BathorysGraveland2 said:
I'd better pre-face this by saying this thread isn't a joke, nor do I wish it to become one. I'm not taking the piss out of "diversity in gaming" or anything. It's meant to be a valid thread.
Anyways, I've been planning a new character to play in the first two Fallout games. I've settled on playing a mentally challenged (super low intelligence) character (with a quick temper, sledgehammer, big guns and the bloody mess perk!!). Now, the early Fallout games, as well as Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, fully support mentally challenged characters as dialogue options and NPC reactions to you change if you have a low intelligence.
This has gotten me curious, are there other mentally challenged characters in video games? I haven't really heard of any. The closest would probably be that Katawa Shoujo, but I believe that is physical handicaps, rather than mental (could be wrong though, never played it).
In regards to diversity in video game characters, I imagine this could hold some potential.
Well, to be honest it seems to be fairly common in video games nowadays, or at least in the horror genera. It seems like every other horror game tries to be claiming to be "psychological horror" and has you taking on the role of some dude who hallucinates at the very least, some even play around with screen fuzzing and similar things. The entire game "Darkest Dungeons" is about managing increasingly insane adventurers as they tromp through dungeons.
If you entirely mean the whole "low IQ retard" thing, no, that doesn't come up very often in part because it's not really all that realistic. The games that were doing that didn't have your character being literally retarded but were pretty much doing the whole PnP RPG schtick of the "18/00 strength, 3 intelligence" fighter which of course was the source of a lot of jokes as the guy was supposed to be a competent killing machine, but otherwise did idiotic things. You know like "hey a gem, Dworg put it in the kitty with the other treasure will you" followed by horrible feline screaming as the fighter starts stuffing the items from the party's loot back into the witch's familiar. Of course it was usually done in less of a "screw the party" fashion and just had the character being as dumb as a rock for laughs, and also to justify why this guy was acting like a D&D fighter (not quite understanding the sheer danger he was putting himself in, but usually surviving because he's so damn tough).
Very few games seem to put the effort into writing that Fallout/Wasteland/Arcanum did as well, which means few if any alternate dialogue tracks.... which have also become increasingly difficult as the demand for full voicing has risen (ie it's easier to do with a game that is all text to begin with).
Now yes, while they did make jokes about people being kicked in the head and stuff in those games, they really didn't go full tilt with saying anyone was supposed to be retarded and it certainly was not promoted as such, which is probably why it didn't get much attention as well. To be frank people are probably correct if they assume we won't see any attempts at things like this from serious game creators until the SJW population has been trimmed down, or at least quieted down, quite a bit, which will probably happen over time since while businesses seem to still be backing down resistance is on the rise.
That said, as I pointed out originally, there are more "mentally handicapped" characters in games than you think, even when you omit the old Amnesia trope, though they tend to only work with very specific kinds of handicaps for the most part. That said in many games I suppose you could say the player winds up portraying the main character as a homicidal maniac, so I suppose that's kind of a mental handicap. I mean it doesn't seem uncommon for players to literally set out to murder everything the game will let them kill.
