Every Other Game Ever
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Tomb Raider:
That said, more games really need pacifist routes through them.
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.
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.
Several games recently. To be fair, it's actually valid in Spec Ops.m64 said:
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.
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.
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
-M
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).omicron1 said:
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.
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.Ohlookit said:
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.TWEWYFan said:
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.
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.
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.
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
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
I think it is not a valid argument to attack and kill everybody on sight, because they shoot at you.
In most shooters it is YOU, who walks gunblazing in enemy territory (or at least armed to the teeth)
Then there is a guardsman who just hopes to get through the night and you trespass on the place he is paid (or bound by duty and honour) to protect. He might not even think he is a terrorist, I mean, it's his home country, he's on guard duty.
And then he shot first.
For fucks sake if a corps of armed to the teeth marines would intrude in my country to find whoever or whatever and kill everyone on sight I would try to kill them too.
So basically, I always have a bad feeling when I am killing somebody, it is just so easy to be in their shoes. (I do not want to count in family members and such, because then I would have to stop playing)
That is the reason why I did not finish God of War 3 ... the obliterate Zeus scene was too much, I already destroyed the world and he just wants to stop me from doing more evil. I had to turn off the console and say "Never play this game again"
In most shooters it is YOU, who walks gunblazing in enemy territory (or at least armed to the teeth)
Then there is a guardsman who just hopes to get through the night and you trespass on the place he is paid (or bound by duty and honour) to protect. He might not even think he is a terrorist, I mean, it's his home country, he's on guard duty.
And then he shot first.
For fucks sake if a corps of armed to the teeth marines would intrude in my country to find whoever or whatever and kill everyone on sight I would try to kill them too.
So basically, I always have a bad feeling when I am killing somebody, it is just so easy to be in their shoes. (I do not want to count in family members and such, because then I would have to stop playing)
That is the reason why I did not finish God of War 3 ... the obliterate Zeus scene was too much, I already destroyed the world and he just wants to stop me from doing more evil. I had to turn off the console and say "Never play this game again"
To adapt the words of Urdnot Wrex,
"Anyone who fights us is either stupid or on [antagonist's] payroll. Killing the latter is business. Killing the former is a favor to the universe."
"Anyone who fights us is either stupid or on [antagonist's] payroll. Killing the latter is business. Killing the former is a favor to the universe."
