Ever do something in a game that made you ashamed?

The World Ends With You…wiping out the Pig Noise.

When you talk to that Reaper who loved the little things, his little pathetic ‘oink’ just makes me so sad. :frowning:

glad to see I’m not the only gamer with a bit of a conscience :slight_smile:

I definitely prefer rpg’s that let me play a philosophical amoral/immoral.

One of the big reasons I gave up pvp on DC Universe was, when trying to play a villain WAY too many people used it as an excuse to be jerks. If they got called on it the standard response was “we’re villains, we’re supposed to do stuff like that”. Even when I play a bad guy I make sure to never cross the line into a-hole I’m playing with real people. That’s not fun to me.

Now, back to my omni-cidal rampage across Thedas :wink:

I don’t let it bother me; it’s a game after all.

(I’m that guy who machine-gunned the civilians in Call of Duty:Modern Warfare 2 with glee)

Does this include The Most Dangerous Game?

I should probably explain a little bit more- I don’t let them bother me, because I’m playing a game, and it’s an opportunity to do things in a fantasy world that I’d never do in real life. In real life, I’m generally something paladin-like as far as being ethical and moral. That’s why sometimes, it’s awfully fun to do the evil/amoral/whatever stuff.

Not ashamed per se, and not exactly something in the game either, but *Spec Ops *did quite the number on me. Of course, that’s kind of the point.
That being said, the interesting thing is that what really got to me weren’t the heavy-handed heartstring tugs, or the worse-or-worser ethical choices, or even the severely fucked up things you end up doing in this game, really. I felt bad while playing, because the game is seriously good at making you feel like you’re doing horrible things but that didn’t affect me, the player, overly much. The real thing only hit me in a “fridge shame” moment, after I was done playing. What got me was :

One of the semi-sarcastic breaking the fourth wall messages you start getting on loading screen once Walker really starts losing it. It read something like “To kill for oneself is murder, to kill for your country is heroic, to kill for entertainment is harmless”, soon followed by “none of this is real, so it doesn’t matter”. I was like: “Yes, this is actually literally true - it really doesn’t matter, and shooting at pixels is indeed completely harmless. I really am still a good person, too. So… why does playing this game *still *make me feel like shit ?”. So I pondered about that for a bit, starting to deconstruct the game, the narrative, etc… figuring out what strings the devs deliberately pulled to make the player feel that way. And that’s when it hit me: I realized that the actually fucked-up part might be that I’d never felt like shit while playing every *other *shooter, despite them portraying more or less the exact same actions, only in a slightly different context and without making you think about it quite so much.

[QUOTE=shijinn]
actually i would feel bad if there had been a choice. if it were artificially railroaded then it loses most of its impact.
[/QUOTE]

Just traipsing through the aftermath has an impact, regardless of choice. Trust me on this. The art direction in this game is frighteningly effective.

Actually, at this point I was kind of “shocked” that despite the horror they’d just unleashed, the protagonists only had their collective “omg we’ve done a bad thing” episode once they figured out that they’d just torched civilians… what, and burning soldiers alive doesn’t count somehow, guys ? You fuckers seriously felt *nothing *while walking among the melty-faced, smoking, pleading, crawling, moaning remains of your countrymen ?! Even “the enemy” is human, assholes !
For a game so otherwise in-your-face in its condemnation (or at least re-contextualization) of the horrors of war as they are portrayed in popular video games, that really felt odd to me. Like something was missing or seriously askew.

And yet I still got a chuckle at team mate Lugo’s lamenting shortly afterwards that “He (your character) turned us into **killers **!”. Well, you are a professional soldier, dude. That’s sort of the job description. You might be the first conscientious objector/sniper.


I also did feel like kind of a shitheel for punching the reporter in Mass Effect. I mean, I know it’s supposed to be a “comedic” moment and all ; but as annoying as she is, she’s really just doing her job and she’s perfectly entitled to asking these questions. They’re a bit leading and biased, but otherwise perfectly legitimate questions.

At Kobal2 re: Spec Ops

Well, they arguably were affected by the burnt soldiers since the whole “There has to be another way!” plea came from seeing the effects of white phosphorus a little while earlier. Lugo doesn’t want to do that to anyone regardless of their position. Later, the other guy tells him to shut up as you’re picking through the corpses and amends it with “…because you’ll breathe this stuff” but obviously just didn’t want to hear him saying what you guys already knew: that this was pretty fucked up.

Thinking on it, I mainly feel guilt when it’s an individual character expressing some sort of harm. I can sit on a rooftop and see how big a traffic jam I can make in Saints Row 3 by sniping civilian commuters on a highway but feel bad for making a bitchy remark to someone in Fallout 3. Go figure.

But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people who don’t feel any reaction except that maybe the game developers didn’t do as good a job at immersing you in their world as they’d hoped.

I’ve found this too in a way. One of my favorite things to do in Assassin’s Creed 2 was to poison the guards with the giant halberds and then throw coins at their feet – mass murder machine (also, the AI didn’t quite know how to react, I think their stupidity was funnier than anything).

But god forbid I hurt a shopkeeper’s FEELINGS.

I’m fairly sure that you can’t exchange with fewer than 7 tiles in the bag. Good story, though, and I’d not hesitate to do it if it were legal.

Last night in Far Cry 3, I spent a while screwing with pirates. Not only just killing them but setting up traps with mines/C4 and taking up sniper positions where I’d headshot two out of the three guys in a jeep and watch the third run around in a panic, occasionally shooting at his feet just to rile him up. Or sneak over and plant C4 on his jeep so when he’d finally calm down and try to drive off, I could detonate him just for laughs.

Then I sniped a tortoise and felt like kind of a dick.

in Fallout 3, it is established earlier on that ghouls can be friendly, being horribly disfigured mutated humans; while feral ghouls should be shot on sight like every other enemy. just like most games, friendly NPCs show up green on your targeting reticule while enemies show up as red. evil enemies like the raiders, roving bands of mercenaries who would kill you on sight just so they can steal whatever you have on you.

so i was exploring the sewers and opened the door into a room where a lone feral ghoul wearing a party hat opened fire on me and i killed him. there was a moment during combat when i backed away for a bit to reload that i realised he didn’t chase after me, and had himself retreated into a backroom out of combat range.

i could have left him alone then but i knew retreating and abandoning known hostiles aren’t really real options in a game. turns out the room was where he lived; complete with garden gnomes, a nuka cola bar and mini museum, livestock and a kitchen. he had a comic book on him. his name was Gallo and i am a raider.

I’ve been playing the same sorts of characters for years – I would steal indiscriminately, but wouldn’t dream of being less than sweet to anyone I wasn’t sure I was going to have to kill. But I’ve evolved, or perhaps mutated. In a recent playthrough of Knights of the Old Republic, I felt bad about all the poor people whose homes I barged in to root through their stuff, especially after I realized how soon I would have more than enough money for my needs.

In the new Fallout games, well, there’s no real thrill to stealing because it does not give you a leg up compared to just running around in ruins. That in particular seems to shift my moral compass – you don’t even get XP for it, unlike in the first two games where stealing was my main source of early XP. Now that looting a town doesn’t actually make it easier to kill raiders and talk people into peacefully resolving their conflicts, its suddenly only about being a shit to people. In Fallout 3, you can loot Megaton’s bedraggled citizens, or you can just walk into SuperDuper Mart and make easy cash from punishing the heads-pop-off gang. In Fallout: New Vegas, you can loot the good, honest folk of Good Springs, or you can go straight to Primm to soak up XP and loot from the vicious tyrants oppressing that town.

Games may also give you options that I want nothing to do with, for all that it’s a game – like how you can submit a companion to be eaten in New Vegas. Nuh-uh. Don’t even want to see what will happen.

There’s also punching the crazy guy in the first mission, especially since he’s pretty clearly just having a more severe version of the visions that Shepard shortly has. People make fun of the turian Councillor, but at least he doesn’t punch Shepard in the head for blathering about his/her visions.

Well, OK, the fact that Shepard would probably blow his head off probably has something to do with it…

In general, I’ve made peace with the fact that I’m a goody-two-shoes in games that give choices. I’ve never made a downright evil choice in a game and enjoyed the experience. No aspersions on anyone who does; it just doesn’t work for me. I’m not able to separate myself from the character I play sufficiently to make that fun. (I suspect that’d also make me a shitty author).

But in Mass Effect, I totally punched that reporter and enjoyed it and didn’t feel bad about it. I think it’s because I play games to let my id loose. My id isn’t particularly malevolent, so I don’t enjoy killing innocent people; but my id also doesn’t really care about things like the first amendment, so if someone’s being a dick to me, it responds with a fist to the nose rather than with a snippy ethical insult.

I loved the Mass Effect series but usually did not play full Renegade characters because too often those options crossed the line from villainy to cartoonish super-villainy.

There was also a real stop and think about it moment in ME2 when you are on the way to recruit Mordin. You have a run in with some human criminals who are looting through the apartments of dead people. You scold them for going through the things of dead people, yet that is what you spend the entire game doing yourself.

Have I ever done something in a game that made me ashamed? No. I shamelessly play fake words in Scrabble all the time. :smiley: