> Nowadays (Mass Effect, Tyranny), it leans more towards a two-scale solution, where your "good" actions are measured alongside your "bad" ones. That's good to

> Nowadays (Mass Effect, Tyranny), it leans more towards a two-scale solution, where your "good" actions are measured alongside your "bad" ones. That's good to hear. It always bothered me in a way that you were able to make your "bad" deeds become forgotten by doing some "good" things here and there. One notable exception was the "Childkiller" status in the early Fallouts (haven't played 3 and beyond) which led to possible encounters with bounty hunters. > Do you have any idea why is that so? Is there some sort of mode-switching happening between the workplace and home, where different priorities take hold? I do think it's because of the "tension" disappearing when you are at home. However, even that doesn't work entirely for me. For instance, I'm a night owl. On weekends, it's impossible for me to get up the same time I would on a work day, regardless of how often the alarm bell goes off. So while I would easily get up at 6:00 in the morning on a Monday while going to bed at 2:00, it would be impossible to get up the same time on a Saturday, even if I went to bed 2 hours earlier. One exception would be having to get up to travel somewhere. Now, one could argue that that "tension" isn't tied to a physical environment but that would point against the learning at home/homework stuff we experienced. Of course, there is the possbility that our body distinguishes between getting up at the right time to get to school/work and doing school stuff at home after school due to undetermined differences. I'm also trying to remember how it was when I had, for instance, two hours of school, four hours of free time and then another two hours of school. I do think the tension disappeared once I was home (unless I had a test or something later that day) but it gradually came back when sitting in class. So it's probably a mode that is on as soon as you wake up until you are home again. That mode is likely also emotionally and physically taxing on our body due to the tension. As soon as we hit home and are powering down, we (ideally) recuperate. Getting back up and increasing the tension again is maybe not ideal for our body (?) which would mean that longer pauses (like the four hours I mentioned) are not really beneficial. Something like that, I would guess. > Grammar, phonetics, even subtle semantic differences – I grasp all that pretty well, but vocab? We are similar then, as we grasp the feeling for a language rather easily. For instance, I was very good at writing French words (and also pronouncing them) and getting all the accents right. That was due to the sound of the word but also how the word "flowed" or looked. Of course, if I didn't know what the word meant, it would be pretty pointless. At least for me, ideally, I learn the language from the ground up, seperately from any other language. This really helps with trying to translate something from one language into another one when it simply can't really be done, as is often enough the case. And yes, learning words from context is the best.