inu-kun said:
Yeah, the game has a deconstruction of fighting monsters but it's extremely generous in that respect, letting you redo it as long as you don't go over the edge (which you need to force yourself to get there), it's more of criticism of min-maxing, farming monsters for a goal to be strongest or see how everything goes wrong, especially if you got the best ending already and rather than let the game "end" you decide to, for a lack of a better term, "rape" it to see how disfigured it can get. The thing is, in most games there is no talk button making this criticism pointless, in the end games are virtual world and your action don't reflect anything.
That's not at all true, which can be seen more easily in other forms of art because we're not as emotionally involved in defending them. There are people who refuse to see the Saw series because they don't like gore, and people who don't enjoy romantic comedies. Content matters, and it says something about our identity what artistic content we choose to become involved with - Demographics concurs.
We don't need to acknowledge nonsense, like the idea that killing digital code equates to killing a living creature. But we shouldn't fear ridiculous arguments just because those arguments are backed up by political power. We shouldn't say "games have no effects" because we fear the argument of "games are murder simulators" and whatnot. If we warp our own view of video games in order to try to maximize our political power we might end up with some power, but we lose truth and integrity.
The very *lack* of a talk button in most RPGs is meaningful - we're trained as video game players to ruthlessly make our way through the narrative, and anything that gets in our way is quickly dispatched. Most game designs *require* brutality because without it one is too weak to proceed through the narrative - creatures in the world are harvested - their lives broken down into Loot and XP to allow the protagonist to proceed. Creatures in games are usually depicted as monsters, terrible creatures that want to harm us, but as the saying goes if God didn't exist, we'd have to invent him. If there were no monsters to allow us to happily kill them to fuel our power progression, we'd have to psychologically modify our own identities to transform *innocent* creatures into monsters so that we could kill them to harvest their value for our own power progression. Put in another way, monsters are awfully *convenient* for a "hero" who needs to kill thousands of creatures to become powerful enough to stop the Big Bad.
This "power progression need" is made fun of in terms of "Link steals from villagers to buy items at the shop" - these seem to be quite poor people Link steals from, perhaps causing them true financial distress, but early in an RPG the "hero" is too weak to steal from powerful people and simply asking for donations to fuel his cause of saving the world doesn't work, because... ? It also begs the question of why it's often ONE person saving the world, while the rest of the population goes about their daily business. Is it really such a stretch to suppose that a "hero" in an RPG is actually a sociopathic megalomaniacal unhinged serial killer? Are they really monsters he's killing or just regular animals... or children? And sure, he becomes better and better at killing as he goes along... but that's hardly something to be proud of.
That we take this game design for granted indicates it's hegemony. It's the "air we breathe" and all is forgiven because the protagonist is simply wiser and braver than everyone else - he sees the Big Bad whereas a regular villager just sees another Asshole in Charge in a long line of them. He takes on thousands of monsters and the Big Bad whereas regular people actually value their own lives. Nevermind that all of this "bravery" is enabled by superpowering the main character and giving him a reload function.
The effect on us of video games is similar to the effect we experience with other forms of art. Watching Saw doesn't make you become a serial killer but it does have effects - if it's well acted perhaps we can learn what a human sounds like who's having their leg cut off (the actor's best rendition of it, anyway) - not something most of us have personal experience with.
I completely agree that we shouldn't celebrate "butterfly and rainbow" games in the hope that we shit those things after playing them. The point of acknowledging the reality that game content matters is not to denounce violent games and celebrate non-violent ones but to continue our exploration of what games actually are. It's self-defeating to be too scared to analyze games because we believe the result of that analysis will be to shut down game creation - at that point we need to be outside reality in our discussion of games, which would be the death of game criticism.
inu-kun said:
Also, trying to pin the monsters as victims and heroes as villains (in an established work) becomes a insane point I see lately (especially in Lord Of The Rings, usually be people who never read the background materials or even the friggin' books), besides, there are works that really do it, but if it's not explained then we don't need to really think about it too much.
I agree with you that this game is not about the Evil Humans terrorizing the Innocent Monsters. The first lines of the game lay out it's view of the "two races" - "Long ago, two races ruled over Earth: HUMANS and MONSTERS. One day, war broke out between the two races."
So BOTH races are imperial - before the monsters were sealed underground they ruled over Earth, by which is implied they dominated the "other races" on Earth, such as other animals. Likewise, the humans are not blamed for the war - it just "broke out", as if it happened unintentionally or at the very least has no discernable or discrete cause. Because there's no moral judgment in favor of either the monsters or the humans, in theory if the monsters had won the surface war the monsters may have sealed the humans underground instead.
