrete structure with a door or entrance, and if they get inside they often find some kind of long-abandoned bunker complex (sometimes relatively small, sometimes surprisingly huge). In the era of YouTube videos about these have become more and more abundant, with people finding and exploring these bunkers.

Almost invariably these bunkers have been completely cleared out and abandoned for many decades. Very rarely is there any furniture or machinery inside, with perhaps the exception of some decrepit tables, chairs, and so on.

What are these bunkers, and why are they completely unmarked, and why doesn't anybody know anything about them, before they are found?

The answer is in a way a bit boring, but also in other ways interesting.

It shouldn't be very surprising that these are military bunkers from the second World War and the subsequent Cold War era. For several decades after Word War II there was a real imminent threat and fear of a nuclear war or, at a minimum, some kind of invasion and war similar to and even worse than those.

The military forces in many countries, especially in the United States, in Europe and in the entirety of the Soviet Union, but also many other countries, prepared for such a nuclear war by building underground military bunkers at strategic locations, spread all through the country (so that nuclear blasts would only cripple a minimal part of the military forces).

The Soviet Union in particular, as well as some European countries, really loved to build these underground bunkers, for all kinds of purposes, which is why they are so common all around in former Soviet countries. These were not merely just underground command centers, but all kinds of bunkers were built for all sorts of purposes, such as storage of supplies and ammunition, shelter for troops and, most dangerously, nuclear waste storage (as nuclear research and nuclear power plants were extremely common in the Soviet Union, and all that waste material had to go somewhere.)

The interesting question is why there are so many bunkers (probably thousands of them) that have been completely abandoned and forgotten? Indeed, a good majority of these bunkers are completely unknown to authorities, and they have no idea that they are there, until someone randomly finds one. One would think that the government would know the location of all these bunkers, but they don't. It may seem unfathomable how the military can build a huge bunker, and then just forget about it so fundamentally that nobody even knows where the majority of these bunkers even are.

However, it's not that strange.

Most of these bunkers were built in high secrecy, for rather obvious reasons. The less likely that foreign enemies knew about the location and nature of these bunkers, the better. The construction and details of these bunkers were of course documented, so that they could be strategically used, but these documents were usually highly classified, and only a very limited amount of people had access to them.

Once a bunker was abandoned because there was no need for it anymore, the documents were sealed and archived in some secret archives somewhere, along thousands and thousands, tens of thousands, of other documents. Pretty much effectively all information about the bunker was buried where nobody would find it anymore.

How about the people who were in those bunkers? Rather obviously they were also bound to secrecy, and most of them wouldn't even remember the location and details of some random bunker somewhere in the middle of nowhere after twenty, thirty, fifty years. The people who built the bunker and those who were most intimately knowledgeable of it got old, they retired, they died. Only very few people alive today were connected to the construction and running of that random bunker in the middle of nowhere. And most of those few people wouldn't even remember where it was, even if they wanted to tell about it.

Thus, we have ended up in a world that has thousands and thousands of fortified underground abandoned military bunkers who nobody knows anything about, and any documentation about them is either deeply buried in some secret archive (alongside tens of thousands of other documents) or even completely destroyed (as many of these documents have been destroyed by the passage of time or even fires, water damage, mold, etc.)

It's likely that there are thousands of such bunkers out there that are still to be found, and literally nobody has visited in something like 50 years.

The morality of killing bad guys vs good guys in video games

Back in the day, quite a long time ago, I was playing the original Fable: The Lost Chapters game. Unlike most other RPG-like games, it has side quests that can be considered "good" and others that can be considered "evil" (and which affect your morality stats in the game). A good quest is for example helping someone, while an evil quest involves for example stealing something or, in the absolute worst cases, massacring an entire village of innocent people who have done nothing wrong.

One of the problems with the design of the game is that the quest list didn't really make it crystal-clear which side quests are of the "good" kind and which are of the "evil" kind. So at one point I accidentally accepted an evil side quest without realizing that it was such. And it wasn't just an innocent "steal candy from a baby" type of evil, but literally a "massacre an entire village of innocent people" mission.

Well, no big deal, just cancel the quest? Turns out that once you have accepted a quest you can never get rid of it. At least in the original game there literally is no way of getting rid of a quest that you have accepted. Nothing. The only way is to load a save that you had made before accepting the quest. The problem? I had since long overwritten that save, and didn't have one. The only way around this would have been to start a completely new game.

Well, what's the problem? Just ignore the quest and never do it.

Problem was: The village in question connected two areas of the game, and there was no way around it in order to get to the other area, and traversing between the two areas was mandatory to advance in the game. And the kicker? Once you entered the village in question, the quest would start, and there's no way of just ignoring it. You literally cannot leave the village without completing the quest! The game just tells you that you can't leave because you have an unfinished quest there! You are stuck! The only way to get "unstuck" is to load a save from before you entered the village, but that just puts you back there.

Yes, the game was literally designed (I don't know if deliberately or just because of lack of thought) so that if you had accepted a quest that involved doing something in such a village, you literally could not traverse through the village without doing the quest. The "optional" side quest becomes a mandatory quest, if you want to advance in the game.

And to put even more salt to the wounds, if you actually started killing people in the village, they would cry and ask you in desperation why you are doing that.

This game design was completely asinine: If you accidentally accepted a particular side quest that was this morally evil and bankrupt, it had the side effect of indirectly becoming a mandatory quest because you couldn't bypass it and thus you couldn't advance in the game without completing it, and there literally is no way to cancel or ignore the quest, once accepted. And to punish you even more, you have to witness the suffering of the innocent NPCs in order to complete the quest, and there's no way around it. And the thing is that the quest descriptions don't always make it clear if it's this kind of evil quest or not.

But this has got me thinking many times: Why do I have a problem in killing certain fictitious non-playable characters that are nothing but pixels on a screen (and thus they don't exist as real sentient feeling beings), while I have zero qualms about killing certain other non-playable characters (in some games even quite brutally so)?

From an ethical point of view, at least one line can be drawn: If the NPCs are trying to kill me, then it becomes morally justifiable to engage in self-defense. Likewise if the NPCs are threatening other innocent NPCs it's morally justifiable to stop them from doing so.

However, that's not all possible situations that can happen in such games. Sometimes, for example, you may approach an "enemy" NPC from behind, without him noticing, and killing him by shooting or stabbing him in the back, without even knowing if he was going to attack you or not.

Most games make it relatively clear whether such an NPC would attack you for sure if he sees you by, for example, establishing that NPCs wearing certain unforms or certain clothes will always automatically attack you, without exception. Likewise a common game design is that all NPCs within a certain clearly delimited area will always attack you without exceptions (while NPCs outside of that area will not). Thus, it makes it morally easier to kill them before they see you, because you know that they would attack you anyway, so you don't have to actually test and make sure that's actually the case.

In a few games it may be less established. Sometimes it may be harder to distinguish between NPCs that are "enemies" and will automatically attack you, and those who are not. In fact, when this is sometimes the case in some rare games, I myself usually do hesitate before going into a killing spree and usually prefer to wait to see if the NPC will attack me before I respond in kind.

But it's an interesting psychological question what makes many/most people behave like this. These people know perfectly well that these are just some pixels lighting up on a screen, depicting completely fictitious non-existing non-sentient non-feeling imaginary beings, and it makes literally no difference to anything whether you simulate "killing" them or not. Yet these people, including me, still hesitate killing "innocent" people, even if they are completely fictitious and simulated.

I think that there's more to this than just weird psychology in play. Regardless of whether these people are fictitious or not, it can erode one's principles, morality and sense of psychological well-being to act in a manner that goes contrary to one's moral and ethical values. It can feel bad, even knowing that no real being was hurt in doing so. In fact, it's not true that no real being was hurt: There was one real being who was slightly hurt by these evil acts: You yourself. Doing bad things to innocent people can feel bad, and that hurts. It obviously doesn't hurt even nearly as much as if you were to do it to a real person, but a hurt is a hurt nevertheless, big or small.

Maintaining your moral principles even in a completely simulated fictitious setting can also work as a safeguard against you losing or eroding those moral principles. Who knows what will happen to your moral principles in real life, if you slip up on them in these video games? Will you become more and more desensitized to evil acts over time, slowly but surely, if you just keep doing these simulated evil acts yourself? It's not completely impossible. Even if simulated, doing evil acts can have negative psychological consequences, like so many other things may.

Why did Nikhil Kamath cheat against Anand in a chess charity event?

In June of 2021 the biggest online chess website, chess.com, organized a live simultaneous exhibition charity event. One of the strongest players in the world, a former world champion and (at the time) the strongest player in India, Viswanathan Anand, played a simultaneous match against several high-profile celebrities and other people.

One of these people was Nikhil Kamath, a compatriot of Anand, and one of the richest people in India. He is not a very strong chess player, quite a beginner in fact. Thus, it immediately rose everybody's eyebrows when he easily beat Anand in their match, his level of play being absolutely beyond anything that a beginner player could ever manage to do. It was immediately apparent that he had used a chess engine to cheat in the match (and further analysis of the game confirmed what was already immediately obvious.) He himself quickly confessed to doing so.

This, quite naturally, caused huge controversy, as not only is cheating in chess in this manner extremely frowned upon, but on top of that he did so in a charity event, and against one of the strongest and highest-profile players in the world, a former world champion.

But why? Why would someone cheat like this, especially in such a high-profile event like this, against such a high-profile player? What was going through his head?

Rather obviously I cannot read minds and thus there's no way for me to know for certain what he was thinking, but this is what I'm hypothesizing:

People who are not familiar with chess and chess tournaments, who might have never played the game or have only played extremely little, and have no experience at all on tournaments and online play, often do not understand how serious of a thing it is to use a chess engine to cheat in a game.

In fact, some time ago a friend of mine, when the topic of online chess came up, presented me with his novel idea and asked me if it would be possible to use a chess program to tell you what to play when playing online against someone. From his tone and how he explained his idea, it was very clear that he had absolutely no idea nor concept of how common cheating in this manner online is, and how frowned upon it is. He seemed to be genuinely and extremely naively asking this as if it had been a novel idea he came up with, and clearly had no idea how common it was, or what kind of repercussions it would have if done.

Of course I cannot possibly know for sure, but I have my suspicion that something similar happened with Mr Kamath: It may well be that, being a rather beginner player, he just didn't understand how serious it is to use a chess engine to cheat, especially against such a high-profile strong player as Anand.

Maybe he thought that it would be a fun little way to make things interesting. Like perhaps some kind of small little innocent prank. Wouldn't it be interesting and amusing if out of the blue one of players in the simultaneous match played very strongly and even beat the world champion? Now that would be something to tell stories about later! What a little innocent joke that he did, pranking the former world champion like that. Surely they would be laughing at it afterwards. And, on top of that, the game itself would probably turn out interesting!

He probably didn't know, and the idea didn't cross his mind, nor did he do any kind of research beforehand, about how huge of a faux pas this kind of cheating is, and how frowned upon it is, how disrespectful and inappropriate it is, especially in this kind of even against this kind of high-profile player. The enormous backlash after the game probably came as a surprise to him. It was probably something he didn't think about much before the event, and only later did he realize what a stupid mistake had made when the entire thing blew up in his face.

It's easy to say "he should have known, or even at least done a quick google search about the subject", but when you are not an aficionado of something, such things don't necessarily occur to you. It just doesn't cross your mind to check, or to think that hey, maybe I'm doing something that I shouldn't be doing.