Game Theory: Are You a Kid or Squid? - Splatoon SOLVED!

Hello Internet! Welcome to the Game. Uh, excuse me... I'm so sorry, theorists. Uh... It seems like we're having... Some kind of... difficulty with the tentacles. Please wait. Hello Internet! Welcome to

game

theory

! Where this week we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief because we're finally out of the dark days here at Game Theory. Mass Effect, Fallout, Dark Souls. All of these

game

s are about apocalyptic societies where survivors fight for supremacy. And that's why the fun game I chose to cover today is Splatoon. Hope for? Are you kidding me?! Is Splatoon also a post-apocalypse? Come on!

Can no one base a game anymore as opposed to, I don't know, trying to cross a street? How about a bear and a bird fighting a witch? The spirits of dead children possessing furry robots so they can get revenge on their killer? No?! Will there be no more feel-good plots? Well, I guess we're back to another horrible end-of-the-world story. But this time it's Splatoon! So it's all about bright colors and embarrassing action that distracts you from whatever mysterious event caused the collapse of humanity! Hurrah! Nintendo. But anyway, today's episode is scientifically based and has absolutely nothing to do with history.

So let me give you the short version of the story for those of you who haven't played it. Basically, something terrible happened on the surface of the Earth and now cephalopods reign supreme. Cephalopods, being

squid

, cuttlefish and octopods. And yes, Internet, you heard right! The official plural version of octopus is "octopedes." Octopods. Which is quite rare and appears only in British English. Do you even have a dictionary, brother? Go ahead and surprise your friends with that little nugget of knowledge. Anyway, of the surviving races the ones I care about, and the main characters of the game, are the Inklings.

Creatures capable of transforming between two different forms. A human or child form. And a tentacle, shaped like a Blooper-type

squid

. If Splatoon were reduced to a Werner Herzog-style documentary, it would look something like this. Ze Inklings exist in a perpetual and unceasing duality. Trapped in the tortured void of ambiguous form. Or if you are Nintendo you simply say: For children or for squid, that is the question. It's also the game's motto embodied in every piece of Splatoon marketing. And today I'm here to answer the rhetorical question that Nintendo never thought it would have an answer to.

Are Inklings biologically more children? Or rather a squid? If you look at the game mechanics and a little science, it's clear that the Inklings are actually much more one than the other. Oh ho! Much more! Then I remember all this, are you a boy or a squid meme? It was just a marketing strategy. Today I come up with a definitive answer! We'll resolve this Inkling existential duality in the next fifteen minutes or so. To start, there are a few simple things we could cross out by looking at the game models. For example, although the Inklings walk upright on the ground, we also see them completely melt into the ground to fast travel and recharge ink.

This actually says a lot about their structural anatomy. Well, Inklings definitely need to be able to support activities like running and shooting an ink gun. They're probably making it with almost zero real bones. This is a solid point in the squid's spine, since cephalopods do not have a skeletal system. Even compared to snakes, these organisms are much more flexible. Allowing them to do things like get into really small places. Hide, as you see in Finding Dory. And if! They flatten to blend into the floor or wall. They maintain their shape with water pressure, allowing them to rise or flatten at will.

Like a self-inflating water balloon! This would also explain why in the game we don't see a bunch of bloody red viscera and bones strewn across the playing field every time you get run over. There's not much more than a lot of liquid there. If that is the case, the Child-shaped Inklings support their movements not with water pressure but with ink pressure. And when you pop them, it's like popping a balloon full of ink! While on the subject of ink, it seems a bit obvious to point this out, but it's squids and not children who actually use ink, in real life.

Although that's not really in evidence here, since squid excrete ink from the sacs near their gills and less so through plastic super soakers. Although that would be pretty much the coolest thing I've ever seen if they did it! Period! End of story. The squid, plus the super-soaked ones, die with a happy and complete life. The other obvious one here is the difference between children who live on land and squids who obviously don't. In this case, one could argue that Inklings must be much closer to children given that they breathe air and have human characteristics such as noses and mouths that are essential for breathing with lungs.

That, in itself, is a big problem because cephalopods are exclusively aquatic. And the whole thing about becoming terrestrial was a HUGE deal in evolution. It wasn't like a couple of lucky fish had jumped out of the primordial ooze. It took two hundred million years for evolution to reach from our common ancestor with the squid, to the first animal that walked on earth. And it took another three hundred million years for things that looked like homo sapians to appear. That's a big evolution! And I think it's safe to say that Splatoon won't take place in half a billion years, given that the Inklings still seem to be wearing Sketchers and sporting the solid man bun.

Sure it's in the future, but how far in the future? I have to say that the remnants of human civilization that are still hanging around are too strong! In short, that means that Inklings must have lungs to absorb oxygen from the ground. A solid point in the Kids column! You see, the gills work because they are like feathers with a large surface area and they exist in layers and that works very well in water because the gills float there. Thus, each is surrounded on all sides by a liquid from which they can absorb oxygen. However, on land, all the gills collapse together on top of each other and block most of the surface, thus suffocating the fish.

Meanwhile, the lungs increase their surface area by having many small sacs that do not collapse with air. That doesn't necessarily mean that Inklings don't also have gills. I mean, sure we don't see it in its child form, but squids breathe by drawing water into their mantles, that squid head. So when Inklings swim through puddles of ink, they could also breathe that way, allowing the ink to flow over their gills and draw oxygen from there. Therefore, they could have systems that allow them to live on both land and ink. However, what is written in ink is complete speculation on my part with no existing evidence that I can find.

So it doesn't make sense. However, another point for Kid is that the inhabitants of the earth need many special characteristics. Like, for example, eyeballs. Sure, fish and squid have eyes too, but light behaves completely differently in our atmosphere than it does in water. And just as everything looks blurry when we open our eyes in a lake or pool. Squid eyes don't work very well in the air. They would have to develop a totally different eye structure to be able to see as well as they do in the game. Otherwise, they would barely be able to see the colorful lines of ink they are throwing.

Much less, perform precision shots with weapons such as the charger. With this we have covered structure, oxygen intake and light intake. But what about their brains? You'd assume that even to play a game like Ink War, you'd really need a higher level of cognitive functions that only belong to children, and not squids, right? Well not really. Of all the animals looking to become the next dominant species here on Earth, cephalopods are a strong candidate. They are extremely intelligent. It's frightening. They can open jars. Aquarium keepers report having unique personalities. And in the wild they are incredibly strategic hunters, sometimes setting elaborate traps for their prey.

In captivity you have examples of cephalopods like the octopus Otto, a resident of a German aquarium who, get it, was known for juggling hermit crabs and turning off the lights over his tank to get attention when he got bored. THAT?! How many octopods does it take to screw in a light bulb? One. One. The point is, even if you think Intelligence would be an easy win for the Kid column here, the way we see the Inklings acting in the game leaves the possibility of it going either way. So at this point we have some evidence in anatomy that points to both squids and children... but we're really missing the bigger picture.

The answer to the whole Kid Squid debate actually has much less to do with a physical characteristic of the Inklings. Their fun sneakers, or even their weird fur/suction cup ears. No! Really, it all comes down to your genetics. Because think about it! We are talking about a species that evolves into a different one. Either human children evolved to possess squid-like abilities or squids evolved to live on land as children. And when you look at the problem from this angle, this is the decisive factor. As I mentioned before, evolution takes a long time. It involves slow Darwinian selection.

Small, tiny survival advantages that have occurred over thousands of generations. Unless, of course, that's not the case. Unless you are one of the few species that has the ability to forget about Darwin completely and evolve at your own pace. And as much as I wanted to as a kid, I might have decided to grow a third arm or something. We humans have to hand it over to our new eight-legged Overlords on this one. It is the squids who have the power to transform into children. The way they do it has to do with genes, but not with DNA, the molecule we all associate with our genes.

But instead, RNA, ribonucleic acid. The red-headed stepchild of the nucleic acid family. Well, DNA is basically the blueprint for your body. RNA is what takes you from a model to something real. Basically, what you need to know is that RNA takes small sections of your genes from the nucleus, where DNA lives on its own because it's too cold for all the other cellular molecules, and carries it to the rest of the cells so they can bind to them. the party and translate into real things. Like proteins that do everything for your body, from creating brain cells to healing your paper cuts.

Without RNA, DNA is nothing. So kids have RNA, but squids also have RNA... So what's the problem? Well, in humans, when our DNA is copied, it contains a lot of junk. A large section is copied into one strand of RNA, but there are fragments in the middle that the body doesn't need. Before your body can make anything useful from RNA, those fragments must be cut up in what is called the cell's Spliceosome Complex. Well, the biology of this becomes much more complex than I want to explain here. The thing to remember is that in humans, this RNA splicing system is one of the things that helps keep us stable.

We have a lot of parts and a lot of systems that we have to keep working, so you have to make sure that when cells make things, they do the same things, in the same way. every time. The splicing system is like a safety net to ensure that the RNA is translated correctly with each replication. It's stable, which is great, but another word for stable is something that doesn't evolve. Humans are humans and we are stuck as humans. The chances of us having some strange new species that will change evolution are incredibly slim. But squid, on the other hand, play by a completely different set of genetic rules.

Just this year, in fact just a couple of weeks ago, while we were investigating this episode, scientists discovered that cephalopods do not follow the normal patterns of forming proteins with RNA. At least, not as strictly as we do. Instead of splicing your RNA, they do something called RNA editing. Where, instead of clipping information with Splicosomes, they actually directly edit the information carried by the RNA. There's no need for a cloying middleman here. This may seem like a small difference, but it completely changes the way cephalopods live, reproduce, and most importantly, evolve. Most life on our planet hasn't fared so well with RNA editing because guess what?

It results in too much evolution and, in fact, most species have eliminated it through natural selection. But RNA editing has some surprising advantages for our squid friends. Cephalopods can adapt quickly to extreme changes in their environment. Sometimes without having to go through thenatural selection. His body just says, "Oh, we need to be able to live in the Arctic?" "Alright, just make these proteins instead of these other proteins," "And that's it!" Normally, these types of changes would have to be passed down slowly from generation to generation. But RNA editing allows cephalopods, like squid, to skip all that noise entirely.

It also places them as one of the only species that can make adaptations fast enough to survive in a post-apocalyptic world in just a few generations. Instead of millions of years! As sad as it is, humans are simply not genetically equipped to do that. I mean, we complain that the air conditioning is three degrees too high! There is no way we can survive a massive environmental disaster! But squid are actually a species that is perfectly positioned to continue its rapid evolution and become the new rulers of the planet. And more importantly, for us today, in our Splatoon

theory

, they are in the best possible position to make big biological moves.

Like jumping from water to living on land much faster than any other species. Develop a new respiratory system and make sure they keep up with the latest trends in Inkling sneakers. So the next time you order that basket of calamari, have a little respect for your appetizer. When the world ends, they will be here much longer than you or me. And when you play Splatoon Two in a couple of months, know that the only answer to the fundamental question: "Are you a boy or are you a squid?" The thing is that you will always and forever be one hundred percent, Squid!

But hey, that's just a theory, a game theory! Thanks for watching!