Every Other Game Ever

[Not G. Ivingname]

How many blocks have you killed?

How many mothers and fathers have you erased from existence to get to me, the High Score?

How many pixels and squares have been lost when you failed to reach me?

How many more must be lost the next time we meet?

Your the real monster.

 

[PeterMerkin69]

Spec Ops: The Line is the biggest scam perpetrated by game designers since they decided to peddle their wares as art. The combat wasn't supposed to be fun? If anything, it was actually better than most modern military shooters. Otherwise, its gameplay was virtually indistinguishable from every other dudebro game released in the last decade. It's just that it was cleverly marketed to people who don't enjoy or don't approve of shooters, people who probably wouldn't recognize the gigantic line of shit they were being fed. Uncharted? Wave after wave, worse gameplay. Gears? Shoot guys. Halo? Shoot aliens. CoD? Shoot dudes. Tomb Raider? Wait a while, then shoot dudes. Red Orchestra? Red Dead Redemption? Resident Evil? WWIIOnline? All of them, they're all about shooting at people. That's the whole fucking point. You shoot the guys! Unless you're agent forty-whatever, in which case you're just shooting at sexy nuns.

There's also "that scene," that gut-wrenching, soul-search-inducing scene. That cheap, predictable, ham-fisted appeal to emotion that would have been skewered if it appeared in any "medium" that didn't make its living with chest-high walls. The one that mildly annoyed me because it delayed combat for a few seconds too long. Frag time, babe. Get your uncanny valley ass the fuck out of my way so I can get back in it. Whooohooo, pewpewpewpew, ahhhh help ahh, pew pew pew

And here's how this rambling diatribe ties in: the whole "violence in gaming is bad and you might be a bad person for enjoying it" idiocy rings hollow in light of overwhelming evidence that simulated, borderline cartoon violence doesn't have the effect on people that censors and gun lobbyists would like teary-eyed soccer moms to believe--so which is it, gamers, game industry and Dorito Popes? Is it harmless fun that never hurt anyone, or something nefarious from which your soul may never recover? WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE SOULS??

But what about the protagonists? Surely they're bad for killing more people than they've saved, rite? Well, okay, in the context of the narrative, this almost makes sense. Almost. Except, that inconsistency only applies when killing in general is said to be bad. Like on those imaginary rocks that dude brought down from his invisible friend. Otherwise, I very much doubt that anyone raising this point is utilitarian the extent of sociopathy, and your stupid morals probably agree with me even if you are. So, how about them Nazis? Is killing 50 Nazis worse than letting them live, even though it means they'll kill 25 Jews, Romany and retards, too? Because in games, with their fatalistic stories, that's usually the case; only instead of 50 facists and 25 innocents, it's two thousand pixel-people, and the pixel-world, or the pixel-princess, or the pixel-president, or even just pixel-America.

I especially loved the way that piece of shit game tried to make me feel guilty during its loading screens. KILLING FER GOD AND COUNTRY IS KEWL, BUT PRETENDING TO KILL THINGS THAT WERE NEVAR ALIVE MAEKS YOU THE DEVIL LOL! Pixels aren't people, you big silly. It's just whack-a-mole with cool looking mallets.

#GODWINNING

 

[springheeljack]

The thing I never really got is in games like Gta 4 and other games of that nature the nameless hired goons just keep coming and coming even thought they just saw you wipe out all of there fellows
How well are they paying these guys? You think at least some of them would decide to give up and escape

Or the way pack of animals keep attacking even though you just fired several rounds from a very loud gun

 

[Marik2]

haha this video is close to the point that the comic is making

 

[JediMB]

Tomb Raider:

Spoiler

The people you kill are all mad and/or vicious cultists who've been murdering and "sacrificing" other shipwreck and plane crash survivors for decades. Any one of them would kill you on sight. And all of it so that a madman could hope to revive and appease a supernatural entity bent on world domination.

And Lara didn't exactly have the time to explain all of this, so "you're insane" will have to suffice. It's not like it's inaccurate.

That said, more games really need pacifist routes through them.

 

[Woodsey]

IIRC this is an almost literal quote from Spec Ops: The Line, amiright?

Several games recently. To be fair, it's actually valid in Spec Ops.

They try and do it in Tomb Raider and then completely ignore it, and it makes no sense anyone: the villain sends out all his drones to kill Lara and Co, even attacks them first, and forces them to retaliate, and then pulls this out of his arse. It's so stupid I'm pretty sure I giggled at it.

 

[CrazyBlaze]

As my roomates and I play through Prototype 2, this comic will come to mind every time Heller yells something about the other people killing civilians after he has just killed a dozen of them to heal.

 

[Kargathia]

9. The DaVinci Code was actually Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Start

I may have to shamelessly steal this line some time in the future. Here, have a cookie for an entertaining post, as we apparently don't deal karma around here.

 

[Ohlookit'sMatty]

You know I hate too admit it but Grey makes a point // How many countless family's do you ruin each time you fight your way to the main boss? Sure they were hired goons but who's to say they didn't have wives and kids to go home to each night // In the end, who is the true monster, the villain wishing to take over the world and enslave humanity or the man who killed this way through an army of hired goons to stop him?


-M

 

[Darken12]

The thing is, murder is the name of the game. Or, should I say, murder IS the game.

 

[TWEWYFan]

In most game character's defense, it's not like they have a choice most of the time. It's usually kill or be killed. Then there's the motivation issue. It's still an interesting point but it's not exactly apples to apples either.

 

[MasterOfHisOwnDomain]

Unless you're in Dynasty Warriors where they're just knocked out!

 

[Lyvric]

Hah, he does have a valid point.

I'm not sure if I would hire kratos...maybe start him off with merchandise first.

 

[Farther than stars]

Problem is, it's about as valid a point as "You had to kill innocent german soldiers to stop Hitler!"

In some cases, it's the exact same argument.

In some, maybe, but the in the majority of cases it's not. Most real-life gang leaders aren't interested in shooting up civilians and spend most of their time peddling drugs anyway. So in a crime game like GTA or Saints Row the protagonist is still acting morally reprehensibly. Even overthrowing a dictatorship isn't necessarily a morally legitimate cause for execution extreme amounts of violence, since that violence might not be necessary (a la Just Cause) or civilians might end up getting caught in the crossfire (see also Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2).
Only in situations where large groups of people stand at significant risk of being killed can you justify killing large swathes of antagonists. But those kinds of situations usually boil down to something like: A villain is going to blow up the earth with his giant death laser on the moon! And by that point the context of the game has usually become too cartooney to be having any serious discussions about morality. That's one of the reasons why the Second World war is so unpopular as a setting these days. The relations between the the Allies and the Nazis has been so oversimplified into "Allies Good, Nazis Bad" that it's very hard to introduce any measure of depth into your story.

 

[Farther than stars]

You know I hate too admit it but Grey makes a point // How many countless family's do you ruin each time you fight your way to the main boss? Sure they were hired goons but who's to say they didn't have wives and kids to go home to each night // In the end, who is the true monster, the villain wishing to take over the world and enslave humanity or the man who killed this way through an army of hired goons to shop him?


-M

This also why Taken is such a bad movie. It tries to be all gritty and realistic, but in the end this guy murders and tortures a bunch of henchmen and bosses to get to his daughter and then they pretend like everything ends happily ever after, forgetting about the fact that Liam Neeson's character is basically a completely psychopath.

In most game character's defense, it's not like they have a choice most of the time. It's usually kill or be killed. Then there's the motivation issue. It's still an interesting point but it's not exactly apples to apples either.

And when it's kill or be killed that's fine. Bioshock is a good example of that. But a more important question is whether or not the protagonist had the opportunity of staying away from dangerous and violent situations. In Deus Ex: Human Revolutions you're basically just a hired gun who goes around looking for trouble at the behest of his corporate overlords. There's not a strong moral basis for that.
The same goes for most games in which you're a soldier. Mostly soldiers don't have to justify their actions, because the end goal of a war isn't something a soldier should concern themselves with; they just have to follow orders. But just because they don't have to justify themselves doesn't mean that they are in the right. Take Battlefield: Bad Company for instance. Bad Company is group of loose canons who are so reckless and insubordinate that they have literally been earmarked for canon fodder. They joined the army for the heck of it and then any killing which ensues is not because of some grand ideal, but because they put themselves in a situation in which they had to fight. That loose attitude to violence is just as reprehensible as the same attitude of any antagonist.

 

[TheMann]

Games tend to justify this by dehumanizing the enemies. In Half Life 2 for example, the Combine troops were all masked aggressors that barely spoke and in BioShock, the splicers were deformed psychopaths that screamed nonsense and attacked you with super powers. Aliens, demons, zombies and robots are also decent cannon fodder. These are ways to reduce or eliminate player empathy with the NPC enemies.

However many games, Dishonored for example, try to make feel you bad about killing too many people. You might overhear a guard who's throat you're about to tear out talking about how he's about to propose to his girlfriend. Other times if you kill someone, his buddies will yell in outrage that you just made his children orphans. The more a game goes through the trouble to make the enemy characters more human and even go as far as to suggest that they have normal lives outside of being your enemy, the worse you're going to feel about shooting, stabbing or blowing them up.

I think this strip is most accurate in military style shooters where the baddies are human enemy soldiers, and their evil leader could very well point out that you mass-murdered hundreds of his troops just to get to him.

Oh and happy birthday, Grey.

 

[5mj7R7yf4Dwr3gdZyyu9PeGNwYjlNrjzuh3iTXQG]

This thread is beginning to depress me. No one who kills, whether paragon police officers or psycho killers or gangsta drug lords or mid-eastern terrorists or US Navy SEALS, does so without tangling with the moral conflict between the necessity of taking a life and the gravity of killing. And where they stand can be radically different from how they are seen by their peers or the public. SEALS often have to retire because the guilt is insurmountable, while gangster cleaners and enforcers feel completely righteous in their position. Islamic terrorists are usually pretty solid sure that God is on their side (and no other religion can effectively contest that point).

During the cold war, the United States went to lengths to keep its nose relatively clean, at least in comparison to the Soviet Union. We could afford to be ideologically righteous. They were pragmatic in favor of the long game. (Today, both Russian fiction and games continue to have that air of necessity. I think it's cultural, influenced by Vodka-inducing winters.)

After eleven years of the war on terror, the United States tortures people, and uses robots to murder fifty civilians for every one high-value target. My country is the evil empire, and those terrorists who think they are rag-tag rebels fighting the good fight really are rag-tag rebels fighting a vastly overpowered enemy. And they certainly don't have to look far to see the atrocities of their enemies. (Granted, their regime will replace them with horrors of their own.)

So, yeah, the hero will always see the people he kills as the enemy. He will always see his murders as justified, his atrocities as necessary.

Go ahead and pretend he's the good guy, though. He does.[footnote]That would actually be a good twist for a game, where in at the end of the second act, the hero has a Falling Down revelation.[/footnote]

Incidentally, Vasili Blokhin [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Blokhin] murdered tens of thousands by his own hand in the service of his country as chief executioner of the Stalinist NKVD. And then there's Bombardier Thomas Ferebee of the Enola Gay.[footnote]I'll let you do your own research on that one.[/footnote]

238U

 

[JudgeGame]

It's ridiculous how since Spec Ops: The Line every single shooter has to use this throwaway line. Most of the time it doesn't even make sense in the context of the story.

 

[Snownine]

True, it'd be nice to see a game where these one man armies try to re-integrate into a normal civilian life

Not a game, but here's how it might go:

Man, I love Warbot in Accounting. My favorite one is when he is trying to get the birthday invitations made.