Comment on Why People Don’t Catch The Politics In Their Favorite Games
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 3 months agoSpec Ops actually did have choices where you could be good, but ironically people missed them because they didn’t think it’d work.
For example, at one point you’re being harassed by an angry mob of locals. A lot of players simply shot them because a lifetime of experience with shooters told them that no other input would be recognized. But in actuality, if you fired warning shots at the ground or over their heads, the civilians would flee without incident.
Kaboom@reddthat.com 3 months ago
I didnt know that. After the forced willie pete bit, I thought all the other bits were forced too. Specs op unintentionally set a rule “if theres a choice, youll be forced to take the evil one” which made the entire thing feel obnoxious.
naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
I think you’re actually engaging with it a bit shallowly. You are the one who invented the rule and a different framing is exploring how, if games seem to put us in situations where we must do horrible things to advance even a couple of times, we take that as a rule instead of risking losing to find other ways.
Which is a fairly glaring indictment of the whole military shooter genre which is all about “hard men and hard choices” that completely dehumanise the factions you’re in opposition to.
Kaboom@reddthat.com 3 months ago
A lot of gamers thought it was forced. Its just bad communication with the player.
naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
Military shooter games glorify war and shallowly reward horrible behaviour. Spec ops does it differently.
Majority of people: do horrible thing
Some people: experimental and find heroic thing is rewarded.
Discussion possible, why did the majority do that? could we talk about horrible and uncreative design patterns in the genre of military shooters? How media portrayals of war train us not to look for peaceful solutions? Whether this feeds into how we view American imperial wars?
you: no spec ops bad video game because I didn’t do the good option.