Quarterly reminder that “protagonist” doesn’t just mean “the good guy”
Countless “Walter White is based actually” fanboys would beg to differ.
Honestly if Walter just flexed into being a revolutionary instead of hoarding money that story could have been bad ass.
Such is the case for many very bad people. Even a fraction of
's hoard could actually “save humanity” by ending world hunger, which the UN tried to convince him to do when he demanded a plan to do it with a budget, received it, then ignored it.
Using le epic TOUGH MAN making HARD DECISIONSTM as a conduit for my wamen bad politics
Every time an Epic
puts Cawadoody on his list of “best nonpolitical games” I apply another layer of Joker makeup. 
They could have killed him in the movie length pilot, it woulda be fantastic, but noooo - fucking lib power fantasies “I went to school so obviously I’d be the best at crimes if I weren’t so good”
I slightly bristle at all the “we could [insert hypothetical fascist culture con] so easy!” comments many, including myself, sometimes make as well, it’s detritus from being converted liberals. We all were, handful of possible exceptions available, it’s nothing to be ashamed of but it is something to notice and potentially change. That said it’s probably more true than the true lib examples.
yea its like criticizing red dead redemption because you can’t play entirely nonlethally. the point of the fiction is to analyze the topics via the player character. its not an RPG (it has like 2 or 3 ‘decisions’ you can make in cutscene/QTE scenarios that lead to 2 or 3 slightly different endings that are all kinda depressing) its a linear 3rd person cover shooter. COD: Black Ops 2 is more of a choice based RPG than this. the whole point is that the war crimes feel the same as the normal gameplay, because normal military shooter gameplay is already making horrible things like war and murder feel ‘rewarding’ and ‘compelling’ and ‘satisfying’. how many times have you executed a wounded or ‘downed’ enemy in video games? perhaps even with a fancy animated ‘execution’… its a war crime.
I actually agree. Giving the player no option then scolding them generally isn’t effective. Give them two horrible options? Sure. Make them make a choice. If they didn’t make a decision it generally doesn’t land.
any other propaganda military shooters doesn’t give you a choice neither. yeah i agree it’s bad as a morality to system to just say “well if you wanna be good just quit” but spec ops isn’t some rpg it has all the mechanics of its genre including the lack of choice but it’s opposing their dominant narrative. if you had the option not to murder the civilians i think the impact of the game would be lost.
“well if you wanna be good just quit”
I’m well ahead of them there when it comes to Cawadoody and other flag humping propaganda trash. The best way to quit is to never start.
it’s called ‘The Line’ because you have to cross it
Just like the trailer narrator of 90% of cop action movies said in the 80s and 90s!
And they’re not trying to make any statement or impact to undercut the dominant narrative. They don’t want players to question, they’re reinforcing what the player already believes.
The game doesn’t need to give you a way out. But for the moment to be impactful you do have to manipulate the player in to believing that they made a decision and are thus culpable for their actions. Players have to feel ownership of what they did to feel shame, remorse, and horror. If they had no choice except “press x to do warcrimes” or turning off the game they’ll press x and grumble about being railroaded by the story.
You actually do have an option IIRC, it just never tells you. It’s supposed to highlight why the military is systemically bad and appears to remove all choice, even if individual soldiers could disobey orders.
Yeah, the only big unavoidable choice is the white phosphorus
pretty sure in most others you can either stand for a second and it proceeds or you shoot into the air instead of at someone and it proceeds
While the white phosphorus part doesn’t give you a choice, isn’t it basically that they used it only intending to hit military targets, then it turns out it hit civilians too?
I think it’s not a choice precisely because it’s the worst or most blatant war crime in the game IIRC and most people would decide against it even for “only military targets” and that would stop them from getting the point across.
It’s been a long time since I’ve played it so I might not be remembering entirely right. I might play it again now.
Yeah the white phosphorus scene was really dumb but the rest felt justified.
Yeah, the white phosphorous scene doesn’t really work unless you’re coming into it with a mindset of “whoa badass, this is gonna be just like those AC-130 missions in Call of Duty”
Apparently the devs wanted to include a branching story path where the player doesn’t use the WP, but they didn’t have the budget.
You should have an explicit option to refuse war crimes, but then it should turn into something like a Hugh Thompson simulator.
CW war crimes
When news of the massacre publicly broke, Thompson repeated his account to then-Colonel William Wilson[6]: 222–235 and then-Lieutenant General William Peers during their official Pentagon investigations.[15] In late-1969, Thompson was summoned to Washington, DC to appear before a special closed hearing of the House Armed Services Committee. There, he was sharply criticized by congressmen, in particular Chairman Mendel Rivers (D-S.C.), who were anxious to play down allegations of a massacre by American troops.[6]: 290–291 Rivers publicly stated that he felt Thompson was the only soldier at Mỹ Lai who should be punished (for turning his weapons on fellow American troops) and unsuccessfully attempted to have him court-martialed.[5]
Thompson was vilified by many Americans for his testimony against United States Army personnel. He recounted in a CBS 60 Minutes television program in 2004, “I’d received death threats over the phone…Dead animals on your porch, mutilated animals on your porch some mornings when you get up.”[16][7]
I actually agree. Giving the player no option then scolding them generally isn’t effective. Give them two horrible options? Sure. Make them make a choice. If they didn’t make a decision it generally doesn’t land.
For similar reasons, CDPR storytelling generally doesn’t land for me.
“Do you want to be a selfish asshole, or at least a pragmatic asshole… or do you want to care about those pitiful NPCs over there?”
“I want to improve society somewhat.”
“HAH! GOT YOU! Actually those pitiful NPCs were extra evil murderfuckers and you just allowed them to murderfuck. Get with the program and start being morally grey already!”
That’s not at all accurate, to the point that I’m struggling to even place what you’re referring to. I think it’s about how if you help guerilla insurgents in the first Witcher game smuggle weapons they later assassinate someone? That was a big “wait, you’re telling me the rebels fighting a war use violence to accomplish their goals and aren’t just heckin wholesome peaceful YA novel protagonists who win by being ontologically good and having plot armor like in every other game, movie, and book that gets mainstream attention in the US?” shock moment for western gamers whose consumption of hollywood treats left them without a framework for understanding that sometimes the materially and morally correct side in a conflict can still be doing brutal and underhanded things as a matter of material necessity.
I never got into the second game, but by the third one the overall moral tone is pretty clearly on the side of mercy and conservation, with sparing and helping magical creatures that are intelligent non-human persons that are just trying to survive being the clearly correct choice to the point that later on when you get put on trial by a werewolf for being a monster hunter a bunch of them show up as character witnesses to your defense. That’s also the game where the narrator all but says “the real monsters are cruel and intolerant men” over and over, every aristocrat you encounter is some flavor of monstrous or dangerously detached from reality, and most of the plot ultimately revolves around trying to stop an extradimensional settler colonialist invasion.
CDPR are still libs, but they overall have a much more materialist understanding of how things fit together instead of the sort of mishmash of hollywood tropes American lib writers throw together based on vibes.
I also think it’s worth mentioning that there are plenty of choices in Witcher 3 that have pretty obviously good and bad options. Anyone ratting out that godling to the property owner is doing so to be evil. Refusing money from poor folks is plain good and never comes back to bite you. Killing Whoreson Junior might as well have had [Everyone loved that.] pop up in the top left corner and even rewards you with a cute little easter egg later.
But all these examples don’t really get remembered because they’re less impactful than the choices that aren’t so obvious
with sparing and helping magical creatures that are intelligent non-human persons that are just trying to survive being the clearly correct choice
While this mostly holds true there is one quest I remember that annoyed the shit out of me
You had to investigate some haunted tower, and were presented with two options essentially: destroy the spirit outright or try to put it to rest gently by performing a ritual
The game was mostly chill about that style of peaceful ritual exorcism being the way to deal with spirits nonviolently, but if you do it the spirit reveals itself to be some evil spirit that murders her lover then flees, with the game implying she’ll just keep killing
Can’t remember it fully but that one quest did throw me
I think I got caught by that one in my first playthrough. I think it’s an interesting scenario because blind compassion isn’t really a feasible ethos with which to navigate life unless you like getting constantly taken advantage of. After all, we don’t drain our bank accounts helping Nigerian princes in a tight spot, do we? Gerry recognizing that her story doesn’t quite add up is an example of tempering compassion with scrutiny.
The game was mostly chill about that style of peaceful ritual exorcism being the way to deal with spirits nonviolently, but if you do it the spirit reveals itself to be some evil spirit that murders her lover then flees, with the game implying she’ll just keep killing
That’s the kind of shit I ran into before giving up entirely on it.
There’s plot twists and surprises, then there’s feeling the heavy hand of the narrative’s preferred direction.
You can like the games all you like, but my initial impressions in both CDPR-made series were that straying too far from the sometimes-obvious narrative lead (if the game even allowed it; even less choices or even potential mission path availability in CP2077) were routinely punished early on.
Call it “wholesome peaceful YA novel protagonists who win by being ontologically good” if you want (which is bullshit, I’m more than fine with surprises if it doesn’t just feel like a punitive narrator), but don’t bother accusing me of a bad faith position if that’s what you’re leading with.
I enjoyed Disco Elysium greatly, and yet at no point did I feel like I was punished by the narrator for playing Harry “wrong” and in a way unbecoming of some Revacholian equivalent of the Witcherino code or whatever. Sure, I got my comeuppance more than a few times (especially after bad die rolls) but it didn’t feel like punitive soft railroading the way CDPR writes its games.
Unless you’d argue that Harry was a “wholesome peaceful YA novel protagonist who wins by being ontologically good?” That’d be a fun mind unlock in the game, maybe.
much more materialist understanding of how things fit together
In the “bringing about meaningful change is impossible and attempting to change things outside of immediate personal fuckbuddy and adopted family circumstances is naive at best and probably worse than the status quo” way, maybe. I guess there’s a sprinkle of materialism in capitalist realism propaganda.
my initial impressions in both CDPR-made series were that straying too far from the sometimes-obvious narrative lead (if the game even allowed it; even less choices or even potential mission path availability in CP2077) were routinely punished early on.
I don’t really remember any decisions clearly being punished in general, although like you said there’s a lot fewer branching paths in Cyberpunk and that’s the game that’s freshest in my memory. What I remember of the Witcher 3 is that it pretty clearly favored helping people in general but that sometimes situations were murky and just an interpersonal dispute or everyone was awful or everyone had valid points and no matter what snap judgement you make it’s going to feel bad afterwards.
Call it “wholesome peaceful YA novel protagonists who win by being ontologically good” if you want (which is bullshit, I’m more than fine with surprises if it doesn’t just feel like a punitive narrator), but don’t bother accusing me of a bad faith position if that’s what you’re leading with.
That was a comment on what I remembered from how people were talking about it when it came out, like it was this big shock because of how common liberal storytelling made rebels just sort of empty wholesome underdogs who never did anything wrong and then just won by being the good guys, and then with the Witcher you had a clear hollywood “morally correct” choice of helping the downtrodden underdogs only to be confronted with the revelation that they were in fact fighting a war and following their own agenda. And there was just so much vapid commentary on how cool and edgy it was that the “good” choice could have “bad” consequences, although admittedly that was coming from a valid place of disliking the Bioware style “moral choices” where someone is either being a saint or a cartoon villain and it’s all very silly because the sides are all just nice guy or mean guy vibes with no material underpinnings at all.
I just get the feeling you’ve mostly seen that sort of gamer discourse and are inferring the worst because of how insufferable they are and what they focus on.
In the “bringing about meaningful change is impossible and attempting to change things outside of immediate personal fuckbuddy and adopted family circumstances is naive at best and probably worse than the status quo” way, maybe.
Not really? In both the Witcher and Cyberpunk the player is someone on the margins, and while Geralt is involved in things that actually have big implications for the setting and do actually change things, V is a dumbass lumpen petty bourgeoisie killer for hire whose best move is just fucking off and not doing that anymore.
I don’t really remember any decisions clearly being punished in general
I haven’t played the Witcherino in years, but those were my impressions when I played it way back (under massive pressure from people I knew, who expected me to be blown away and a massive fan, instantly. I won’t even go into what a dull slog the actual combat was, leaving little else to try to appeal to me but a story that I simply did not enjoy and did indeed feel soft railroaded with whether you believe me or not) and CP2077 may have been more recent but was even more restrictive, giving few options in many cases except “help the cops or leave” and “if you want to do this expansion you’re going to need to lick some fed boots.”
I just get the feeling you’ve mostly seen that sort of gamer discourse
To some extent, I feel like it hasn’t actually stopped and it’s even somewhat here in this exchange right now, especially the prior assumption that read to me as an implication that I must be a baby brained delicate snowflake idealist that wants sunshine and rainbows because I can’t handle the cold hard and very mature truths waiting for me in the One True Leftist Materalist Valhalla known as Murderfuckland once I’m ready to be one of the adults in the room, or something.
I won’t even go into what a dull slog the actual combat was,
Yeah it was very rough, especially early on. The Witcher 3 has one of the worst opening stretches of any game I’ve ever seen and I bounced off it hard the first time I tried it.
giving few options in many cases except “help the cops or leave”
I do not remember any scene like that. Cops are antagonists with very few exceptions and those few exceptions all either quickly become ex-cops or die.
“if you want to do this expansion you’re going to need to lick some fed boots.”
The opening to Phantom Liberty is pretty cringe, yeah, but it does take the mask off pretty quick and show them all to be vapid toadies and/or complete monsters before long. The best of the feds pretty much tells you outright “yeah I don’t care about any of this, I just want a cushy retirement that gets me out of here, btw we’ve got an office betting pool on how long it takes you to die so pls stay alive a long time so I win it lol.” The NUSA president literally sends in death squads to No Russian the Night City aerospace port in one ending and shows up in person to oversee the slaughter.
To some extent, I feel like it hasn’t actually stopped and it’s even somewhat here in this exchange right now, especially the prior assumption that I must be a baby brained delicate snowflake idealist that wants sunshine and rainbows because I can’t handle the cold hard and very mature truths waiting for me in the One True Leftist Materalist Valhalla known as Murderfuckland, or something.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. I contextualized the history of discourse around the specific plot point you seemed to be referencing. Most of that focused on the Witcher’s moral choices as being dark and edgy and how cool it is that “good intentions have bad consequences” in a way that was pretty much just western gamers raised on hollywood slop drawing exactly the wrong conclusions from something that didn’t follow the sort of narrative tropes they expected.
The Witcher 3 has one of the worst opening stretches of any game I’ve ever seen and I bounced off it hard the first time I tried it.
I was so worn out by that opening stretch that I may have been in a bad mood for trying to enjoy the “best part of the game” that came right after.
I do not remember any scene like that. Cops are antagonists with very few exceptions and those few exceptions all either quickly become ex-cops or die.
There was an entire side mission series that was both helping the cops and featured the extraordinary line associated with it, said by the protagonist character, of “not all cops are bastards”
.and show them all to be vapid toadies and/or complete monsters before long
I’m sure it does, but it wallows in the “everyone’s an asshole” ambiguity there the way Bioshock Infinite did with the Vox versus Columbia’s old ruling class. It doesn’t do much with it as far as I can tell except say “yeah everyone sucks, so pick who you want to fuck and enjoy the status quo. Again.”
I contextualized the history of discourse around the specific plot point you seemed to be referencing.
You also set up a straw effigy of YA protagonists defeating everything with love and friendship as the conjured up (only?) alternative to crapsack worlds where everyone with any agency or stage presence is an asshole and trying to improve society somewhat is naive/stupid/makes-things-worse. As the old saying goes, shots fired.
Yeah I was just following orders
🤔
No one forced you to pick up a copy of Bland Early 2010s Modern Military Shooter: Pentagon Propaganda Boogaloo
. You picked it up (ostensibly) knowing what it is and what it was going to includeIt’s like when I hear the name “Tom Clancy” come out of someone’s mouth when they talk about what they like to read.
Thanks for the warning, Mr. Bloodthirsty Armchair Warrior Boomer. I’ll stay well away from you.
Why use that image of edgeworth to make your point? That’s edgeworth standing on the right side of the courtroom, where he’s always wrong.
The whole point of the ace attorney games is if you are on the left, you are good and correct. If you are on the right, you are evil and wrong. And if you are in the center, you are either a hopelessly confused idiot, or evil.
type :shrug to look up emojis
took the one of the argumentative lawyerman
That’s… a bit of a stretch to consider that using a shrugging emoji of an antagonist in a video game means my argument is inherently wrong?
I assume they were joking but it wasn’t too clear.
That’d be like seriously saying anyone using Breaking Bad emojis cooks meth and sells it to high school kids and makes deals with neo-nazis.
no, it’s true. i’m a cat girl IRL because i use the catgirl emojino, it’s true. i’m a cat girl IRL because i use the catgirl emoji
and I am the chief of the VolCel Police!
The VOLCEL POLICE are on the scene! PLEASE KEEP YOUR VITAL ESSENCES TO YOURSELVES AT ALL TIMES.
نحن شرطة VolCel.بناءا على تعليمات الهيئة لترويج لألعاب الفيديو و النهي عن الجنس نرجوا الإبتعاد عن أي أفكار جنسية و الحفاظ على حيواناتكم المنويَّة حتى يوم الحساب. اتقوا الله، إنك لا تراه لكنه يراك.
Every emoji a confession
I think the sidebar in the emoji comm is helpful to remember. It says “emojis are what they convey”, so expecting everyone to know the direct reference to the video game (and by extension all other 2400 emojis) is a little much. You can use it that way or as a lil guy shrugging.
The whole point of the ace attorney games is if you are on the left, you are good and correct. If you are on the right, you are evil and wrong. And if you are in the center, you are either a hopelessly confused idiot, or evil.
Gif reference aside, I don’t really buy that if you’re not joking, because that’d be like seriously saying anyone using Breaking Bad emojis cooks meth and sells it to high school kids and makes deals with neo-nazis.
This is dialectics
No one forced them to tell their story in a way that robbed the moment of it’s impact and made the player feel annoyed and hoodwinked instead of horrified.
The player could always make the choice to stop playing and turn the game off, and it even says as much during one of the loading screens so it’s 100% intentional. Often times the correct choice is one that is outside the narrow range of choices that are given, and I believe that was the point the developer was trying to make.
EDIT: It’s worth checking out the loading screen messages in the game, since these often give away what the devs intended, sometimes in an ironic way. Some examples:
-
To kill for yourself is murder. To kill for your government is heroic. To kill for entertainment is harmless.
-
Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two conflicting ideas simultaneously.
-
You are still a good person.
-
The US military does not condone the killing of unarmed combatants. But this isn’t real, so why should you care?
-
Do you feel like a hero yet?
-
If you were a better person, you wouldn’t be here.
-
Kill a man, and you are a murderer. Kill everyone, and you are a god.
There’s a whole list here: https://pastebin.com/w7x0LJ5w
They’d best be prepared to offer you a full refund if they intend you not to actually use the product.
It’s poor storytelling.
If I remember correctly, that part happens relatively late in the game, so you play a decent amount before that.
They aren’t preventing you from playing the game or anything, as the choice is ultimately up to you. You just don’t get to be a hero if you choose to keep playing.
Sure, right, it’s their game, they can do whatever they want, and what they wanted to do was tell a story badly.
People talk about The Line to this day, but they only argue about whether that scene was a legitimate story telling beat or a gotcha. No one actually talks about the story, whether the story was moving or effecting, whether it changed anyone’s minds. They just argue over the wp scene. People remember that there was a forced non-choice that folks didn’t like and that’s all they really recall about the game. I’d argue that’s good evidence the game failed in its messaging.
No one actually talks about the story, whether the story was moving or effecting, whether it changed anyone’s minds.
You might be right, though I don’t think that’s necessarily because the story is bad. Overall, I thought the story was pretty decent (even if a little derivative), though I also think it was much more relevant when the “War on Terror” was fresh in people’s minds. That particular scene is discussed more because of how shocking it is and due to it being a major turning point in the story, but there is a lot more to talk about imo, including the loading screen messages.
Have you played it yourself, just curious?
-
People continue to defend their design choice even though “uh aktually you could prevent bad thing from happening by not continuing” has never worked for other media. Imagine people saying this shit for a novel. If it’s not a real choice, then whatever you do to continue the game is functionally the same as turning the pages of a novel. It’s whatever set of mechanical motion that is needed to advance progress in consuming the media.
Spec Ops The Line is a fantastic game that just so happens to be a thorough deconstruction of the generic power fantasy military shooter so naturally gamers hate it for making them question why they enjoy playing games like Call of Duty or Battlefield.
Yep. It holds a mirror up very thoroughly to the audience to show them what they are and they unsurprisingly HATE that.
Sends them scurrying back to their reddit shithole to jack off to gore footage of surrendering Russian conscripts being blown up
Yep. It holds a mirror up very thoroughly to the audience to show them what they are and they unsurprisingly HATE that.
Gamers are the least media literate of people who’s entire hobby is about exposing themselves to media.
When
are pounding down cross-promoting snacks and beverages while killing otherfied “terrorists” in Cawadoody and mildly grumble about predatory monetization but blame the wokes for it 
How dare a piece of media, I product I bought, challenge me by pointing out that the standard media of this type depicts horrific acts. Clearly it wants me to feel ashamed for playing, and not to reflect on why it’s so uncomfortable when highlighted, but so banal it goes unacknowledged when not?
Could I use this moment to grow? To ask how we got here and whether we should stay here? Certainly not, because games are masturbatory toys of indulgence and nothing more. Unless of course I’m defending how I spend my time, then they’re art.
Games are art but as soon as they are critiqued the way art is critiqued that is a direct threat to the treats and requires a decade-long culture war
It’s probably time to start including videogames in English or whatever class covers media literacy. Not just movies and books.
Can you imagine the backlash though? From chuds and boomers alike.
I spend too much of my life in games (board, social, or video I play them all!) and I really do wish more people who enjoy them were interested in critical analysis of them. Outside of gamedev circles and weird youtube channels asking “why is this being presented the way it is?” is a technique for speedrunning slur%. Especially if a game is non, or non traditional, narrative. Like I dare you to try analyse the themes of slay the spire or whatever on the subreddit haha.
Shout out to the time SUPERHOT tried the “Stop playing the game! I mean it! You’ll be responsible for the consequences!” thing and I just ended up shutting it off and never playing it again
But but but you end up shooting yourself in the back of the head. It’s tight.
The game works if you realize that there is no “bad apples” when they work for the empire, only “good apples,” and even then 9/10 times, they will volunteer to be a rotten apple for self preservation. Therefore, the only choices you have are to kill, kill, and kill.
But i don’t think Americans are introspective to be making media like that. I believe it really was just a dumb gotcha ‘mmmm hypocrite much??
” gameThat comment is probably bait posted by the OP in the image on another window to drum up engagement.
I’ve never played it but it seems like it’s mgs2 for normies and 10 years later.
I always maintained it was just a worse and less topical MGS2.
Spec Ops: The Line, beyond being a pretty good game with a lot to say about the average gamer’s enjoyment of military shooter power fantasies, also introduced me to my favorite band, the Black Angels, and I’ll be forever grateful to it for that.
Least enjoyable game I’m glad I played. Actual art. Hamfisted, leaned too much on using the term “Cognitive dissonance” as a magic spell to contain and explain, but well done.
