inu-kun said:
The problem is that pretty much all games has the monsters immediately aggro the PC (though a good idea for a game is one where you achieve initiative every time, thus being the one who "shot first"). Also, I don't really care for politics in games, for me a game deconstructing needs to say something about the medium than about myself, in the end the player follows the medium to reach it's conclusion.
Of course - but then why do such a high percentage of games require *murder*, err, the "cleansing of monsters", to form the basis for power progression? Also, why do games generally separate the world into two groups - villagers, city-folk, *civilized* people, viewed as good and not subject to extermination, and the "world outside the city", either the countryside crawling with monsters or the underground filled with dark nasties. If a gamer were to take games quite seriously, he might become terrified if he didn't himself live within a populated area. "Am I a monster?", he may ask. The games he plays certainly seem to think so.
If we take off our "defend video games at the expense of reality" glasses for a moment, we might conclude that the ideology of video games is based on the colonization model - the purpose of "killing monsters", deemed within the game itself as "saving humanity from evil", is actually just to clear the land of threats so that the human "civilization" can expand to that land. After all, those "good" city-dwellers, who have gotten their existing land in just that way, are going to need more land than they currently have soon enough. What better way to gain that land than by demonizing every living creature who would be a martial threat on it, sending out a "hero", a poor naive fool (Link?) with delusions of grandeur, and having him kill all of those living creatures, thus paving the way for expansion? It's a bad idea for the "hero" to feel bad about the genocide he's causing, so he's "killing monsters to save humanity from evil". Dick Cheney - "It's good what we're doing, George, we're saving humanity from barbarism". George, just like Link, is only doing God's work, at least in their own minds.
As far as "monsters immediately aggro the PC" goes - it's self-defense. When European colonists in North America just happened to wander westward with guns, they were "ruthlessly and savagely attacked without provocation" by "evil monsters" (err, Native Americans). They were simply defending themselves by exterminating them, and then they just happened to wander further westward with guns, and man, again they were attacked savagely and without provocation, and jeez, what else could they do but exterminate the monsters in order to defend themselves? And then just happen to wander further westward, with guns...
It's easy to view colonial victims as foolish to bother to defend themselves with force, but one needs to erase history to not note that that's never the first choice of the "monsters" in their relations with the "humans". Another way that games warp reality is to present the point at which "monsters" have GIVEN UP on dealing with the "humans" in any way but through martial self-defense as if it's FIRST CONTACT between the two. Usually colonial victims begin with a lack of understanding that they are besieged by a colonial force, so they consider the situation much more benign, and gain an understanding of the reality over time (usually through burying their friends and family), at some point turning to martial self-defense in desperation, which is the point at which they become "monsters" and receive final extermination (the "final solution").
Just because the player begins the game at a certain point, doesn't mean that the gameworld has no prior history of it's own. Yet the player is conditioned (and naturally inclined) to believe what the developer tells him about the world, while the developer himself (usually) is ideologically in line with colonialism itself. So the developer tells the player that Link is a hero, saving the world from evil, and the player believes him. And he goes on believing him, as Link depopulates the "uncivilized" world in game, after game, after game. And then we turn to Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey" to further "clarify" what's happening in games.
But here's the rub. Truth doesn't exist in a vacuum. What we call "truth" is actually determined by political and other forces within the world. That's why Native Americans were "monstrous savages" while they had land the Europeans coveted and then "unfortunate victims" once they were genocided and their remnants left to exist in a world of their own murderers, but they are also "pathetic alcoholics" who should stay on reservations, so that they don't "infect" the "good people" with their history.
Global capitalism has reached a stage now where it's more difficult to demonize people. It still does it's best, so Muslims are barbaric inhuman terroristic monsters, which the oil the Middle East holds that Western multinational corporations hope to control has nothing to do with whatsoever, but even contented Westerners viewing cat videos on the internet might stumble across a video log of an Iranian citizen sharing his life and become confused about how this person could be such a monster, and this confusion might lead to further uncovering of reality.
inu-kun said:
About the talk button, art is minimalistic, the absence of a talk button signals that talking is meaningless, thus the player plays by the games' rules of beating the monster, I can even give you a modern example, Priscilla (from Dark Souls), most players will not fight her as she does not aggro you and gives you a way out of the world, the game gives you a text and visual indication that violence is optional, thus you can choose whether to use it or not.
This process is certainly fascinating. Game content is always gated, and the mechanics of unlocking that content is what the player needs to do to explore the game itself. So while Link is victimized into being a mass murderer through the delusion of "saving the world from evil" for us we just do whatever it takes to unlock further game content. That the *method* of that unlocking is usually to kill "monsters", harvesting them for gold, gear, and XP, has only received any consideration in recent years, and is still marginal, usually waved away under the banner of "fun".
I love Dark Souls, and one thing I love about it is that the monsters are humanized, and the protagonist is dehumanized, which is not at all to say that monsters are good and the protagonist is evil. In Dark Souls the protagonist is a part of the world and the monsters have a measure of meaning and reality in the game. The game embraces, rather than attempts to eliminate, the history of it's gameworld.
Yet the game is still about remaking the world in the agenda of the protagonist, it's still about the ignorance of the protagonist with regard to the reality of the world, and it's still about harvesting monsters deemed inferior to the protagonist (they've lost their humanity while the protagonist wavers between human and undead) for a power progression to allow the protagonist to fulfill his agenda.
inu-kun said:
I'm sorry I misunderstood you about the monsters and humans, it's just I fear people will try to make it into "good" and "evil" camps, though in the game the description seems to suggest that monsters are incredibly inferior to man.
What do you mean by inferior?