Are video games better without stories? (Gaming)

by cheapLEY , Thursday, April 27, 2017, 13:47 (2776 days ago) @ General Battuta

Reread what I said about it. You have no agency because you have chosen to enter a devastated wartorn city and involve yourself in the local conflicts (i.e. you have chosen to play a war game). Some situations - like war - cannot be resolved with your moral agency intact. The only purely Right choice is to never enter the situation.

Okay, sure. That means the only right act is to not play the game, defeating the purpose of a video game. I get what it's angling for, it just doesn't work in the context of what a video game is. Of course I'm going to do what you tell me to do, that's sort of how video games work. There's an understood rule where I buy into whatever the game is selling to move it along and see what's happening--throwing that back in my face and saying, "look how bad you were, you shouldn't have done that" isn't exactly compelling. The thing is, I don't even think what they were trying to do was bad--it was just executed poorly, in that it's predictable. Again, the white phosphorous scene really stands out. When I (the player) can clearly see the big crowd of people are unarmed and not shooting at me, but the game forces me to kill them anyway, all sense of illusion is gone, and I immediately know what the game is trying to do. That completely kills the impact of the entire rest of the game for me.