EvaUnit02 on 31/1/2015 at 11:28
Quote Posted by henke
Tactical shooters aren't really what I was looking for, and Payday didn't have much of a singleplayer narrative to speak of, did it? GTA V is the only one that's the kinda thing I had in mind.
All of the examples that I gave fall under the broad criteria that you gave in your initial post on this particular subject.
But yes, every heist in PayDay has its own narrative. As does every mission in the aforementioned TFPSes (R6 Vegas 1 & 2 have fully fleshed out story-driven campaigns to boot).
catbarf on 2/2/2015 at 05:30
Quote Posted by Pyrian
Yes, I find it difficult to feel all that bad about killing people who are actively hunting me down and attacking to kill me. :confused:
Many games go well beyond self-defense, though, especially in situations where you're the one actively provoking conflict. The rooftop archers in the Assassin's Creed games that I take out to prevent from raising the alarm aren't trying to hunt down or kill me but they get knives through the eye sockets all the same. To be fair there are a lot of games where you have good reason to do what you do, but when's the last time Call of Duty let you take prisoners or offer surrender rather than wipe out your enemy to the last man? And that's leaving aside games where you're unequivocally the bad guy and your targets have pretty good reasons to be actively trying to kill you.
Just curious, have you played Spec Ops: The Line? It has what I consider a great commentary on this, as your character repeatedly insists that you're just defending yourself and trying to save innocents as justification for the wholesale slaughter you're committing.
faetal on 2/2/2015 at 12:32
2 things come to mind for me:
1) Not sure there is much weight in arguing that there are moral and amoral ways to make one game character simulate killing another. Everyone playing knows they aren't real people. What's more disturbing is how normal it is watching explosions in Kabul on the news without batting an eyelid that there may be civilians getting some of that benign collateral damage which is so unfortunate.
2) I think anyone who can't separate fact from fiction and game motivations for real ones probably aren't going to be all that sociable even if this game were banned.
TL;DR - it's a game - big whoop.
Thirith on 2/2/2015 at 12:45
I think that's naive, to say the least. Obviously fictional characters are fictional, yet people have feelings with respect to fictions all the bleeding time. It's one of the main reasons why people are attracted to fiction. This doesn't mean that our feelings for fictional characters are identical to those for real people or that we can't distinguish, but it's simply not true that there's a hard and fast delineation between how we relate, emotionally and cognitively, between people who are real and people who are characters in made-up stories. Not a reason to ban games, but a good reason not to resort to intellectual commonplaces in the discussion. For better or for worse, it's very well possible that the characters in stories we've been enjoying for a long time are more real to us in a number of ways than the people dying in Kabul.
TL;DR - rather than being glibly dismissive about these things, we should try to understand better how people relate to fictions.
faetal on 2/2/2015 at 13:07
I'm not glibly dismissive - I find it disturbing how people can watch footage of bombing in civilian regions on the news and be desensitised to it, while worrying that some simulated killing may not have pure enough motives. The game looks like something I doubt I'd enjoy, as I'm a 95% Paragon in Mass Effect kind of guy. That said, I don't think those who have a blast killing a bunch of simulated defenceless civilians in a game are expressing some facet of their desires towards other people. It's no worse than letting people run over pedestrians or firebomb them in GTA, it just has the veneer stripped off.
Pyrian on 2/2/2015 at 13:12
Quote Posted by catbarf
Many games go well beyond self-defense...
Certainly, but Vicarious just got all weird about a specific example of self-defense.
Quote Posted by catbarf
Just curious, have you played Spec Ops: The Line?
Nah; it was a real struggle for me to get through some of the missions in Far Cry 2. I wanted to be all like "hell no I'm not doing that" but then the game just doesn't continue, and I really love the gameplay.
Thirith on 2/2/2015 at 13:19
@faetal:
Context does matter. Not to every single player equally, and in ways that are much more complex than 'good violence vs. bad violence', but it does matter. There was a stupid game in the '80s that had the player manage a concentration camp; the gameplay may have been 100% identical to any other management sim at the time, but the veneer does make a difference. Does it make everyone who played the game a closet (or not so closet) Nazi who wants to commit genocide? Definitely not, but the "veneer", as you put it, has an impact with respect to how the brain processes these things and integrates them with the concepts already stored in the brain. Games are Skinner boxes in many ways, so I do think it'd be naive to think that they can't condition us in certain ways. Again, I don't think this conditioning is as straightforwardly simple as "You play Hatred, you turn into a psycho (or you already are one)", but "It's a game, big whoop" is an assertion that needs quite a lot of evidence before it holds up. We are affected by fiction, at least in the short run and quite possibly in the long run, in ways that are measurable.
faetal on 2/2/2015 at 14:16
Making a game about concentration camps is hugely insensitive to people whose cultural history involved the loss of relatives interred in such camps. That's not removing a veneer, it's adding one.
A game about randomly killing people because of psychotic nihilism is just a trope writ large as a game mechanic. Of course killing innocent people is objectionable - I don't think that anyone who plays a game where this is the core activity thinks otherwise.
[EDIT] I'd be interested in general to debate why a huge proportion of otherwise sane, law-abiding people spend their free time playing in murder simulators anyway, given how a large element of gaming in general feature killing.
WingedKagouti on 2/2/2015 at 15:26
Quote Posted by faetal
[EDIT] I'd be interested in general to debate why a huge proportion of otherwise sane, law-abiding people spend their free time playing in murder simulators anyway, given how a large element of gaming in general feature killing.
Most of these games present you with a "
Do <violent action> to <target group> or <bad thing> happens. If you stop <target group> you're a hero!"-scenario, which for many is more than enough excuse to do whatever the game requires of them.
Pyrian on 2/2/2015 at 15:51
Quote Posted by faetal
I'd be interested in general to debate why a huge proportion of otherwise sane, law-abiding people spend their free time playing in murder simulators anyway, given how a large element of gaming in general feature killing.
What WingedKagouti said, but also precisely
because you can't otherwise do it, or at least wouldn't really want to. We have violent urges and we're generally expected to not act upon them. Of course that creates pressure to have an outlet.
