Why do all the commanders seem to have it? There's no cognitive damage (so far). I'd like to see a brain-damaged commander than fully remembers what happened, but is incapable of communicating anything properly.
+1 Perhaps their memories were stored in the cloud, which was lost when the makers of the commanders went extinct? Yet somehow the unit designs were kept.... Yeah I dunno.
Actually, if Uber were to do something like that... can it please be the Theta Commander. I can picture it as being super combat effective due only to immense clumsiness.
they should send an email to the NSA on good old earth, they probably have a backup. selective memory/data loss has a long tradition as stylistic device in story telling (whatever form), it's useful and its causes are sufficiently vague for a wide field of application.
Hard drives are separate from CPUs. Think of their brain as the CPU and the memory as the hard drive. Their hard drives could have all been magnetized for instance... Edit: Unit designs are part of the firmware
I think this is a fairly pivotal part in the lore that we will have to find out. Anyway, selective memory loss is far more likely in a machine than in a human.
Indeed. It also allows the player/reader to learn the universe as the character does, since amnesia allows you to "start from scratch" without literally being born yesterday. You don't have to find a way to communicate information to the player/reader that the main character already knows. Other devices that perform the same function in literary works are: outsider characters, such as the backwater hick or the foreigner character, who don't know anything about the place they are travelling through due to ignorance; the contemporary human protagonist, warped to wherever the story is happening who has to learn the culture (but not the language, strangely enough) as he goes along, the upshot of which is that you can reference contemporary human culture and not have it be weird, but this device often strains credibility; and the child, who will ask questions any adult should know, allowing the protagonist to explain The Great War, the Political System, or The Grand Prophecy everyone knows already, as though they were speaking to a child. I'm sure there are others, but I can't recall them at the moment. Either way, all of them have only specific applicability, and Amnesia is not limited to any of these. You can define the amnesia any way you like, the only problem being, it can be taken to ridiculous lengths where it could be accurately called Laser Guided Amnesia, where it strains credibility. But since it's so versatile and doesn't involve a lot of set-up, it's commonly used and also commonly associated with lazy storywriting. But done well, Amnesia makes a fine mechanism for allowing other characters to paint the scene for Herr Forgetful. Exasperated sighs at having to explain the obvious are worth bonus points.
