6 ms·

The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

298 points by prismatic 4mo ago

jdw64 4mo ago
I can agree with the other examples, but including Dark Souls feels like a stretch. In Dark Souls, the primary currency for progression—'souls'—is fundamentally earned by killing enemies. No matter how tragic a monster's lore might be, the moment it drops the exact resource the player needs to level up, can we really call that a genuine moral dilemma? I agree with applying this to Undertale, but using Dark Souls severely dilutes your argument. If Dark Souls counts, then countless text-heavy JRPGs with sad villain backstories would also fit the bill. Ultimately, for a true moral dilemma to exist in game design, there has to be a scenario where the player doesn't strictly need to kill mechanically, yet they are forced to confront the choice of doing so
- probably_wrong 4mo ago
  I vouched for your comment because, while (IMO) dead wrong, I didn't think it was "this should be flagged" wrong. The article uses the word "dilemma" exactly once in the introduction, mostly because that's not really what the article is about. Instead it's a reflection of the melancholy of playing a game where, justified as your actions may be, the entire act of killing is surrounded in sadness. In Dark Souls specifically (mild spoilers) your character is fighting to prevent essentially the end of a world that's falling into decay. Yes, you kill enemies, but the enemies themselves are corrupted creatures who went mad and you only kill them to prevent the corruption to spread even more. Your end may be justified, but that doesn't mean you can't be sad about having to kill them to begin with.
  - AndrewDucker 4mo ago
    And even more-so, with the extra information you discover, and especially the alternate ending, your end may very-much not be justified.
  - jdw64 4mo ago
    While I agree to some extent, realistically, if we follow that logic, wouldn't we have to feel a sense of melancholy every time we kill an enemy in almost any game? It's highly debatable whether players actually feel melancholy when fighting monsters in Dark Souls. Putting aside the fact that the story is notoriously cryptic and reliant on player speculation, yes, the lore of Dark Souls is tragic. However, this is the sadness of the 'lore,' not an emotion driven by the 'gameplay.' The problem is that this tragedy must be pieced together by reading flavor text. Does the game actually communicate this naturally during play? Not really. The player is simply thrown into a brutally hostile world and left to suffer. In reality, players hunt these monsters to buy gear or level up, not out of melancholy. Shadow of the Colossus portrays tragedy brilliantly in this regard because you actively track down and stab peacefully existing creatures. But I strongly question whether Dark Souls and Spec Ops: The Line belong in that same category. Spec Ops: The Line forces you to commit atrocities just to emphasize a protagonist going mad, and in Dark Souls, every monster is inherently hostile toward you. I find it hard to believe a player would feel genuine melancholy from this kind of deceptive design, where the game fixes your choices entirely on a linear track just to force a tragic point. Normally, when an enemy is that hostile, your only thought is, 'I just need to kill this bastard.' The sadness in Dark Souls is a retroactive feeling you get from piecing together flavor text. While I appreciate the depth of that narrative, it's very hard to put it on the same level as making unprovoked attacks on peaceful monsters (Shadow of the Colossus) or actually having the mechanical choice to spare them (Undertale).
    - Zarathruster 4mo ago
      The praise heaped on Spec Ops makes me embarrassed for games as a medium. This is a game that forces you to commit mass murder in order to progress the storyline, pretends that something profound has just been demonstrated, and then tries to guilt trip you about it for the rest of the experience. It's a mess of dumb, trite, "war is hell" cliché and I wish we would collectively forget about it.
    - alex_c 4mo ago
      >Does the game actually communicate this naturally during play? Not really. The player is simply thrown into a brutally hostile world and left to suffer. In reality, players hunt these monsters to buy gear or level up, not out of melancholy. It's more nuanced than that, and "in Dark Souls, every monster is inherently hostile toward you" is not true. Most games have a clear division between hostile mobs you kill for XP and loot, and story NPCs which you cannot / are not supposed to attack. That line doesn't really exist in Dark Souls. Most (all?) story NPCs can be killed, which has specific consequences if the player chooses to do so. And there are monsters throughout the game world that are functionally identical to hostile monsters - they look the same, drop the same resources if you attack and kill them - but are simply not hostile to you and are just minding their own business. It IS more subtle than in other games, and might not even be obvious to the player at first. This gradual realization was actually one of my favorite parts of playing Dark Souls. But there are definitely intentional gameplay elements that support this, it is not strictly text lore.
- kibwen 4mo ago
  > the moment it drops the exact resource the player needs to level up, can we really call that a genuine moral dilemma? New players to Dark Souls assume that they need to kill every monster in their way to proceed. But the design of the game itself, with its repeated corpse runs to boss arenas where they get splatted over and over again, eventually teaches the player that running past enemies where possible is actually an expected way to play. Furthermore, leveling up is not required to beat the game, nor is killing enemies the only way to acquire souls. And there are plenty of opportunities for the player to choose whether or not to kill entirely peaceful NPCs, most notably Priscilla, who is posed like a boss while standing in what looks like a boss arena in a place where you fully expected to find a boss to fight, and yet she begs you to leave peacefully and does not bar your exit. It's not as clear-cut as Shadow of the Colossus (in particular it's not actually clear what the ethics of killing hollows is, given that they're cursed to repeatedly rise in undeath for all eternity), but the core theme of the game is futility.
ellefire 4mo ago
The Cogwork Dancers in Hollow Knight: Silksong are a recent example of this https://hollowknight.wiki/w/Cogwork_Dancers https://hollowknight.wiki/w/Cogwork_Dancers
- xkcd-sucks 4mo ago
  All of Silksong did this really well - Killing the bosses is the point of the game; each boss fight starts out frustrating and becomes quite fun, but at the point where the fight becomes pure fun you kill them and can never repeat that fight again. With the exception of its wonderful final boss fight, but still
david_shaw 4mo ago
The Fallout games often exemplify this: nearly every decision you make is morally ambiguous, and often has far-reaching repercussions in the story and world.
- alansaber 4mo ago
  Fits the setting well. Especially New vegas.
  - lopsotronic 4mo ago
    FNV is peak franchise, IMHO. Master's study of how to make a sandbox tell a narrative. Also, and this is trivial tiddlywinkies, the designers bothered to do a little bit of light reading about how guns actually work. I am continually distracted by impossible mechanisms in later FO games.
    - alansaber 4mo ago
      I read that the animation for Joshua Graham disassembling the pistols was relatively accurate if that counts lol
- superxpro12 4mo ago
  IDK if i'd go that far... there's usually clear paragon and renegade pathways. I'd agree that they do include a few morally ambiguous quandaries, but they are not regularly encountered.
CurtMonash 4mo ago
For a mainstream boss example I nominate the Lonely Giant in Elder Scrolls Online. There also are plenty of cute-animal mobs that weren't going to bother you unless you started something. An example that still stands out for me is the first set of sleeping bears in LOTRO.
- no-name-here 4mo ago
  LOTRO = Lord Of The Rings Online
ajuc 4mo ago
No mention of the Witcher? The whole franchise is based on moral dilemmas like that.
- Aerolfos 4mo ago
  Or Nier, which are inspired by and connected to Shadow of the Colossus in the same way as SotC is connected to Zelda (explicitly mentioned in the article)
  - ThrowawayR2 4mo ago
    Agreed, Nier: Replicant definitely belongs in the list. Yoko Taro successfully asks "What if the opponents you fight were the main character of their own stories with their own good and justifiable motivations?" as well as any of the other games mentioned.
- lukwoz 4mo ago
  Came here to mention the same thing. It's one of the pillars of the whole Witcher saga, but most clearly it's visible in Sapkowski's short stories - The Lesser Evil, A Grain of Truth, A Question of Price, The Witcher, to name just a few.
- xxs 4mo ago
  There are so few (2) succubi mutagens in Witcher3. Gotta do what you gotta do, 30% damage is nothing to scoff at.
- relaxing 4mo ago
  Maybe the author, being Czech, wanted to look beyond the quintessential Slavic contribution to the genre. It’s the only explanation I can think of. The idea that monsters can be understood, and spared because in the end they’re exhibiting human flaws, is such a powerful storytelling device.
  - xxs 4mo ago
    >author, being Czech Sapkowski is from Poland, though. Still Slav, but still.
Kovah 4mo ago
Another interesting example are hunting games such as Hunter Call of the Wild. I played that for countless hours. While some people simply go for reckless trophy hunting, I thought about most of the shots I took; there's a flock of deer with a single stag, surrounded by does. I knew I would feel awful taking out that single stag, leaving the does behind alone. Could taking it out now be considered "crowd control", how rangers call it? Maybe, under specific circumstances. Or is that just a lie I tell to myself to justify the trophy? Taking shots on animals living their life in the forest and on the fields imposes a moral/ethical question, especially if you are not being attacked or would otherwise starve to death.
- thaumasiotes 4mo ago
  > there's a flock of deer with a single stag, surrounded by does. I knew I would feel awful taking out that single stag, leaving the does behind alone. Assuming the deer were in such a social structure to begin with, they'll be alone for maybe a day before another stag steps up. Deer do not exist in a gender ratio of 6:1.
  - Kovah 4mo ago
    Well, that might be technically correct. Yet it still doesn't feel good to destroy this social group they formed, to decide it's okay that this animal feels alone for that day. That's one of the points of the article as I understood it: is it ethical to play god and decide on that animals' fate?
jjhfarmer 4mo ago
The first game I thought of upon reading the title of the article was 'Shadow of the Colossus'. There's a particular boss about half-way through the game who resides in a small secluded garden and the process of defeating them involves tricking them in to ramming over columns etc. until they are trapped. I have a strong memory of being 12 years old, lying awake at night with the melancholic feeling this article describes, with the realisation that those beasts never did anything to me and I was essentially going out of my way to trick and slaughter them. No other game has invoked that feeling in me since. It's a very special game. It remains one of my favourites and a stellar example of what the medium can achieve.
- baumschubser 4mo ago
  To me, these reflections upon my aggressive and violent behavior in a game are much more impactful than games that put me into dilemma situations, where you are already presented with a nicely arranged moral problem in the moment. These are two distinct techniques and I feel the latter almost always failed to impress me much, while the first one is where I feel caught, even shocked by myself and the cold-bloodiness to (virtually) follow any suggestion to kill.
  - LandR 4mo ago
    The Uncharted games are weird like this. They get lauded for their storyline, yet Drake is out their killing hordes of guys for what ? Some treasure ?
    - ArmadilloGang 4mo ago
      I thought about this playing Just Cause 2. So I go to this island, blow up all of their oil, gas, and power infrastructure, killing hordes of security guards who are just locals working the few jobs available to them.
    - rybosome 4mo ago
      I believe that exact framing of Uncharted is the origin of the term “ludonarrative dissonance”, where the character’s motivations and morals are in contrast to the extreme violence they are committing because of the nature of it being a video game. Definitely one of those things I didn’t question when I was younger, but as I get older it’s hard not to see it. EDIT: I was wrong, the term originated from an analysis of Bioshock, but Uncharted was later held up as a strong example of this. And it’s more generally about the contrast between narrative and gameplay mechanics.
myfonj 4mo ago
> As a result, the game offers no easy satisfaction of hacking and slashing through weaker opponents. Besides the questionable morality of kill=experience=progress in typical hack'n'slash or roguelike, what started to irritate me in there as I grew older as well, was the stupid mechanics where crowds of enemies described as intelligent humanoids (i.e. not animals or robots) facing clearly overpowered high-level PC (famous, even) never surrendered, almost never tried to flee, attacked one-by-one, and shoved no sign of tactical thinking or self-preservation instinct. Despite being armed and (by description) organised, PC could enter a narrow corridor, defeat dozen of them without taking any damage, yet there will be a waiting line eager for demise by a single hit -- even actively advancing towards it. No attempt to regroup, to take advantage of the number superiority, wait in open space, ambush from all directions, or anything like that. Same applies to most FPS: there is a Doomguy running around at unprecedented pace, slaughtering everything that moves, but we will all keep our scattered positions. (This led me to a thought, whether it would be possible to rearrange enemies in canonical Doom map so that all would attack at once at some appropriate spot and whether it would guarantee their victory or not.)
- yomismoaqui 4mo ago
  The solution for your problem is playing a Souls game
  - scotty79 4mo ago
    How would roleplaying a victim help his problem of not being feared sufficiently by little computer people?
- rootlocus 4mo ago
  While I agree it's incredibly jarring in some games, I'm always thinking back at a presentation by David Rosen on procedural animation: "First, do no harm to the gameplay". He's talking about animations in particular, but I feel that should be a core pillar for any game designer. Many things are unnatural in games: you don't instantly recover from a beating by eating one apple in real life, but we're ok with it in games because it makes the gameplay fun. https://youtu.be/LNidsMesxSE?si=fGFCTCHm77OJiYu3&t=260 https://youtu.be/LNidsMesxSE?si=fGFCTCHm77OJiYu3&t=260
rootlocus 4mo ago
> Before the encounter with the first Troll, the dumbfounded mythical character, Atreus, asks: “We’re going to fight that?!?” Kratos, the main character, answers: “We have no choice,” in a matter-of-fact, almost resigned way, as if shruggingly accepting the design conventions of the game itself. I didn't see it like that. Atreus thinks he and his father are normal humans, even if he saw his father perform incredible feats of strength such as carrying a huge tree trunk. Atreus has no idea what his father is capable of, and he himself has been mostly sick and frail. The boy is scared. Nowhere does that scene read as "That looks humanoid, I don't think we should kill it". Draugrs are more humanoid and they've been killing some on the way. The troll is incredibly fierce and the largest opponent they faced until now. That's a completely natural reaction from the boy with no moral implications. It's actually a little later in the game when they're assaulted by Reavers (actual living humans talking about eating them) that Atreus kills one in self defense and remains shocked by the experience. Kratos shows empathy and care when he comforts him and says "Close your heart to it". [1] There's a deep thread about humanity and the right or need to kill in self defense in the game, and Atreus goes through a rebellious phase where he thinks godhood gives him the right to do anything. But the troll scene? That's reading too much into it. 1. https://youtu.be/_oOZG5-tqpA?si=w6-PyJXjTZ-qSv2q&t=4173 https://youtu.be/_oOZG5-tqpA?si=w6-PyJXjTZ-qSv2q&t=4173
- br121 4mo ago
  Atreus' question come out of fear, but Kratos' response is what the article focus on. Kratos does not take any joy in killing, he does that out of necessity and would have loved for that necessity not to arise. He could have boasted "I have killed bigger things", but instead he choose words of resignation against a kill or be killed fate he was trying to escape
  - gchamonlive 4mo ago
    > he does that out of necessity and would have loved for that necessity not to arise Which I believe is in contrast with the older games. Haven't played them but from what I've heard he'd pursue conflicts because he enjoyed them. I think this change is because of his ongoing process of coming to terms with being a father which takes the act of killing and twists it inside out.
rob74 4mo ago
I wonder how they arrived at the name "Ebrietas"? Does it have something to do with being inebriated? EDIT: it does, I just had to google "Ebrietas latin" (and got https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ebrietas https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ebrietas), otherwise it only returned references to the monster.
- shakna 4mo ago
  Probably more likely related to the Mexican moth, considering the character designs.
- gainda 4mo ago
  From what I recall there is a relationship in the game of how much blood you take from an outer being like her & how crazy (drunk?) the user then becomes, before becoming a crazed beast. There is one key item in the game called “Eyes of a blood-drunk hunter”
- tptacek 4mo ago
  It's designed after a moth species.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
shevy-java 4mo ago
> This non-battle turned out to be a powerful experience, but its power stemmed mostly from the contrast between this and my other monster encounters. This is more correlated with modern games. Modern games, at the least non-Indie games, dumbed down the gameplay. I am not saying such games are awful per se, but they are often very simplified to the 1990s era in many ways. Many old RPG games are quite complex; or told as a story. The old Betrayal at Krondor was kind of like a novel - unsurprisingly since Feist wrote most of the content (save various adjustments made to the gameplay itself). Yes, graphics are bad, options are too few, but storyline-wise this was my favourite RPG. Another example would be "Realms of Arcania" (in german the three DSA games). Again, graphics today are not great, and playing it in english versus german is actually worse (one of the few games where german was better than english, by the way), but the gameplay options in the second part were nice. Part 3 was a bit different, and people critisized it, but I still liked that you would explore a "real" city while still having tons of options available. Other RPGs such as Baldur's Gate 2 are a bit different - DnD itself is IMO a very bad system for RPGs (takes too long to explain now, but just look at static alignment systems - that makes zero sense) and most of it was focused on hack-and-slay for power and items, so it has the same problems. But with mods you can kind of extend the story and add more storylines, thus having more options. So BG2 is not the best example here, compared to the other two; even before that, if you remember the old Ultima series, the NPCs kind of had a regular life, worked at specific times, went to work leaving their homes (and you could then pillage that) and so forth. A lot of the "why do I want to slay the cute monster", is driven by the underlying design. These games often try to dumb down everything. I noticed this first with World of Warcraft. To me these games never were interesting, as it seems to have been deliberately dumbed down. Many of those games today are more like a movie with a bit interaction in between. That's imo not quite a game anymore. There are some exceptions though; I liked little nightmares, but this is also a simplified, mostly linear gameplay. This problem keeps on coming back again and again. For some reason modern games hate complexity. Either humans became dumber, or designers wanted to simplify things.
- ajuc 4mo ago
  1. there's a trade-off between graphics/sound quality and story complexity. The better quality your voiced dialogue is - the more you have to pay for every additional line - so you tend to shorten it. Same with graphics - it's one thing to paint 8 frames of 32x32 sprites. It's another to motion-capture, model, texture, and process 100s of different versions of each character animations. 2. you're comparing unfairly (looking at the most complex examples from the past and comparing them to modern average). There were LOTS of very simplistic games in the past. You just don't think about most of them. Some genres went extinct because of how simplistic they were (see the dungeon crawlers where there was no dialogue or story whatsoever - just moving at 90 degree and hitting monsters) - it's the "old music was better" fallacy - you don't remember the old music that sucked. If you compare most complex modern games they blow out of the water anything from the past. Let's say Baldur's Gate 3 or Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft compared to let's say Elite or Betrayal at Krondor.
ionwake 4mo ago
If you are young "shadow of the collosus" is a game I highly recommend you dig up and play, it set a special unique tone for the 2000-2010 era
- Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
  If you are old and haven't played it yet too though. There's a few games that are a pretty unique experience like that, Bloodborne is another, but also consider Journey and probably a list of others.
- asgerhb 4mo ago
  When you say "dig up," do you recommend the remaster or the original?
  - frogulis 4mo ago
    If you've got the ability to play the original, it still held up fantastically when I last played it properly (2-odd years ago). I tried emulating it a few years before that when I didn't have any workable screen for my PS2 and that was not so good. A game that pushed the original hardware to its limit also pushed the emulator past its limit. Might be better with more powerful hardware than mine? However, I've heard the remake is perfectly good, and surely easier to play with modern PC hardware!
  - jjhfarmer 4mo ago
    I would highly recommend the original if possible. I feel the remake removed a lot of the atmosphere and direction in the pursuit of showing off asset fidelity. The original holds up amazingly well for its time and feels like playing a painting.
    - Johanx64 4mo ago
      I remember "playing" it briefly somewhere within PS2-era. And the absolutely horrid framerate is the thing that I remember most about the game. It absolutely ruined the experience for me and made me stop 'trying' to play it. And no, it isn't me a primarily a PC gamer complaining about 30fps. It was like 15-20fps. It's was absolute ass, bordering on unplayable. It's like you weren't grappling with a colossus, instead you're constantly fighting the laggy 15fps framerate. And I don't mean it just by the standards of today, I mean by standards of the day. God of War games hit 50-60fps pretty well on PS2 and had all the epic bosses and set pieces
m_aiswaryaa 4mo ago
On a similar theme, The old knight and the dragon: https://www.instagram.com/p/DY0YtdtHdLb/?img_index=1 https://www.instagram.com/p/DY0YtdtHdLb/?img_index=1
leoc 4mo ago
Odd that it doesn’t mention Metal Gear Solid, which was casting doubt on the morality of the player character’s actions and painting boss fights as tragic affairs back in 1998, even though it does mention MGS love letter Spec Ops: The Line (and even though MGS is a media darling and probably significantly overdiscussed in general).
- Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
  I think the article is intentionally focused, if it were to mention every game that is related we'd be here for a while. That said, this is a common thing in articles about e.g. video games - "I wish they mentioned X". I too wish that but at the same time, one needs limits.
  - leoc 4mo ago
    MGS (and MGS2) are prominent enough, and directly relevant enough, and predate Shadow of the Colossus enough, that not mentioning them is a conspicuous omission, and not just something it would have been nice to add. In fact not mentioning them makes the article somewhat misleading, especially when at the same time it chooses to highlight Spec Ops: The Line.
    - IAmBroom 4mo ago
      You really can't mention MSGS without giving due mention to DOOM, which owes its existence to the popularity of Zork. And you can't mention that without D&D, but you have to preface every mention of D&D with historical war board-gaming and... chess and Go.
      - leoc 4mo ago
        I am afraid that you have missed my point. DOOM is famous for many things, but encouraging a really-makes-ya-think response to the death of its NPCs is not one of them. If it were then it probably would cry out for a mention in an article about games which made you feel bad to kill bosses, yes.
- 4mo ago
kstenerud 4mo ago
One game that really annoyed me was Assassin's Creed Odyssey. It was an amazing game. Beautiful scenery, great story. And then I played the fate of Atlantis expansion. In order to progress the story, you have to weaken Persephone's hold on the realm, which I did. However even if you reduce her influence to zero (which I did), you still can't progress unless you betray a friend (even though there's no utility in that anymore).
serallak 4mo ago
I've just finished playing Metro Exodus, which is another example. The "good ending" depends on your behavior in the three open areas of the game. You can still kill "monsters" (mutated humans, animals, cannibals, bandits) without impact, but you should minimize killing other humans, such as slaves, or even hostile but "misguided" NPCs (people that just want you to stay out of their settlement, that you are required to traverse, and who will shoot you on sight). This is something you can actually achieve pretty easily, just by using stealth. But reading older posts on this game, many people found this difficult, as the game made easy and satisfying to kill from the shadows.
- superxpro12 4mo ago
  It's interesting that metro and Stalker both feature this sort of decision tree. I wonder what it is about that culture that leads to this gameplay element.
throwatdem12311 4mo ago
This article had me until it said the pacifist run in Undertale was more difficult. Anyone that has attempted a “genocide” route where you kill everyone will probably tell you that that boss is probably one of the hardest things they ever done in a videogame - if they can beat it at all.
- cubefox 4mo ago
  The article didn't say that a pacifist run was more difficult than a genocide route.
  - throwatdem12311 4mo ago
    I never even considered one might play Undertale where you only kill some people but not others, the game doesn’t really ever incentivize you to do a “mixed” run. Pacifist is more like a puzzle game, and I didn’t find it all that challenging at all. If you go the “kill only some people” route, I don’t think you would ever really be strong enough for this to be fun due to not levelling up enough to keep up with later stage enemies. So you’re going to be heavily incentivized to go full pacifist to bypass levelling entirely or genocide to get enough levels. Then of course you’ll hit the wall at the end…
    - kmeisthax 4mo ago
      The funny thing is, not only are there multiple Neutral endings, Toby actually wrote different variations of them for almost every possible combination of boss kill. They range from "you know, Alphys wanted to talk to you about something" if you killed nobody, to "if Sans ever figures out how to leave the Underground, he will end you". The latter is what you'd get if you misinterpreted "Genocide run" to mean "kill everything you see", which isn't quite it. My guess is that Toby's intent was for you to play the game normally, get one of the many, many different Neutral endings, reset to get the Pacifist ending, and then a few years later come back to Genocide after hearing about this weird route where you get to fight the other font skeleton.
    - debugnik 4mo ago
gchamonlive 4mo ago
That reminds me of the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna and Krishna have a long conversation before a battle where the former is supposed to perform his duties towards the people he's sworn to protect, but which would mean most likely killing close relatives that he cares about. There is no honor in killing, only in exercising your duty towards serving and protecting others.
PaulHoule 4mo ago
Makes me think of that dragon that you can sneak up to near the beginning of Elden Ring and take it out with chip damage over about half an hour without waking it up.
analog8374 4mo ago
These are their kitchens and living rooms. You leap in swinging your broadsword.
casey2 4mo ago
The Shadow of the Colossus video essay meme has transferred into text, we are devolving!
aaron695 4mo ago
[dead]
chiffre01 4mo ago
I mean this has been a this has been a theme going back further than "Shadow of the Colossus" or "Undertale". Both "Chrono Trigger" and "Crono Cross" make you question your actions and whether or not it was worth on a monster genocide.
kmeisthax 4mo ago
> Contrary to Flowey’s advice, the game can be finished without a single kill, leading to a special ending, but this pacifist route is markedly more difficult. ...huh? This is very much not true. The most difficult[0] encounters happen on the Genocide route, in which you powerlevel like it's a normal JRPG until the encounters run out. Pacifist is only slightly harder than a "No Mercy" neutral run[1]. For the first two thirds of this article I was screaming "BUT WHAT ABOUT UNDERTALE". Toby Fox basically wrote the book on the moral quandries of killing monsters in video games, and this article does not do his work justice. It feels like the author wanted to briefly mention it at the end as a way to cap off the essay. And, while I haven't played Shadow of the Colossus, I suspect the inspection of that is about as surface-level as the tacked-on mention of UNDERTALE at the end. I feel like I just read a high school English essay. [0] Mechanically and emotionally. [1] As in, a run in which you kill everything you see, but do not exhaust the kill limit.
- debugnik 4mo ago
  > in which you powerlevel like it's a normal JRPG until the encounters run out Regular JRPG farming is not enough to trigger this route. You need to farm out every single area with enemies, starting from the very first one and never leaving one unfarmed, otherwise you accidentally exit the route even if you keep trying. You seem to know this but somehow pretend it's the normal JRPG experience? As for Shadow of the Colossus, this article has flaws but its analysis of that game isn't one of them. It's very much what "everyone" knows about the game.
- WolfeReader 4mo ago
  I think "the pacifist route is more difficult than the default route" and "The pacifist route is the hardest way to play the game" are two different statements. The article said the first, but you're reacting as if it said the second.
belval 4mo ago
Perhaps not a monster, but in "It takes two", there is a particular scene where you have to murder a friendly stuffed elephant to get your in-game daughter to cry. I have been playing video games for decades at this point but that one really shook me up. You pretty much execute a toy begging for its life. As soon as that scene was over it genuinely took me a few days to come back to it. That was a hard rewatch: https://youtu.be/12FNU8bNEbE?si=BKZCynsHhoz5GN2m&t=65 https://youtu.be/12FNU8bNEbE?si=BKZCynsHhoz5GN2m&t=65
- amiga386 4mo ago
  The ending credits show her patched back up with needle and thread, but they know what they did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bnKr0M1Tzs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bnKr0M1Tzs
- SV_BubbleTime 4mo ago
  I’m apparently a heartless monster or something, but that elicited less than zero for me. I wanted it to end because the squeeky annoying voice and over the top cuteness was for effect. I’m happy for you that you felt that was dark. Well, IDK, maybe I’m happy for you, hard to say.
- gainda 4mo ago
  Long time gamer here too and this also really got me. I'm not sure exactly what it was; perhaps a turn to a darker tone where I wasn't expecting it. For all the interpersonal disagreements the game is generally 'whimsical.' It was the desperation of the elephant that really got me ... the bargaining, the confusion. I find that as I get older I respond more to media like this. I'm not sure if it's emotional intelligence, being more present, or something else.
  - sedimannapoleon 4mo ago
    [dead]
stared 4mo ago
I love how the game SOMA deals with taking (or not taking) someone's, or something's, life. It is never an easy moment. And with no commentary (with some haunting exceptions, https://youtu.be/pmC6naegRgo?t=161 https://youtu.be/pmC6naegRgo?t=161), no external reward or punishment, you need to carry the burden of your own decisions. Some people says they will be judged (only) by God and history. In SOMA, there is neither.
tptacek 4mo ago
Well, Ebrietas and Rom in Bloodborne are the only two monsters that aren't actively hostile, and both have lore backstories (including their genetic relationship) explaining that. Killing Ebrietas is optional, which works against the idea that the game is setting you up to question the ethics of monster-killing; many players don't even realize they can walk away from Ebrietas, because the game absolutely primes you to just get in and start whacking.
- vector_spaces 4mo ago
  The game very explicitly implores the player to question the ethics of monster slaying -- most directly through the character of Djura, who points out that the beasts were once people too. The game goes so far as to give you a dialogue box when talking to him, with the options to spare the beasts or not There is also the romp through the Hunter's Nightmare, whose first act is replete with beasts cowering in fear at the sight of the player character. Even if you spare them you'll usually see them brutally slain by mad hunter compatriots anyway And it's no mistake that all the "kin" type characters you encounter in the game, like Rom, Ebrietas, and Moon Presence, are all deeply tragic. Thematically Bloodborne is deeply concerned with humanization/dehumanization and how those interact with violence, and it plays a lot with this in the narrative to subvert with the usual power fantasy of the soulslike genre -- the beasts cowering in fear in the nightmare seem more human than the mad hunters, Ebrietas appears to be grieving when you encounter her, and with Rom you might systematically murder her children before directing your blade at her. Like you can live out that power fantasy, but it won't always feel great. So no, I don't think that Ebrietas being optional works against this idea at all. It just allows the narrative to explore different facets of this question -- it humanizes her, and if you choose to fight her it's because you chose to be the aggressor.
  - tptacek 4mo ago
    Only in Old Yharnam! You're right to call it out, I missed that, but I feel like even the BSB in Old Yharnam has a backstory motivating you to put it down. Arguably, not much in Bloodborne is even actually happening. (My confidence on all this isn't super high, but this is like the one video game I do play, and I've gone a little deep on the lore.)
fuzzfactor 4mo ago
Well I'm no gaming enthusiast so I have a very limited range that I can fully enjoy at my low accomplishment level. Must be quite the opposite of a real gamer, so I naturally like the simpler and less complex approach. More or less the easy stuff, and I'm not completely alone. I think first and foremost, a particular game should be fun from quite early on before you have developed much deep experience, and then any progress through different levels should be logical and straightforward. In both respects from my simple-minded starting point I guess I enjoy it most when it's about as rewarding as finishing off an order of french fries :) Talk about excitement rising to melancholy amounts . . .
zoogeny 4mo ago
My own anecdote related to this idea was on a playthrough of Skyrim. I was between objectives and wandering through the map. I came across one of the ubiquitous caves which I decided to enter. I was attacked by some generic low-level bandits and I cleared the cave. After dispatching the enemies I was looting through the cave and came across some letters. They detailed a tale of a family that came on hard times in a nearby town and were forced homeless by circumstance, how they were trying to rebuild their lives, etc. I looked around the cave and could tell the individuals mentioned in the letter were accounted for in the cave. I mean, they were generic bandit models but the designer had matched them to the narrative. I thought about the situation. I was this extremely high level wizardy kind of build trekking though the wilderness and I came across an encampment. When I barged into their makeshift home they rightly were like "get out". And then I slaughtered them all with no reason and was now deciding if the clutter was worth packing and re-selling. I more or less stopped playing Skyrim after that.
- gnerd00 4mo ago
  I knew a Buddhist monk in Berkeley in the 1990s who was very interested in "games" to teach Dharma.. Games in those days did not look like they do in the last ten years.. Obviously what is now called AAA games are very much the opposite of Dharma talks..
- phs318u 4mo ago
  I read your comment to my partner who pointed out that what your Skyrim character was doing was exactly what the billionaires do - treat us all as NPC’s whose stories don’t matter. I’m glad you had your epiphany.
- petsfed 4mo ago
  I had a similar experience playing, of all things Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising. You play as a variety of US Marines helping Russia defend some island from a Chinese invasion so as to control some recently discovered oil deposits. And at one point while playing this already somewhat implausible situation, I thought "that random PLA soldier I just mowed down would not have, in reality, signed up to be the invading force in a petro-conflict". It kind of killed first-person shooters for me for a while, because I accidentally humanized a poorly-programmed bot in a ridiculous, made-up scenario into making me feel bad for them.
Barrin92 4mo ago
It's something Roger Scruton writes about in Modern Culture. He pointed out that one of the distinguishing features of modern entertainment media is the collapse of persons into bodies, subjects into objects, fantasy rather than imagination. In the imagination that art produces, and I agree with the article that Shadow of the Colossus deserves that label, enemies are not bodies, they're persons. In great art they can be more real than reality. In fantasies bodies are consumed for gratification and stimulation, they have no interior life. It's also the difference between pornography and erotic art. In the former the people depicted become objects not even bodies but body parts, they're profaned. The only person that matters is the consumer. In erotic art it's the opposite, the eroticism happens between the subjects of the art, the viewer is placed at a distance. There's a lot of games that have wrestled with this in regards to violence. Kojima back in the day already in Metal Gear Solid 2 but he made it an explicit design choice in Death Stranding (less so in the second than the first one, sadly I suspect for commercial reasons) in a way that reminded me a lot of SotC.
jdkee 4mo ago
“Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey.” -G. K. Chesterton
lopsotronic 4mo ago
Old Guy here calling out Planescape:Torment for directing us to perhaps the most insidious monster of all. It's an old isometric Infinity Engine game - although the engine is heavily hacked - but if you get the urge to play an older game, and you don't mind reading a whole bunch of text, well, it's got the rep for a reason. Although it's been nigh 30 years I can't bring myself to spoil it. It's a good 'un.
littlecorner 4mo ago
> Perhaps true malice, then, resides not in the monsters themselves but in the systems that classify them as enemies No, malice does not come from the systems. It comes from us who make the systems

298 points by prismatic 4mo ago

jdw64 4mo ago

I can agree with the other examples, but including Dark Souls feels like a stretch. In Dark Souls, the primary currency for progression—'souls'—is fundamentally earned by killing enemies. No matter how tragic a monster's lore might be, the moment it drops the exact resource the player needs to level up, can we really call that a genuine moral dilemma? I agree with applying this to Undertale, but using Dark Souls severely dilutes your argument. If Dark Souls counts, then countless text-heavy JRPGs with sad villain backstories would also fit the bill. Ultimately, for a true moral dilemma to exist in game design, there has to be a scenario where the player doesn't strictly need to kill mechanically, yet they are forced to confront the choice of doing so

probably_wrong 4mo ago
I vouched for your comment because, while (IMO) dead wrong, I didn't think it was "this should be flagged" wrong. The article uses the word "dilemma" exactly once in the introduction, mostly because that's not really what the article is about. Instead it's a reflection of the melancholy of playing a game where, justified as your actions may be, the entire act of killing is surrounded in sadness. In Dark Souls specifically (mild spoilers) your character is fighting to prevent essentially the end of a world that's falling into decay. Yes, you kill enemies, but the enemies themselves are corrupted creatures who went mad and you only kill them to prevent the corruption to spread even more. Your end may be justified, but that doesn't mean you can't be sad about having to kill them to begin with.
- AndrewDucker 4mo ago
  And even more-so, with the extra information you discover, and especially the alternate ending, your end may very-much not be justified.
- jdw64 4mo ago
  While I agree to some extent, realistically, if we follow that logic, wouldn't we have to feel a sense of melancholy every time we kill an enemy in almost any game? It's highly debatable whether players actually feel melancholy when fighting monsters in Dark Souls. Putting aside the fact that the story is notoriously cryptic and reliant on player speculation, yes, the lore of Dark Souls is tragic. However, this is the sadness of the 'lore,' not an emotion driven by the 'gameplay.' The problem is that this tragedy must be pieced together by reading flavor text. Does the game actually communicate this naturally during play? Not really. The player is simply thrown into a brutally hostile world and left to suffer. In reality, players hunt these monsters to buy gear or level up, not out of melancholy. Shadow of the Colossus portrays tragedy brilliantly in this regard because you actively track down and stab peacefully existing creatures. But I strongly question whether Dark Souls and Spec Ops: The Line belong in that same category. Spec Ops: The Line forces you to commit atrocities just to emphasize a protagonist going mad, and in Dark Souls, every monster is inherently hostile toward you. I find it hard to believe a player would feel genuine melancholy from this kind of deceptive design, where the game fixes your choices entirely on a linear track just to force a tragic point. Normally, when an enemy is that hostile, your only thought is, 'I just need to kill this bastard.' The sadness in Dark Souls is a retroactive feeling you get from piecing together flavor text. While I appreciate the depth of that narrative, it's very hard to put it on the same level as making unprovoked attacks on peaceful monsters (Shadow of the Colossus) or actually having the mechanical choice to spare them (Undertale).
  - Zarathruster 4mo ago
    The praise heaped on Spec Ops makes me embarrassed for games as a medium. This is a game that forces you to commit mass murder in order to progress the storyline, pretends that something profound has just been demonstrated, and then tries to guilt trip you about it for the rest of the experience. It's a mess of dumb, trite, "war is hell" cliché and I wish we would collectively forget about it.
  - alex_c 4mo ago
    >Does the game actually communicate this naturally during play? Not really. The player is simply thrown into a brutally hostile world and left to suffer. In reality, players hunt these monsters to buy gear or level up, not out of melancholy. It's more nuanced than that, and "in Dark Souls, every monster is inherently hostile toward you" is not true. Most games have a clear division between hostile mobs you kill for XP and loot, and story NPCs which you cannot / are not supposed to attack. That line doesn't really exist in Dark Souls. Most (all?) story NPCs can be killed, which has specific consequences if the player chooses to do so. And there are monsters throughout the game world that are functionally identical to hostile monsters - they look the same, drop the same resources if you attack and kill them - but are simply not hostile to you and are just minding their own business. It IS more subtle than in other games, and might not even be obvious to the player at first. This gradual realization was actually one of my favorite parts of playing Dark Souls. But there are definitely intentional gameplay elements that support this, it is not strictly text lore.
kibwen 4mo ago
> the moment it drops the exact resource the player needs to level up, can we really call that a genuine moral dilemma? New players to Dark Souls assume that they need to kill every monster in their way to proceed. But the design of the game itself, with its repeated corpse runs to boss arenas where they get splatted over and over again, eventually teaches the player that running past enemies where possible is actually an expected way to play. Furthermore, leveling up is not required to beat the game, nor is killing enemies the only way to acquire souls. And there are plenty of opportunities for the player to choose whether or not to kill entirely peaceful NPCs, most notably Priscilla, who is posed like a boss while standing in what looks like a boss arena in a place where you fully expected to find a boss to fight, and yet she begs you to leave peacefully and does not bar your exit. It's not as clear-cut as Shadow of the Colossus (in particular it's not actually clear what the ethics of killing hollows is, given that they're cursed to repeatedly rise in undeath for all eternity), but the core theme of the game is futility.

ellefire 4mo ago

The Cogwork Dancers in Hollow Knight: Silksong are a recent example of this https://hollowknight.wiki/w/Cogwork_Dancers https://hollowknight.wiki/w/Cogwork_Dancers

xkcd-sucks 4mo ago
All of Silksong did this really well - Killing the bosses is the point of the game; each boss fight starts out frustrating and becomes quite fun, but at the point where the fight becomes pure fun you kill them and can never repeat that fight again. With the exception of its wonderful final boss fight, but still

david_shaw 4mo ago

The Fallout games often exemplify this: nearly every decision you make is morally ambiguous, and often has far-reaching repercussions in the story and world.

alansaber 4mo ago
Fits the setting well. Especially New vegas.
- lopsotronic 4mo ago
  FNV is peak franchise, IMHO. Master's study of how to make a sandbox tell a narrative. Also, and this is trivial tiddlywinkies, the designers bothered to do a little bit of light reading about how guns actually work. I am continually distracted by impossible mechanisms in later FO games.
  - alansaber 4mo ago
    I read that the animation for Joshua Graham disassembling the pistols was relatively accurate if that counts lol
superxpro12 4mo ago
IDK if i'd go that far... there's usually clear paragon and renegade pathways. I'd agree that they do include a few morally ambiguous quandaries, but they are not regularly encountered.

CurtMonash 4mo ago

For a mainstream boss example I nominate the Lonely Giant in Elder Scrolls Online. There also are plenty of cute-animal mobs that weren't going to bother you unless you started something. An example that still stands out for me is the first set of sleeping bears in LOTRO.

no-name-here 4mo ago
LOTRO = Lord Of The Rings Online

ajuc 4mo ago

No mention of the Witcher? The whole franchise is based on moral dilemmas like that.

Aerolfos 4mo ago
Or Nier, which are inspired by and connected to Shadow of the Colossus in the same way as SotC is connected to Zelda (explicitly mentioned in the article)
- ThrowawayR2 4mo ago
  Agreed, Nier: Replicant definitely belongs in the list. Yoko Taro successfully asks "What if the opponents you fight were the main character of their own stories with their own good and justifiable motivations?" as well as any of the other games mentioned.
lukwoz 4mo ago
Came here to mention the same thing. It's one of the pillars of the whole Witcher saga, but most clearly it's visible in Sapkowski's short stories - The Lesser Evil, A Grain of Truth, A Question of Price, The Witcher, to name just a few.
xxs 4mo ago
There are so few (2) succubi mutagens in Witcher3. Gotta do what you gotta do, 30% damage is nothing to scoff at.
relaxing 4mo ago
Maybe the author, being Czech, wanted to look beyond the quintessential Slavic contribution to the genre. It’s the only explanation I can think of. The idea that monsters can be understood, and spared because in the end they’re exhibiting human flaws, is such a powerful storytelling device.
- xxs 4mo ago
  >author, being Czech Sapkowski is from Poland, though. Still Slav, but still.

Kovah 4mo ago

Another interesting example are hunting games such as Hunter Call of the Wild. I played that for countless hours. While some people simply go for reckless trophy hunting, I thought about most of the shots I took; there's a flock of deer with a single stag, surrounded by does. I knew I would feel awful taking out that single stag, leaving the does behind alone. Could taking it out now be considered "crowd control", how rangers call it? Maybe, under specific circumstances. Or is that just a lie I tell to myself to justify the trophy? Taking shots on animals living their life in the forest and on the fields imposes a moral/ethical question, especially if you are not being attacked or would otherwise starve to death.

thaumasiotes 4mo ago
> there's a flock of deer with a single stag, surrounded by does. I knew I would feel awful taking out that single stag, leaving the does behind alone. Assuming the deer were in such a social structure to begin with, they'll be alone for maybe a day before another stag steps up. Deer do not exist in a gender ratio of 6:1.
- Kovah 4mo ago
  Well, that might be technically correct. Yet it still doesn't feel good to destroy this social group they formed, to decide it's okay that this animal feels alone for that day. That's one of the points of the article as I understood it: is it ethical to play god and decide on that animals' fate?

jjhfarmer 4mo ago

The first game I thought of upon reading the title of the article was 'Shadow of the Colossus'. There's a particular boss about half-way through the game who resides in a small secluded garden and the process of defeating them involves tricking them in to ramming over columns etc. until they are trapped. I have a strong memory of being 12 years old, lying awake at night with the melancholic feeling this article describes, with the realisation that those beasts never did anything to me and I was essentially going out of my way to trick and slaughter them. No other game has invoked that feeling in me since. It's a very special game. It remains one of my favourites and a stellar example of what the medium can achieve.

baumschubser 4mo ago
To me, these reflections upon my aggressive and violent behavior in a game are much more impactful than games that put me into dilemma situations, where you are already presented with a nicely arranged moral problem in the moment. These are two distinct techniques and I feel the latter almost always failed to impress me much, while the first one is where I feel caught, even shocked by myself and the cold-bloodiness to (virtually) follow any suggestion to kill.
- LandR 4mo ago
  The Uncharted games are weird like this. They get lauded for their storyline, yet Drake is out their killing hordes of guys for what ? Some treasure ?
  - ArmadilloGang 4mo ago
    I thought about this playing Just Cause 2. So I go to this island, blow up all of their oil, gas, and power infrastructure, killing hordes of security guards who are just locals working the few jobs available to them.
  - rybosome 4mo ago
    I believe that exact framing of Uncharted is the origin of the term “ludonarrative dissonance”, where the character’s motivations and morals are in contrast to the extreme violence they are committing because of the nature of it being a video game. Definitely one of those things I didn’t question when I was younger, but as I get older it’s hard not to see it. EDIT: I was wrong, the term originated from an analysis of Bioshock, but Uncharted was later held up as a strong example of this. And it’s more generally about the contrast between narrative and gameplay mechanics.

myfonj 4mo ago

> As a result, the game offers no easy satisfaction of hacking and slashing through weaker opponents. Besides the questionable morality of kill=experience=progress in typical hack'n'slash or roguelike, what started to irritate me in there as I grew older as well, was the stupid mechanics where crowds of enemies described as intelligent humanoids (i.e. not animals or robots) facing clearly overpowered high-level PC (famous, even) never surrendered, almost never tried to flee, attacked one-by-one, and shoved no sign of tactical thinking or self-preservation instinct. Despite being armed and (by description) organised, PC could enter a narrow corridor, defeat dozen of them without taking any damage, yet there will be a waiting line eager for demise by a single hit -- even actively advancing towards it. No attempt to regroup, to take advantage of the number superiority, wait in open space, ambush from all directions, or anything like that. Same applies to most FPS: there is a Doomguy running around at unprecedented pace, slaughtering everything that moves, but we will all keep our scattered positions. (This led me to a thought, whether it would be possible to rearrange enemies in canonical Doom map so that all would attack at once at some appropriate spot and whether it would guarantee their victory or not.)

yomismoaqui 4mo ago
The solution for your problem is playing a Souls game
- scotty79 4mo ago
  How would roleplaying a victim help his problem of not being feared sufficiently by little computer people?
rootlocus 4mo ago
While I agree it's incredibly jarring in some games, I'm always thinking back at a presentation by David Rosen on procedural animation: "First, do no harm to the gameplay". He's talking about animations in particular, but I feel that should be a core pillar for any game designer. Many things are unnatural in games: you don't instantly recover from a beating by eating one apple in real life, but we're ok with it in games because it makes the gameplay fun. https://youtu.be/LNidsMesxSE?si=fGFCTCHm77OJiYu3&t=260 https://youtu.be/LNidsMesxSE?si=fGFCTCHm77OJiYu3&t=260

rootlocus 4mo ago

> Before the encounter with the first Troll, the dumbfounded mythical character, Atreus, asks: “We’re going to fight that?!?” Kratos, the main character, answers: “We have no choice,” in a matter-of-fact, almost resigned way, as if shruggingly accepting the design conventions of the game itself. I didn't see it like that. Atreus thinks he and his father are normal humans, even if he saw his father perform incredible feats of strength such as carrying a huge tree trunk. Atreus has no idea what his father is capable of, and he himself has been mostly sick and frail. The boy is scared. Nowhere does that scene read as "That looks humanoid, I don't think we should kill it". Draugrs are more humanoid and they've been killing some on the way. The troll is incredibly fierce and the largest opponent they faced until now. That's a completely natural reaction from the boy with no moral implications. It's actually a little later in the game when they're assaulted by Reavers (actual living humans talking about eating them) that Atreus kills one in self defense and remains shocked by the experience. Kratos shows empathy and care when he comforts him and says "Close your heart to it". [1] There's a deep thread about humanity and the right or need to kill in self defense in the game, and Atreus goes through a rebellious phase where he thinks godhood gives him the right to do anything. But the troll scene? That's reading too much into it. 1. https://youtu.be/_oOZG5-tqpA?si=w6-PyJXjTZ-qSv2q&t=4173 https://youtu.be/_oOZG5-tqpA?si=w6-PyJXjTZ-qSv2q&t=4173

br121 4mo ago
Atreus' question come out of fear, but Kratos' response is what the article focus on. Kratos does not take any joy in killing, he does that out of necessity and would have loved for that necessity not to arise. He could have boasted "I have killed bigger things", but instead he choose words of resignation against a kill or be killed fate he was trying to escape
- gchamonlive 4mo ago
  > he does that out of necessity and would have loved for that necessity not to arise Which I believe is in contrast with the older games. Haven't played them but from what I've heard he'd pursue conflicts because he enjoyed them. I think this change is because of his ongoing process of coming to terms with being a father which takes the act of killing and twists it inside out.

rob74 4mo ago

I wonder how they arrived at the name "Ebrietas"? Does it have something to do with being inebriated? EDIT: it does, I just had to google "Ebrietas latin" (and got https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ebrietas https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ebrietas), otherwise it only returned references to the monster.

shakna 4mo ago
Probably more likely related to the Mexican moth, considering the character designs.
gainda 4mo ago
From what I recall there is a relationship in the game of how much blood you take from an outer being like her & how crazy (drunk?) the user then becomes, before becoming a crazed beast. There is one key item in the game called “Eyes of a blood-drunk hunter”
tptacek 4mo ago
It's designed after a moth species.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

shevy-java 4mo ago

> This non-battle turned out to be a powerful experience, but its power stemmed mostly from the contrast between this and my other monster encounters. This is more correlated with modern games. Modern games, at the least non-Indie games, dumbed down the gameplay. I am not saying such games are awful per se, but they are often very simplified to the 1990s era in many ways. Many old RPG games are quite complex; or told as a story. The old Betrayal at Krondor was kind of like a novel - unsurprisingly since Feist wrote most of the content (save various adjustments made to the gameplay itself). Yes, graphics are bad, options are too few, but storyline-wise this was my favourite RPG. Another example would be "Realms of Arcania" (in german the three DSA games). Again, graphics today are not great, and playing it in english versus german is actually worse (one of the few games where german was better than english, by the way), but the gameplay options in the second part were nice. Part 3 was a bit different, and people critisized it, but I still liked that you would explore a "real" city while still having tons of options available. Other RPGs such as Baldur's Gate 2 are a bit different - DnD itself is IMO a very bad system for RPGs (takes too long to explain now, but just look at static alignment systems - that makes zero sense) and most of it was focused on hack-and-slay for power and items, so it has the same problems. But with mods you can kind of extend the story and add more storylines, thus having more options. So BG2 is not the best example here, compared to the other two; even before that, if you remember the old Ultima series, the NPCs kind of had a regular life, worked at specific times, went to work leaving their homes (and you could then pillage that) and so forth. A lot of the "why do I want to slay the cute monster", is driven by the underlying design. These games often try to dumb down everything. I noticed this first with World of Warcraft. To me these games never were interesting, as it seems to have been deliberately dumbed down. Many of those games today are more like a movie with a bit interaction in between. That's imo not quite a game anymore. There are some exceptions though; I liked little nightmares, but this is also a simplified, mostly linear gameplay. This problem keeps on coming back again and again. For some reason modern games hate complexity. Either humans became dumber, or designers wanted to simplify things.

ajuc 4mo ago
1. there's a trade-off between graphics/sound quality and story complexity. The better quality your voiced dialogue is - the more you have to pay for every additional line - so you tend to shorten it. Same with graphics - it's one thing to paint 8 frames of 32x32 sprites. It's another to motion-capture, model, texture, and process 100s of different versions of each character animations. 2. you're comparing unfairly (looking at the most complex examples from the past and comparing them to modern average). There were LOTS of very simplistic games in the past. You just don't think about most of them. Some genres went extinct because of how simplistic they were (see the dungeon crawlers where there was no dialogue or story whatsoever - just moving at 90 degree and hitting monsters) - it's the "old music was better" fallacy - you don't remember the old music that sucked. If you compare most complex modern games they blow out of the water anything from the past. Let's say Baldur's Gate 3 or Dwarf Fortress or Minecraft compared to let's say Elite or Betrayal at Krondor.

ionwake 4mo ago

If you are young "shadow of the collosus" is a game I highly recommend you dig up and play, it set a special unique tone for the 2000-2010 era

Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
If you are old and haven't played it yet too though. There's a few games that are a pretty unique experience like that, Bloodborne is another, but also consider Journey and probably a list of others.
asgerhb 4mo ago
When you say "dig up," do you recommend the remaster or the original?
- frogulis 4mo ago
  If you've got the ability to play the original, it still held up fantastically when I last played it properly (2-odd years ago). I tried emulating it a few years before that when I didn't have any workable screen for my PS2 and that was not so good. A game that pushed the original hardware to its limit also pushed the emulator past its limit. Might be better with more powerful hardware than mine? However, I've heard the remake is perfectly good, and surely easier to play with modern PC hardware!
- jjhfarmer 4mo ago
  I would highly recommend the original if possible. I feel the remake removed a lot of the atmosphere and direction in the pursuit of showing off asset fidelity. The original holds up amazingly well for its time and feels like playing a painting.
  - Johanx64 4mo ago
    I remember "playing" it briefly somewhere within PS2-era. And the absolutely horrid framerate is the thing that I remember most about the game. It absolutely ruined the experience for me and made me stop 'trying' to play it. And no, it isn't me a primarily a PC gamer complaining about 30fps. It was like 15-20fps. It's was absolute ass, bordering on unplayable. It's like you weren't grappling with a colossus, instead you're constantly fighting the laggy 15fps framerate. And I don't mean it just by the standards of today, I mean by standards of the day. God of War games hit 50-60fps pretty well on PS2 and had all the epic bosses and set pieces

m_aiswaryaa 4mo ago

On a similar theme, The old knight and the dragon: https://www.instagram.com/p/DY0YtdtHdLb/?img_index=1 https://www.instagram.com/p/DY0YtdtHdLb/?img_index=1

leoc 4mo ago

Odd that it doesn’t mention Metal Gear Solid, which was casting doubt on the morality of the player character’s actions and painting boss fights as tragic affairs back in 1998, even though it does mention MGS love letter Spec Ops: The Line (and even though MGS is a media darling and probably significantly overdiscussed in general).

Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
I think the article is intentionally focused, if it were to mention every game that is related we'd be here for a while. That said, this is a common thing in articles about e.g. video games - "I wish they mentioned X". I too wish that but at the same time, one needs limits.
- leoc 4mo ago
  MGS (and MGS2) are prominent enough, and directly relevant enough, and predate Shadow of the Colossus enough, that not mentioning them is a conspicuous omission, and not just something it would have been nice to add. In fact not mentioning them makes the article somewhat misleading, especially when at the same time it chooses to highlight Spec Ops: The Line.
  - IAmBroom 4mo ago
    You really can't mention MSGS without giving due mention to DOOM, which owes its existence to the popularity of Zork. And you can't mention that without D&D, but you have to preface every mention of D&D with historical war board-gaming and... chess and Go.
    - leoc 4mo ago
      I am afraid that you have missed my point. DOOM is famous for many things, but encouraging a really-makes-ya-think response to the death of its NPCs is not one of them. If it were then it probably would cry out for a mention in an article about games which made you feel bad to kill bosses, yes.
4mo ago

kstenerud 4mo ago

One game that really annoyed me was Assassin's Creed Odyssey. It was an amazing game. Beautiful scenery, great story. And then I played the fate of Atlantis expansion. In order to progress the story, you have to weaken Persephone's hold on the realm, which I did. However even if you reduce her influence to zero (which I did), you still can't progress unless you betray a friend (even though there's no utility in that anymore).

serallak 4mo ago

I've just finished playing Metro Exodus, which is another example. The "good ending" depends on your behavior in the three open areas of the game. You can still kill "monsters" (mutated humans, animals, cannibals, bandits) without impact, but you should minimize killing other humans, such as slaves, or even hostile but "misguided" NPCs (people that just want you to stay out of their settlement, that you are required to traverse, and who will shoot you on sight). This is something you can actually achieve pretty easily, just by using stealth. But reading older posts on this game, many people found this difficult, as the game made easy and satisfying to kill from the shadows.

superxpro12 4mo ago
It's interesting that metro and Stalker both feature this sort of decision tree. I wonder what it is about that culture that leads to this gameplay element.

throwatdem12311 4mo ago

This article had me until it said the pacifist run in Undertale was more difficult. Anyone that has attempted a “genocide” route where you kill everyone will probably tell you that that boss is probably one of the hardest things they ever done in a videogame - if they can beat it at all.

cubefox 4mo ago
The article didn't say that a pacifist run was more difficult than a genocide route.
- throwatdem12311 4mo ago
  I never even considered one might play Undertale where you only kill some people but not others, the game doesn’t really ever incentivize you to do a “mixed” run. Pacifist is more like a puzzle game, and I didn’t find it all that challenging at all. If you go the “kill only some people” route, I don’t think you would ever really be strong enough for this to be fun due to not levelling up enough to keep up with later stage enemies. So you’re going to be heavily incentivized to go full pacifist to bypass levelling entirely or genocide to get enough levels. Then of course you’ll hit the wall at the end…
  - kmeisthax 4mo ago
    The funny thing is, not only are there multiple Neutral endings, Toby actually wrote different variations of them for almost every possible combination of boss kill. They range from "you know, Alphys wanted to talk to you about something" if you killed nobody, to "if Sans ever figures out how to leave the Underground, he will end you". The latter is what you'd get if you misinterpreted "Genocide run" to mean "kill everything you see", which isn't quite it. My guess is that Toby's intent was for you to play the game normally, get one of the many, many different Neutral endings, reset to get the Pacifist ending, and then a few years later come back to Genocide after hearing about this weird route where you get to fight the other font skeleton.
  - debugnik 4mo ago

gchamonlive 4mo ago

That reminds me of the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna and Krishna have a long conversation before a battle where the former is supposed to perform his duties towards the people he's sworn to protect, but which would mean most likely killing close relatives that he cares about. There is no honor in killing, only in exercising your duty towards serving and protecting others.

PaulHoule 4mo ago

Makes me think of that dragon that you can sneak up to near the beginning of Elden Ring and take it out with chip damage over about half an hour without waking it up.

analog8374 4mo ago

These are their kitchens and living rooms. You leap in swinging your broadsword.

casey2 4mo ago

The Shadow of the Colossus video essay meme has transferred into text, we are devolving!

aaron695 4mo ago

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chiffre01 4mo ago

I mean this has been a this has been a theme going back further than "Shadow of the Colossus" or "Undertale". Both "Chrono Trigger" and "Crono Cross" make you question your actions and whether or not it was worth on a monster genocide.

kmeisthax 4mo ago

> Contrary to Flowey’s advice, the game can be finished without a single kill, leading to a special ending, but this pacifist route is markedly more difficult. ...huh? This is very much not true. The most difficult[0] encounters happen on the Genocide route, in which you powerlevel like it's a normal JRPG until the encounters run out. Pacifist is only slightly harder than a "No Mercy" neutral run[1]. For the first two thirds of this article I was screaming "BUT WHAT ABOUT UNDERTALE". Toby Fox basically wrote the book on the moral quandries of killing monsters in video games, and this article does not do his work justice. It feels like the author wanted to briefly mention it at the end as a way to cap off the essay. And, while I haven't played Shadow of the Colossus, I suspect the inspection of that is about as surface-level as the tacked-on mention of UNDERTALE at the end. I feel like I just read a high school English essay. [0] Mechanically and emotionally. [1] As in, a run in which you kill everything you see, but do not exhaust the kill limit.

debugnik 4mo ago
> in which you powerlevel like it's a normal JRPG until the encounters run out Regular JRPG farming is not enough to trigger this route. You need to farm out every single area with enemies, starting from the very first one and never leaving one unfarmed, otherwise you accidentally exit the route even if you keep trying. You seem to know this but somehow pretend it's the normal JRPG experience? As for Shadow of the Colossus, this article has flaws but its analysis of that game isn't one of them. It's very much what "everyone" knows about the game.
WolfeReader 4mo ago
I think "the pacifist route is more difficult than the default route" and "The pacifist route is the hardest way to play the game" are two different statements. The article said the first, but you're reacting as if it said the second.

belval 4mo ago

Perhaps not a monster, but in "It takes two", there is a particular scene where you have to murder a friendly stuffed elephant to get your in-game daughter to cry. I have been playing video games for decades at this point but that one really shook me up. You pretty much execute a toy begging for its life. As soon as that scene was over it genuinely took me a few days to come back to it. That was a hard rewatch: https://youtu.be/12FNU8bNEbE?si=BKZCynsHhoz5GN2m&t=65 https://youtu.be/12FNU8bNEbE?si=BKZCynsHhoz5GN2m&t=65

amiga386 4mo ago
The ending credits show her patched back up with needle and thread, but they know what they did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bnKr0M1Tzs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bnKr0M1Tzs
SV_BubbleTime 4mo ago
I’m apparently a heartless monster or something, but that elicited less than zero for me. I wanted it to end because the squeeky annoying voice and over the top cuteness was for effect. I’m happy for you that you felt that was dark. Well, IDK, maybe I’m happy for you, hard to say.
gainda 4mo ago
Long time gamer here too and this also really got me. I'm not sure exactly what it was; perhaps a turn to a darker tone where I wasn't expecting it. For all the interpersonal disagreements the game is generally 'whimsical.' It was the desperation of the elephant that really got me ... the bargaining, the confusion. I find that as I get older I respond more to media like this. I'm not sure if it's emotional intelligence, being more present, or something else.
- sedimannapoleon 4mo ago
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stared 4mo ago

I love how the game SOMA deals with taking (or not taking) someone's, or something's, life. It is never an easy moment. And with no commentary (with some haunting exceptions, https://youtu.be/pmC6naegRgo?t=161 https://youtu.be/pmC6naegRgo?t=161), no external reward or punishment, you need to carry the burden of your own decisions. Some people says they will be judged (only) by God and history. In SOMA, there is neither.

tptacek 4mo ago

Well, Ebrietas and Rom in Bloodborne are the only two monsters that aren't actively hostile, and both have lore backstories (including their genetic relationship) explaining that. Killing Ebrietas is optional, which works against the idea that the game is setting you up to question the ethics of monster-killing; many players don't even realize they can walk away from Ebrietas, because the game absolutely primes you to just get in and start whacking.

vector_spaces 4mo ago
The game very explicitly implores the player to question the ethics of monster slaying -- most directly through the character of Djura, who points out that the beasts were once people too. The game goes so far as to give you a dialogue box when talking to him, with the options to spare the beasts or not There is also the romp through the Hunter's Nightmare, whose first act is replete with beasts cowering in fear at the sight of the player character. Even if you spare them you'll usually see them brutally slain by mad hunter compatriots anyway And it's no mistake that all the "kin" type characters you encounter in the game, like Rom, Ebrietas, and Moon Presence, are all deeply tragic. Thematically Bloodborne is deeply concerned with humanization/dehumanization and how those interact with violence, and it plays a lot with this in the narrative to subvert with the usual power fantasy of the soulslike genre -- the beasts cowering in fear in the nightmare seem more human than the mad hunters, Ebrietas appears to be grieving when you encounter her, and with Rom you might systematically murder her children before directing your blade at her. Like you can live out that power fantasy, but it won't always feel great. So no, I don't think that Ebrietas being optional works against this idea at all. It just allows the narrative to explore different facets of this question -- it humanizes her, and if you choose to fight her it's because you chose to be the aggressor.
- tptacek 4mo ago
  Only in Old Yharnam! You're right to call it out, I missed that, but I feel like even the BSB in Old Yharnam has a backstory motivating you to put it down. Arguably, not much in Bloodborne is even actually happening. (My confidence on all this isn't super high, but this is like the one video game I do play, and I've gone a little deep on the lore.)

fuzzfactor 4mo ago

Well I'm no gaming enthusiast so I have a very limited range that I can fully enjoy at my low accomplishment level. Must be quite the opposite of a real gamer, so I naturally like the simpler and less complex approach. More or less the easy stuff, and I'm not completely alone. I think first and foremost, a particular game should be fun from quite early on before you have developed much deep experience, and then any progress through different levels should be logical and straightforward. In both respects from my simple-minded starting point I guess I enjoy it most when it's about as rewarding as finishing off an order of french fries :) Talk about excitement rising to melancholy amounts . . .

zoogeny 4mo ago

My own anecdote related to this idea was on a playthrough of Skyrim. I was between objectives and wandering through the map. I came across one of the ubiquitous caves which I decided to enter. I was attacked by some generic low-level bandits and I cleared the cave. After dispatching the enemies I was looting through the cave and came across some letters. They detailed a tale of a family that came on hard times in a nearby town and were forced homeless by circumstance, how they were trying to rebuild their lives, etc. I looked around the cave and could tell the individuals mentioned in the letter were accounted for in the cave. I mean, they were generic bandit models but the designer had matched them to the narrative. I thought about the situation. I was this extremely high level wizardy kind of build trekking though the wilderness and I came across an encampment. When I barged into their makeshift home they rightly were like "get out". And then I slaughtered them all with no reason and was now deciding if the clutter was worth packing and re-selling. I more or less stopped playing Skyrim after that.

gnerd00 4mo ago
I knew a Buddhist monk in Berkeley in the 1990s who was very interested in "games" to teach Dharma.. Games in those days did not look like they do in the last ten years.. Obviously what is now called AAA games are very much the opposite of Dharma talks..
phs318u 4mo ago
I read your comment to my partner who pointed out that what your Skyrim character was doing was exactly what the billionaires do - treat us all as NPC’s whose stories don’t matter. I’m glad you had your epiphany.
petsfed 4mo ago
I had a similar experience playing, of all things Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising. You play as a variety of US Marines helping Russia defend some island from a Chinese invasion so as to control some recently discovered oil deposits. And at one point while playing this already somewhat implausible situation, I thought "that random PLA soldier I just mowed down would not have, in reality, signed up to be the invading force in a petro-conflict". It kind of killed first-person shooters for me for a while, because I accidentally humanized a poorly-programmed bot in a ridiculous, made-up scenario into making me feel bad for them.

Barrin92 4mo ago

It's something Roger Scruton writes about in Modern Culture. He pointed out that one of the distinguishing features of modern entertainment media is the collapse of persons into bodies, subjects into objects, fantasy rather than imagination. In the imagination that art produces, and I agree with the article that Shadow of the Colossus deserves that label, enemies are not bodies, they're persons. In great art they can be more real than reality. In fantasies bodies are consumed for gratification and stimulation, they have no interior life. It's also the difference between pornography and erotic art. In the former the people depicted become objects not even bodies but body parts, they're profaned. The only person that matters is the consumer. In erotic art it's the opposite, the eroticism happens between the subjects of the art, the viewer is placed at a distance. There's a lot of games that have wrestled with this in regards to violence. Kojima back in the day already in Metal Gear Solid 2 but he made it an explicit design choice in Death Stranding (less so in the second than the first one, sadly I suspect for commercial reasons) in a way that reminded me a lot of SotC.

jdkee 4mo ago

“Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey.” -G. K. Chesterton

lopsotronic 4mo ago

Old Guy here calling out Planescape:Torment for directing us to perhaps the most insidious monster of all. It's an old isometric Infinity Engine game - although the engine is heavily hacked - but if you get the urge to play an older game, and you don't mind reading a whole bunch of text, well, it's got the rep for a reason. Although it's been nigh 30 years I can't bring myself to spoil it. It's a good 'un.

littlecorner 4mo ago

> Perhaps true malice, then, resides not in the monsters themselves but in the systems that classify them as enemies No, malice does not come from the systems. It comes from us who make the systems