I am usually good, but it’s more because many games think out the good plotlines (more quests, etc.) than the evil ones. Still:
Harvesting Little Sisters in Bioshock
Molag Bal in general makes you do messed up things. I think Boethiah’s quest in Skyrim was pretty bad. S/he acts differently in other games.
Oblivion: all I will say is Purification. Especially M’raaj-Dar.
GTA 4: I love how Nico reacts with extreme guilt when you pick up a prostitute. He says things like how he’s reached a new low, the previous guys act differently.
Really? I know people who joke that the little tokens in Puerto Rico are slaves, but I’ve never heard of anyone boycotting the game over it. The game itself never makes any mention of slavery one way or the other - the tokens are referred to as “colonists,” and while you tend to use them for a lot of fieldwork (which, in the time period in question, was probably mostly carried out by slaves IRL), you also use them for things like staffing your university, and other endeavors that were never regarded as slave work.
I’ve worried about slaves in games like Pharoah, which glides past the fact that the “laborers” building the pyramids probably weren’t independent contractors. Also, Children of the Nile has “servants” which you know, I wish they’d just say “slaves” because that’s what they’re talking about.
I couldn’t even.
I had no problem with this. Those people were assholes. Even the kitty.
Yeah, but the funny part was that M’raaj-Dar was a dick the whole time, then became incredibly friendly once you get the orders. It was kind of endearing.
Re: Pyramids. At least a good portion of the laborers were maybe not slaves. Other cites on Google. Not to say that some weren’t slaves, of course.
This was mine also. In my case, I was immersed as playing my guy just evil enough to gain dark force powers with the goal of eventually being good at the end by using the dark side against the bad guys. By that time, though, I couldn’t back out of that path and my redemption was snuffed. I remember thinking to myself “It’s not fair! I didn’t mean to be evil!”
In Bioshock I tried replaying by harvesting little sisters to see the alternate endings, but couldn’t do it. I always play by saving them, and just look up the alternate endings on youtube.
There’s a P&C game called 99 Rooms. It’s not really a ‘game’ so much as an interactive online art installation.
Mostly you have to click things to advance to the next level, sometimes those things are a little … disturbing. The impact’s lessened if you know in advance so I’ve spoilered a couple.Click on the heart to make it stop beating, or lower the hanged child *almost *to the floor.
Weird little ‘game’.
Yes, those two left me feeling very guilty indeed.
Fable 3 drops a bomb on you pretty early: You’re forced by your asshole brother the king to decide who dies - your bestest friend/sweetheart since you were kids, or some innocent citizens who were peacefully demonstrating outside the palace because of your brother’s reign of terror and are now begging for their lives. Refuse or take too long, and he kills all of them.
Dragon Age: Origins has some tough choices in the ending, especially if you’re playing a female character: [spoiler]Only a Warden can kill the Archdemon at the end, and it has to be via sacrificing that person’s life. At the end, most players will have two Wardens left, their own character and Alistair, your companion since the beginning of the game. If you’re playing a female character, you and Alistair might have fallen in love and had sex. And now one of you has to die. Will you sacrifice yourself and see an ending with a heartbroken Alistair? Will you let him die - oh yeah, he might well be the new king of the realm and now he’s gone and whoa, time for chaos maybe - and deal with the aftermath alone?
Or, will you choose a third option - the night before, a witch in your party wants to screw Alistair (or you, if you’re a guy) to get some of his magical Warden sperm for the baby she wants to raise. Her plan is to go along and let the Archdemon soul get sucked into the super-new fetus, where it’ll be purified and she can raise an elder godling after she takes off to parts unknown. Because there’s no way that can have bad consequences down the road, right?! If you pick this option, she takes off after the fight is done, and the Warden Leaders back at HQ apparently have Serious Questions about why two Wardens are still alive.
I tried to game it with an elven character who didn’t start a romance with him, and picked the “redeem Loghain” option, so Alistair wouldn’t die (because he says forget you and stays behind) and my character could manipulate Loghain into sacrificing himself. Yeah. Even in DAO: Awakenings, Alistair makes it perfectly clear that he’s still pissed at you. :([/spoiler]
I feel some real life guilt over MMOs. Every once in a while in everquest or LOTRO I would buy something out of pity. Some kid misunderstood something and had an item the they though was really valuable, but was pretty much trash. i ignored them like everybody else, and you could see in there repeated sell messages they were really confused and frustrated after all the time the spent getting their “item”. I would log off but still think about it and feel bad for them and guilty that some kid was having a miserable night. But it was almost always someone low level, it’s hard to get high level and not figure it out by then.So when I got high enough levels where what they expected it to be worth was petty cash, so i would buy it from them.
I probably got scammed a time or two but I have pretty good instincts on BS vs real stupidity, and if they did good show, you got me to give you money i was giving away anyway.
The only guilt I feel when playing a game is when I have to turn it off to go back to real life
No seriously though, I remember in Perfect Dark feeling guilty when the guys would put up their hands and yell “don’t shoot!” and I would anyway. Because SOMETIMES they still pull out a gun and keep shooting at you (not all the time though, so shouldn’t I wait and see).
I feel guilty with every Kirby game I’ve ever played, because I constantly make him suck everyone in all the levels
Bioshock? Really? I only started saving them when I read that it would give me the “good” ending. Otherwise, I would’ve happily wiped the creepy little bitches out.
Apparently my VG morality is horribly miscalibrated.
The most guilt I’ve ever felt in a video game is when I went for the evil ending in Infamous 2. End of the game you have to kill your best friend from the previous game and this one. The one who has stood by you through thick or thin. They twist the knife by making you shoot him repeatedly before he dies. There’s no way to back out of it.He just keeps getting up, so you keep having to shoot him:(
The ending made me feel so bad that I almost wished that I hadn’t done the good ending first. Then I could do the good ending and feel like I was fixing something.
Thing about Bioshock (and maybe the second one?) is that being good was not just morally good but materially good. Basically, you would get ADAM rewards slower for being good, but every 3 sisters you saved got you a gift. But sometimes the gift was a unique gene tonic. So by the end of the game, evil would have a bit more ADAM, good would have more tonics. IIRC this made good more appealing, because by the end the only things you couldn’t afford were crap.
I think this is an interesting point about guilt in games. There seem to be five ways to handle it:
Make moral behavior a more efficient game-winning strategy. This encourages folks to be good, but doesn’t really have a moral element to it, since there’s no temptation to evil. This is the Bioshock method.
Make moral behavior a less efficient game-winning strategy. This gives the game a moral element, since you have to make a sacrifice to do the right thing (as in real life), but it could be tremendously unsatisfying to folks who want to play a good guy, and it can earn you terrible reputation among the public. This is the GTA method.
Make moral and immoral behavior equal paths to winning the game. This one can be interesting, but what it really tempts the audience to do is to play the game both times. I’m not sure how that’d provide insight. KOTOR goes this route, I think.
Give you no choice. This is what Portal does when forcing you to sacrifice the companion cube. For me, this was the most interesting sensation of ethics in a game.
Provide no in-game consequences for evil. This is the method used in the example in the OP, in Skyrim when I murdered an asshole NPC and then reloaded. These are the examples that make me think most about my actions and about the world. Sure, he was probably going to arrange for my own death, but is it okay for me to launch a pre-emptive strike?
Hmmm… Guilt from video games, eh? An interesting question. If you’re the type who’s susceptible to this sort of thing, make a note to never ever follow the evil route in Planescape: Torment. That let you do some truly evil things.
Skyrim is even worse than how you say it though. It DOES provide consequences for being evil and killing innocent people,* BUT ONLY IF YOU GET CAUGHT*. So it encourages you to be immoral in the most evil way possible (doing it secretly) so you don’t suffer the bad consequences, just like in real life.
#2 is obnoxious if done incorrectly. It’s the opposite of #1 in that it steers you down the evil path. I’m not 100% sure what you mean with GTA (like only get money by legit means) as the storyline forces you to kill lots. The public likes good guys, but then they forget things immediately. There are some moral choices in GTA IV, usually along the lines of “save bad guy/kill him.” It is almost always beneficial to spare them, as you can get rewarded. One guy tries to kill you, but then he’s easy and it gives you an extra scene. The two main big decision is between killing one of two friends (one choice is clearly superior) and the ending, where it is a very Cadmean victory.
#5 makes me think of something. I have a perhaps irrational fear of letting any unique friendly NPC die in TES. Exceptions are Dark Brotherhood quests and such. If a dragon attacks, I save the game, kill him, and then run around the village looking for corpses. If anyone but a guard dies, I will reload. I do this even if it is a villager who is pointless for the plot, quests, or selling stuff.
I’ve only played a few minutes or a demo of the Overlord games, but I like how the moral choice is essentially between “evil” and “super evil.”
And Chaotic makes you do some truly hilarious things!
But that game encouraged Lawful Good, at least initially. There were ~2 drops of blood that gave +1 CON, and a sword that only LG could use. Once you used the blood you were free to change alignments.
I don’t know if I’d call it a boycott - it’s more comments from individuals who say that won’t play the game for this reason.
Apparently the pieces were called slaves in the original German version of the game. This was changed to colonists and they’ve always been called colonists in the English language versions.
But let’s be real. You’re a seventeenth-century Caribbean plantation owner. You’re going down to the docks and buying workers off a ship and putting them to work in your fields. You don’t pay these workers and you keep all the crops they grow. And these workers are dark brown.
It’s not a real stretch of the imagination to tell what these workers represent.
Tropico was all about being a dictator. And not just any dictator. Paying your soldiers twenty times what everyone else was getting, and making sure anyone who got close to the palace got theirs. Really brought out my inner sociopath, I guess!
I felt bad killing the sasquatches in Red Dead Zombie pack. I also feel guilty when I use a spiky blue shell in Mario Kart, because it’s such a cheap piece of shit of a weapon.
Nah. The moustache twirling evil way to resolve 90% of the quests nets you less stuff and/or XP than the boy scout way, in both games. It’s BioShock all over again (but before !).
One could argue that the higher reward for going evil is that you get to lightning bolt bitches (whereas light side powers are much less efficient at room clearing) but then a Jedi Consular ends up with so much Force points, they can spam powers from the opposite side regardless of their higher cost, so…
Anyway, the guilt trip I remember most vividly was sometime in the mid-90s, back when there still was such a thing as a video game magazine. I remembered reading some preview about a bad shooter game set in the (then recent) Gulf War and thinking “WTF ?! This is not a subject for a game ! People died ! Real people !”. And then I immediately had a flash of all the WW2 games I’d been playing, and understanding that all those nameless nazis and GIs and Japanese troopers I had personally shot right in the 'nads (or ordered to their deaths in RTSs) were, metaphorically speaking, also someone’s grandad. Not the pixel mens themselves, obviously, but that the historical events that inspired those levels featured real people who had really shot at each other and died at the time… for my amusement, it would seem.
So I kinda felt shitty about it for the rest of that day.
Generally speaking though, during play I’m usually distanced from the game enough that I make the moral decisions, good or bad, from a deconstructive point of view (i.e. for the lulz, or for the in-game rewards of either) rather than being emotionally invested.
I very much enjoy hamfisted “ethical” choices that are handled completely wrong though - like that one quest in Dragon Age:Origins where the kid is possessed by a demon. The game designers obviously wanted/expected the player to empathize with his mother and/or him, since the evil he does really isn’t his fault… but the mother is written and acted like such a complete, selfish bitch throughout the whole ordeal, it ends up being more self-righteously satisfying to resolve the quest in a way that results in her death. Or both their deaths, if you’re feeling especially vindictive.
On that note however, I admit being pleasantly surprised that you could also simply turn down the plight of the village altogether (and subsequently find it in ruins when the plot makes you come back). “Undead monstrosities are poised to sack the town and murder you all, you say ? Rotten luck, that. Well, I’m off. Stiff upper lip, chaps !”. It’s a rare game that allows you not only the Good Choice and the Evil Choice, but also to be completely uninterested in the Choice in the first place :).
