No Right Answer: Good vs. Evil - Who Wins More?
- Thread starter Firefilm
- Start date
The thing is Good and Evil are rarely ever the cut and dry in real life. You usually don't find maniacal, cackling, Saturday morning cartoonishly evil villains in real life. Even Hitler, as evil as we like to think he was, probably believed he was doing the right thing. He certainly believed he was doing what was best for Germany.
Overall a highly entertaining debate especially the twists at the end, there's one thing I didn't really get though. Was that last minute swerve by Chris before they cut to the credits supposed to be a reference to something or was he just being random?
Video discussion aside, I find that in a game like Fallout 3 the matter of Good and Evil is not always so cut and dry if you get down into the nitty gritty of it. Take the supposed remnants of the United States government known as the Enclave, the faction in game is unquestionably painted as the evil one and the Brotherhood of Steel the good. Though their moral compass might have been removed or completely inverted the Enclave does have a noble sounding goal, the eventual restoration of the US to it's pre-nuclear war glory. The only problem is that they feel that for this to happen all irradiated inhabitants of the wasteland would need to die, which is pretty much anyone who is not in the Enclave. To some this may be perfectly acceptable logic when you consider the horrible state of the world and the scarcity of resources like food and water that isn't irradiated. But the game never lets you choose Enclave or the Brotherhood, no matter how many times you play the core game the enclave always loses in the long run even if you don't destroy their base or kill their most senior military officer. Even in the Broken Steel add, unless you sneak nearly everywhere you go you have to all but annihilate the last of the enclaves forces and only then do you get the option to use a satellite guided missile strike to either hit their mobile command post or destroy the Brotherhood's primary base in the Pentagon.
But that's just a sparse analysis of the two main factions in the game, some things 'I think' are unquestionably evil, like wiping out an entire town that has an undetonated 'megaton' nuclear bomb sitting in the middle of it because some rich asshole living in a tower thinks it's an eye sore.
Video discussion aside, I find that in a game like Fallout 3 the matter of Good and Evil is not always so cut and dry if you get down into the nitty gritty of it. Take the supposed remnants of the United States government known as the Enclave, the faction in game is unquestionably painted as the evil one and the Brotherhood of Steel the good. Though their moral compass might have been removed or completely inverted the Enclave does have a noble sounding goal, the eventual restoration of the US to it's pre-nuclear war glory. The only problem is that they feel that for this to happen all irradiated inhabitants of the wasteland would need to die, which is pretty much anyone who is not in the Enclave. To some this may be perfectly acceptable logic when you consider the horrible state of the world and the scarcity of resources like food and water that isn't irradiated. But the game never lets you choose Enclave or the Brotherhood, no matter how many times you play the core game the enclave always loses in the long run even if you don't destroy their base or kill their most senior military officer. Even in the Broken Steel add, unless you sneak nearly everywhere you go you have to all but annihilate the last of the enclaves forces and only then do you get the option to use a satellite guided missile strike to either hit their mobile command post or destroy the Brotherhood's primary base in the Pentagon.
But that's just a sparse analysis of the two main factions in the game, some things 'I think' are unquestionably evil, like wiping out an entire town that has an undetonated 'megaton' nuclear bomb sitting in the middle of it because some rich asshole
I agree with the what the folks above me have stated. This debate really only belongs in the context of fiction, real life is just too morally grey.
As far as fiction is concerned I always end up cheering for the bad guy, mostly because they are more interesting characters! I especially love the intelligent ones, (for some reason the good guys are always somewhat thick.) Hannibal Lecter is one of my favourite characters of all time.
"Good wins, Evil loses. That's how the stories go. But what if Good cheated? And what if Evil threw the fight?"
-paraphrased opening that I love from a book by Tom Holt (can't for the life of me remember the title)
As far as fiction is concerned I always end up cheering for the bad guy, mostly because they are more interesting characters! I especially love the intelligent ones, (for some reason the good guys are always somewhat thick.) Hannibal Lecter is one of my favourite characters of all time.
"Good wins, Evil loses. That's how the stories go. But what if Good cheated? And what if Evil threw the fight?"
-paraphrased opening that I love from a book by Tom Holt (can't for the life of me remember the title)
It's good to be bad, but it's better to be evil.
Because evil will always find a way.
That being said, you can be the good guy, I'll be the one in the Dark Tower on the throne of skulls, using virgins as pillows because the skulls are too hard and uncomfortable as the rest of the world burns when I reveal my Dark Tower is actually a rocket/spaceship that's way too big to take off without destroying the planet or at least life as we know it in the process.
Because evil will always find a way.
That being said, you can be the good guy, I'll be the one in the Dark Tower on the throne of skulls, using virgins as pillows because the skulls are too hard and uncomfortable as the rest of the world burns when I reveal my Dark Tower is actually a rocket/spaceship that's way too big to take off without destroying the planet or at least life as we know it in the process.
A good go-to in terms of gameplay, though I found the gameplay theme of "here are toys, awesome toys that are easy to use ?now don't" wore thin. (I did get the good ending, but in large part because I liked the game difficulty at the start and found the addition of powers made it far easier than it needed to be. I do resent not being able to summon hordes of rats to eat my foes, though)FurinKazanNZ said:
Games with a message of delayed gratification (like Dishonored) or empathy over selfishness are fine enough, morally, but I do really pine for games-as-entertainment that move away from the Good / Evil (Light / Dark, Paragon / Renegade) dichotomies. It's the moralistic equivalent of zombies - I get why they're programmed into games (easy to set up) but they're crazy overused, to say nothing of being intellectually insulting - to paraphrase ZP, do I save the orphan or burn down the orphanage?
I'd love to see a game subvert this by having dualism (if they can't manage anything better) but then have either extreme be 'bad' endings and have the twist be a win condition that is to hit as close as possible to 'neutral'.
PS - at the end of the vid : "creepy". Unless you were misspelling for effect, in which case I'm confused but carry on.
