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FPS Gaming and the 'Just-World Hypothesis'
Hugh Pickens writes "When people witness someone subjected to some misfortune, they're susceptible to suggestions that the person deserved it and thus see the misfortune as evidence of karma or justice – hence the 'just' in 'just-world hypothesis.' Now consider the controversial new first-person shooter Homefront, which has you play as a freedom fighter in an America occupied by a North Korean superpower. The introduction to the game goes to great lengths to relieve you of any moral misgivings you might have about plugging away at the enemies it's getting ready to throw at you. 'You see enemy soldiers not only brutalizing American civilians, but outright murdering a mother in front of her children and callously tossing corpses around,' writes James Madigan, a gamer with a Ph.D. in psychology. 'The message is clear: Hey, these guys are evil. When we give you a gun, shoot them and feel good about it.' Madigan says the interesting thing about Homefront is that it's not leaving any blanks to be filled, which robs the game of some narrative depth."
It doesn't matter if it's the North Korean army invading the United States or the American army invading Iraq.
Protect your nation. Kill the invaders.
Make them pay for the theft of your national resources with rivers of blood.
How do we know that the mother of that child didn't deserve it?
Good heavens. We have to make this right by making it be the US soldiers we're shooting.
Why would you rob a game of narrative depth?
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Hypothesis above aside, is it me or does Homefront blow?
Homefront - Thrilling Gameplay Experience
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFVz6-A75Fc
Homefront tells the tale of one nation's struggle against the tyranny of locked doors.
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I don't think Slashdot sould dignify some things with a article. This game, probably don't deserve one, has is just another COD clone.
-Woof woof woof!
Half Life 2 jumps to mind. You kill a guard with your crowbar; they're beating up this guy while his wife scream "please, somebody help". Tha'ts how you get your pistol.
Games aren't the real world. A World War I game that forces you to ask "wait, why am I shooting them again?" just isn't any fun. I think that's why people like WWII so much - by war standards, it was morally unambiguous.
Moral ambiguity bothers people. It's not enjoyable. It shouldn't be enjoyable, and it's good that it bothers us. Is it surprising that we don't like it in games?
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Narrative depth, not gameplay depth. Any deep thinker will be unsatisfied with a totally unambiguous set of circumstances and characters. On the other hand, those types tend not to play many video games anyway...
No matter what choice a developer makes, someone is going to complain about it. If the North Koreans weren't unmistakably evil, critics would be complaining about a lack of motivation and calling the game racist for allowing non-whites to be shot.
Uncharted was called racist for having some Asian soldiers to shoot. So Uncharted 2 made all the enemies white (specifically Russian).
Cartoon worlds have cartoon enemies. Critics complain. And there's always someone around to label anything and everything racist.
What did they say to the North Korean Soldiers? That's a more interesting point.
Franck Martin
Avonsys
Shooters are rooted in well, shooting. Whatever moral conflict you may have about the taking of a life is quickly resolved and cast aside as you blast your way through hundreds, even thousands of enemies over the course of the game. Any hesitation must necessarily have been overcome in the first few minutes in these games.
This is largely due to the power fantasies that accompany the shooter genre. Players are powerful, and their "shooting" ability must be sufficient to overcome all obstacles thrown at them. Justification is needed to resolve the dissonance stemming from gunning down so many enemies. Uncharted is one example of a (great) game that has received some criticism for failing to address this point. Charming off-the-cuff quips are jarringly out of place after slaughtering hundreds of men. Even after the protagonist is himself shocked at the prospect of shooting museum security guards, and is instead offered tranquilizer darts, these guards are sedated right off walkways to fall several stories down. Or off the edge of rooftops where the fall is almost certainly fatal. The justification for shooting is made necessary by the nature of shooters.
So here's an interesting idea from the "Extra Credits" guys at www.escapistmagazine.com .
How about a game where you're a widowed mother trying to get your children to safety across war-torn Europe? The objective is clear, the motivation even more so. The focus would not be on charging into violence, but avoiding it where possible, or using it as an ugly means to a necessary end. A challenging premise for game design, and for game writers. It offers the potential to challenge the players with things like:
-Dialogue of a mother trying to raise children to be good people in an awful environment.
-Deciding what taboos may need to be broken to get the children to safety. Perhaps she will need to kill a man to protect them...and then explain to them why it was right (or wrong?) for her to do that. Perhaps she will need to sleep with a guard so the kids can slip past...but burdened with the memory of what happened.
-Being asked to risk your safety and that of your children on behalf of someone else, or even someone else's children. (and again, having to justify your choices to your children later).***
-Comforting a child.
Extra Credits offered this idea up as part of a discussion on what it takes to create a "good female character". They posited that a good /female/ character is not simply a gender-neutral character that would be good regardless of gender (which would simply be a "good character"). Rather, a good female character is a character whose femininity is innately tied to who she is. This would be an opportunity for a strong female character to flourish as a result of her femininity, rather than a lack of the same. And sex appeal would not have to factor in anywhere either.
P.S:
***An interesting dilemma came up for me in Fable 2 *minor spoiler ahead*:
Once of the quests involves being tricked by a villain, and finding yourself and an innocent woman, placed in front of a demon demanding life force from one of you. This meant that one of you would be instantly aged into a shriveled husk. In the end, I gave the demon the girl. After all, it was just an AI character, whereas I was a real human being who would feel some regret at having my avatar tarnished for the rest of the game.
But I had a twinge of regret, I had been playing virtuous hero throughout the game until this point, rescuing others, and refusing reward whenever it was offered. But now I was not being asked to be the hero, I was asked to be the martyr. Being defaced was a purely visual effect, but a significant one because this was the first time the player is asked to actually give up something irreplaceable. This was the one time where I was asked to make a real sacrifice, however small it was. I was surprised to find myself a bit ashamed at my selfishness, and the event sparked some brief introspection. Great stuff for a videogame.
I find it quite interesting that the author thinks that someone who would by "Homefront" would have moral misgivings that they needed to be relieved of. Shouldn't the Anit-Discrimination Group for all things Asian be kicking in about now? One usually hasknowledge of the game before it is purchased. I have never heard of the situation where the game was returned because some had to "kill too many things." My daughter was wathcing me play an FPS. She asked "how do you know which ones to shoot?" I repled "I shoot the ones shooting at me first", trying to be a little neutral. She asked "Do you get more points if you shoot them all?" No paternity test needed here...
Fast, cheap, correct. You get to pick two.
On Babylon 5, one of Marcus's lines was that he took great comfort in the basic unfairness of the Universe. If it were basically fair, that would mean he deserved everything that happened to him.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
"Madigan says the interesting thing about Homefront is that it's not leaving any blanks to be filled" - I would hardly call that interesting
I noticed the same thing playing the (original) Assassins' Creed. Just before you assassinate someone, they are invariably shown performing some terrible crime; either the commission or ordering of brutal murder, the threat thereof, slave trading, or human mutilation.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
We fail to realize how much power we control over our lives. I once had a friend go on about this woman who was robbed. I was like she's the victim. He said yes, but she went un-escorted, at dusk, at a place that was known to have several robberies in the last couple of months, and was a known place to avoid for the last several years, when everyone knows there is a good chance you are coming out within 20 minutes, stepping out of a SUV with pearls on.
I don't think his point was that she deserved it, but that she was careless, and I agree. You can't "justify" the robber pointing a gun at her. You just can't. But she could have done some things differently. She is the victim, but she also put herself out there. Some would blame her, and that is perhaps where the "just" part comes in. I try not to pass judgment until I know all of the facts. Maybe she didn't know, but then she was still careless in not making it a point to know. And some therefore might not "feel sorry" for her. I do, she was ignorant more than likely. I mean really, who likes to play with fire unless they don't "really" understand how bad they can get burnt? Only the mentally ill, or someone who wants to get burnt...
As far as the game, I don't play them anymore, but if I did, I'd likely go along with it unless it made me uncomfortable, or just pretend there were different circumstances, as surely others will. I don't have reservations about harming someone to protect an innocent, but I do have reservations about killing someone unarmed, "enemy" or not. Again, we don't know all of the facts. And pushing hate/anger on someone in the form of a bullet is not going to make friends.
“The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend.”
-- Abraham Lincoln
Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control.
bind "mouse1" "hug"
Other character has a gun and is shooting at me? Light that sucker up. Moral considerations are for later when you're cleaning your weapon, something that always seems to be left out of these games.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
On top of that, of the ones who do play video games FPS isn't exactly their first choice.
Yes, this is why I near exclusively play JRPG's, particularly the Tales series.
You know, in CoD: World at War, whenever I would play the Soviet campaign missions taking place in Berlin, all I could think about was the fact that, historically, most of the defenders of Berlin were either young teenage boys or men of middle age or older. Some volunteered, others were forcibly conscripted. No military training, with simple weapons that could be mass-produced quickly(google the VK 98 and the VG series of rifles). Conversely, the heroically portrayed Red Army was made up of conscripts and murdered and raped civilians as it crossed Eastern Europe(yes, the Germans murdered civilians as well-mostly Jews and suspected Communists). And you know what? To me, knowing this historical background actually makes these levels a lot more emotional and significant for me. Moral ambiguity has a lot more power to it and makes shooting games more, not less, fun. Read any soldier's memoirs. There is always this watershed moment, where the soldier pauses and realizes he is being told to, encouraged to, and rewarded for killing another person. It is a turning point for them, one that usually becomes a defining moment in their life. War is always at some point morally ambiguous, down to the individual level. If a game can actually accept this and embrace it, it will find itself being labelled as not simply another cookie cutter FPS, but as a legitimate and hard-hitting experience.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
My favorite multiplayer FPS has two teams of mercenaries who work for two different holding corporations and are fighting each other over various objectives, such as control points or intelligence briefcases.
Both holding corporations are run by the same person, known only as The Administrator.
The mercenaries appear to be clones of the same 9 people, but they wear different hats.
In case you're wondering, I'm describing Team Fortress 2. :P
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Most FPSes are not big on stories and choices. They are big on shooting things. There are games that focus more on story, but shooties are not them.
Heck some of the really popular shooties, the story is completely ignored by most players. Like Battlefield Bad Company 2. It is the online shooty I currently like. I have no idea what the story is, never tried the single player. It is US vs Russia but it doesn't really matter. It is people I am supposed to shoot vs people I am supposed to help. Heck, you swap sides each round.
People need to stop wanting games to be "perfectly real" or any of that shit. No, games need to be fun. Now for some games, that means a deep story, and maybe it means some hard choices. However for others, it means a bunch of baddies of some variety to shoot. Both are ok.
The Just World hypothesis is appropriately explained in the summary, but I don't think the excerpt describing the game actually works with the phenomenon.
(1) You see people of a certain uniform brutalizing people you assume are innocent.
(2) When you harm the brutalizers, your justification is "eye for an eye" on a national level.
There is no issue there and such judgments are not noteworthy.
What the "Just World Hypothesis" (better referred to as the "Just World Fallacy") actually describes is that pattern of humans seeking a means to place blame on victims while ignoring the free will of the offender.
So, if we're going to actually use the Just World Fallacy appropriately in the context of this game, we would have to personally make the assumption that the dominated did something to deserve their plight.
"Wow, NK is dominating USA in the game. Well, the USA probably had it coming... just look at American Idol." --- Just World Fallacy
Other, more pertinent places we see the Just World Fallacy:
"Ya, you were robbed, but you left your door unlocked. You deserve what you got."
"Ya, she was sexually assaulted, but she was dressed like a whore..."
"The boy was killed while legally crossing a street in a crosswalk. But he was dressed in black, so he had it coming."
"Her car was stolen, but it was her fault-- she left her keys in car."
I guess I agree in a different way. 'Play' that involves the fulfillment of violent revenge fantasies isn't morally ambiguous. Morally vacant is closer to the mark.
Morally ambiguous or conflicted, to me, means interesting.
The publisher could have at least had the shred of decency to call them insurgents.
If they're having North Korea as a superpower the game is already more deeply entrenched in a fantasy world than Lord of the Rings.
And in its predecessor, Wolfenstein 3d, your enemies were Nazis.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
great, first the VA shooter, and now this anti-korean game.
hope there's at least some south korean protagnoists in the game or else i'm pretty sure i'm gonna get capped in the face by some idiot for being korean.
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I seem to remember seeing a comic commenting on that same situation related to Team Fortress's 2fort (I mean the original TF from the late 90s, not TF2)... in 2fort, you have two buildings across a small lake from each other with a bridge crossing it.
Actually, I seem to recall the commentary for TF2 mentioned that this is part of the reason they went for a cartoony look in the second game; in cartoons, you don't need to explain why something happens, it just is.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Any deep thinker will be unsatisfied with a totally unambiguous set of circumstances and characters.
Unless they've been exposed to nebulous gray-area dramas their entire life. Even Scrappy-Doo has been used as a surprise villain recently. Scrappy Effing Doo. I predict that the new Smurfs movie will show complex motivations for both Gargamel and the Smurfs.
I find it funny when I play multi player FPS's I will get all fired up and yell at the enemy at how horrible and disgusting they are and how our team is so awesome and flawless, etc.
But when it comes time to balance teams and I get automatically switched, I'll start snubbing the team I was just on and start rooting for my new team.
I'm exaggerating a bit, but I do notice the whole us verses them attitude that can change in an instant when I switch teams. Always thought it was interesting.
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This is why enemies like zombies and Nazis are so popular in games - because they're unequivocally bad, and therefore, you shouldn't feel bad about shooting them. There are a few exceptions, of course: some games will let you do bad things and those games tend to be controversial (example: Grand Theft Auto and the Call of Duty scene where you're walking through a Russian airport killing civilians). Another common thing games and movies do is not showing you the face of the enemy - showing someone's face humanizes them, which makes killing them seem bad. Examples: Half-Life 2 soldiers have masks over their faces, storm troopers and a whole bunch of other Star Wars baddies have masks, Killzone enemies wear masks. In many cases, even Nazis wear masks (http://ui07.gamespot.com/806/returntocastlewolfenstein_2.jpg). In general, if you're supposed to like someone, they won't have a mask, and if they have a mask, they're probably bad.
(P.S. The Spy and Pyro in Team Fortess are always bad.)
Better yet, sometimes they were Nazi zombies.
I think that the answer to GP's question is simple, though: we're talking about humans here. They're not soulless killing machines, no matter what the media has taught us about the militaries of the DPRK or NSDAP, or about soldiers of any given army being immoral people. In World War I, there were often cases where the troops on the ground were so horrified by the violence, and so aware of the basic goodness of each other as human beings, that they wouldn't fight; one particular story tells of a German soldier visiting an English trench for Christmas dinner. Although the powerful ideologies carried by modern military aggressors often bury this, it's not trivial to forget that your enemies are humans. Don't mistake the cartoonish sensibility of early-nineties id Software for reality!
(That being said, Doom's narrative was built to fail by the time of release.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
All games provide a "just world" in the sense that they operate consistently according to rules. This is true from Tic-Tac-Toe to Mario Bros. to Crysis. One of the primary draws of gaming is the chance to experience the fantasy of a just world. In real life, you can do everything right and still lose -- or do everything wrong and still win. In (good) games, there is a direct relationship between following the rules and getting a reward. It doesn't matter what the effort and reward are, and these are often totally (and whimsically) arbitrary. The crucial thing is that you are rewarded for good performance and punished for bad performance consistently, according to the rules, every time. When this consistency breaks down, you end up with a frustratingly bad game.
In real life, you are told "if you go to college and get a degree, you will get a rewarding job and make a lot of money." However, many people who follow this advice will not receive the reward. By contrast, we know that when we are playing a game we will always progress to the next stage if we collect 5 stars, or open the door if we get the key, or receive 500 gold if we deliver the letter. Can you imagine if you did a quest and simply didn't receive the reward (and didn't get any chance for revenge)? Or if the rules just changed randomly without notice? Nobody would play such a game, except to create a hilariously virulent video review.
The fantasy of a morally just world is an extension of the fact that games create worlds that operate consistently according to rules.
After killing a few hundred of them?
Right on topic: if there's ambiguity, or if you suddenly start realizing that the opposition is human and can be sympathetic, it changes the whole FPS experience. And people know this, too, which is why we engage in demonization of our enemies in the run-up to a war: so we can less badly about killing them because we've already justified it to ourselves. We probably have to do that in order to survive, but propaganda is the least attractive form of advertising.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
My brother always played Panzer General with the Germans. He said they had better weapons. Nice excuse. You better keep and eye on him...
It's quite simple really.
Do you want to make games educational or do you want them to be entertainment?
Yes, both of these are in stark contrast when it comes to replicating real life.
No one will have fun playing a game where falling a bit too far makes you limp for the rest of the game (or the remainder of the mission), where you slowly bleed to death and lose accuracy based on how close to death you are and so on and so forth.
Likewise, living a normal day life, or, heck, living the life of an actual soldier (sitting and waiting for hours on and, then somebody sneaks up on you and kills you) is also quite boring.
Moral ambiguity is one thing, actually teaching people about how real life works would be a horrible passtime.
Seriously, imagine a game where you spend the entire game fighting a villain, everything points towards that he is the villain and he will walk.
You finally kill him, find out that you've been duped by the actual villain, then you get arrested and put on death row.
Game over.
Does that sound fun?
The point is, entertainment isn't supposed to be like real-life, if it where, you would only get a single chance at it and it wouldn't be straight-forward and entertaining all the time, cause life isn't.
So, no, unless you think that games should solely be based on learning things about real life, let them be just, let them be fun and let them be rewarding.
Not saying that depth isn't relevant, just saying that fiction usually let's the good guys win, even if that is a blatant lie.
Those guys haven't even figured out how to feed themselves. By what conceivable quirk of fate would North Korea become a super power?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Sometimes the bad guys are exactly that..bad guys. In these cases, there is no moral dilemma.
What the "Just World Hypothesis" (better referred to as the "Just World Fallacy") actually describes is that pattern of humans seeking a means to place blame on victims while ignoring the free will of the offender.
Other, more pertinent places we see the Just World Fallacy:
"Ya, you were robbed, but you left your door unlocked. You deserve what you got."
"Ya, she was sexually assaulted, but she was dressed like a whore..."
"The boy was killed while legally crossing a street in a crosswalk. But he was dressed in black, so he had it coming."
"Her car was stolen, but it was her fault-- she left her keys in car."
Crimes are always the fault of the criminal, but I can't defend complete and utter ignorance of living in the real world. It's got absolutely nothing to do with a "Just World" fallacy, it's because I know the world is an unjust place and you need to look out for yourself and those you care about. If you didn't teach your kids not to play on the freeway and not get in a car with a stranger I'd say you've failed at parenting and eventually if you don't learn yourself you've failed at growing up.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Not just one soldier, two entire trenches. They had a Christmas celebration together, including a mess, a football match and, if I remember correctly, even a Christmas tree. Additionally, trench crews tended to develop a tit-for-tat approach like "we fire two shots for every one they fire" (which, of course, means no shots if the enemy doesn't shoot at all).
I think that in many cases the soldiers in the trenches viewed their direct opponents as much more human than the generals who sat somewhere far away and ordered them to let themselves get shot for no good reason. Which would be a nice concept for a shooter (you shoot many good men for no reason other than that those are your orders and they have similar-sounding ones), although I'd imagine many gamers might not like a game that forces them to justify their actions away or face the fact that they are responsible for a whole lot of suffering.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Not deep enough to catch a joke, eh?
If you watch Scooby Doo, don't be surprised if it isn't Dostoevsky!
Orcs = Evil
Zombies = Evil
Morgoth, once Melkor, most powerful of the Valar, wasn't evil outright, just envious. Then the whole cat plus curiosity issue arose and he went crazy. Like a fox.
It's all well and good to create a morally unambiguous killing experience. The Witcher went the other way -- you pretty much couldn't make a 100% win-win decision. It wears on you. Even life isn't that bad. It was like becoming Valedictorian (Yay!) and finding out that there's a kid in your class who would have not only been the first kid to go to college in his family, but would have had a free ride to Harvard if he'd been tops in the class instead of you (Boo.). Except with elves and stuff.
I've always thought this whole issue of "just world" notion is moot in FPS anyways. Doom and Wolfenstein enhance the issues by presenting you with an enemy that is hardly human anyways, but in every FPS I've ever played, and also in the Grand Theft series, you get over it really quickly because the enemy will fight you once he sees you, and in a predictable way. It's literally kill or be killed, with no room for any other tactic, thus justifying the brutality.
I think it would be a really interesting concept for a game to allow for more options. I guess it doesn't fit well with games that are more of total war simulators, but perhaps for games more like Godfather, GTA, or Bully, you could start conversations with opposing gang members rather than have them immediately fight you. You could potentially bribe them, befriend them, etc, even if your groups are at war. Obviously walking into a crowded room of them would have to be pre-programmed fighting, but even then it might have a different dynamic if say, you have a friend in the room. He might quietly leave instead of fight, and take another guy with him, thus making your mission a little easier.
Damn the submit button for being so close to the preview button. The point is not to avoid every risk, that you should never forget anything or anything like that. But if you're purposely leaving your keys in your car and you act like it's a shock to you that there's car thieves then yes I will mock you for not knowing or not caring. Do you really want a world where people take zero responsibility to make themselves less vulnerable to crime? Of course I don't mean lock yourself in and never go out, that'd be throwing the baby out with the bathwater but it would not hurt people to apply sound judgement. That doesn't take it any less a crime when people don't, but it doesn't mean the unlit empty park is just as good a way home as the lit street with people.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
new first-person shooter Homefront, which has you play as a freedom fighter in an America occupied by a North Korean superpower.
A north Korean superpower... really? So it's a comedy then?
There was one Christmas truce. Exactly one. The following year the commanders on both sides, those nestled well back, from the actual fighting, issued the order that if anyone tried that again they would be shot for sedition. They knew very well that the men pulling the triggers needed to see the enemy as faceless monsters, or else the trigger would not get pulled.
It is interesting how counter to Christian theology the 'just world' idea really is. Given that the primary 'hero' of Christians ( Jesus) was beaten, scorned, rejected and then Killed. The scripture is infiltrated with many sayings like:
"take up your cross and follow me"
"he who tried to save his own life, will lose it , but he who gives up his life, for my sake will save it' .
Christianity teaches that this world is certainly NOT just. There is more evil then we can stomach and more mercy then we can imagine.
So with Good Friday coming up , i think this topic is an interesting one to reflect on.
Jesus said " can a student be greater then his master? "
So why then do we all expect to be able to go through the world without suffering ? living in a world were 'we / the good' prevail and 'them/ the enemy' are overcomes.
And are 'we/ the Good'? The bible says: ...." the just man sins 100 times a day" .... " no there are non worthy, no not One" ... "show me the man who says he is without sin and I will show you a lier "
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
I don't recall MASH (the TV show) portraying the North Koreans all that badly. Generally it showed them as intelligent people in hard situations. Example, the NK doctor who was helping them treat patients and Hawkeye was trying to pass off as a Korean American. Or, the infiltrator into the camp that was loving the chow because it was so much better than the food he had had (Igor the cook's incompetence aside). Or the two NK soldiers passing themselves off as ROK medics to get medical supplies who took Maj Burns to get them through checkpoints and then released him.
The only NK I remember who was morally amiguous was a North Korean woman who attempted to kill US patients after Hawkeye had stuck up for her. She was turned over to a South Korean officer who was portrayed as a monster, and we saw that she was being patriotic to her side.
If they were going to make a game about an evil empire successfully invading the U.S., wouldn't it have made more sense to use China, a rising imperialistic power (just ask there neighbors, with most of whom they have territorial disputes) with a large enough population to support an occupation army?
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
I use a bit of irony to swap roles for our normal protaganists, and I'm modded troll. Yay.
The mods need to read Mark Twains "The War Prayer". Perhaps that will be blatant enough for getting through heads.
In an FPS, you're usually going to have someone who is portrayed negatively. It's nearly a given in the genre. If it was a game being aimed at a Moslem audience concerning the Crusades, you wouldn't expect it to portray the forces of Richard the LionHeart as nifty neato keen guys.
I do find it odd that people wonder if this is desensitizing people to killing the "other guys". Slashdot has long been a forum that mostly holds that violent video games and movies have no effect on people in the real world. Why doesn't that same idea hold here?
The world is not fair or just. Good thing too.
This isn't very original, but consider a world where life was fair and just and all the horrible things that happen to people happened because they actually deserved them. A pretty frightening thought, isn't it?
As such, I recommend taking great comfort in the general unfairness of the world.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
You actually demonstrate the linguistic confusion most people who are thought to believe the Just World Fallacy really exhibit: confusing "just deserts" with "don't be surprised".
Most people don't actually believe that leaving one's keys in one's car genuinely deserves having that car removed from the owner's possession. Instead, when they say, "She deserves to get her car stolen...," they mean to convey, "She really shouldn't be surprised. Criminals are looking for the easiest means of profit and she created an extremely easy means for profit."
"Crimes are always the fault of the criminal, but I can't defend complete and utter ignorance of living in the real world."
Oddly enough, I don't have a problem defending genuine ignorance. Nor should you. Ignorance is the lack of knowledge, not denial of reality.
For example: I am ignorant to the intricacies of genetic manipulations required to make banana seeds negligibly small.
Children are ignorant to many things in the world and we forgive them. Often, so are those who grow up in homogeneous populations. I have no problem accepting/forgiving faux pas in such situations.
And I don't think you take issue with that either.
Instead, I think you're particularly annoyed by people you perceive to think themselves invincible or those who make nonchalant decisions in their lives regardless of information historically at their disposal. (Such as the person, say, who grows up in Los Angeles and leaves her keys in her car.) And it's even worse when those people act as though there was no way to predict that their actions would enable a criminal to take advantage of a situation.
I think you might have missed his point. He's not talking about the quality of the work. He's talking about how even a show like Scooby Doo (which I'm sure he didn't expect to resemble Dostoevsky), is trying to write ambiguous, gray characters with complex motivations. In other words, he's trying to make the point that media are saturated with these sorts of nebulous gray-area dramas.
"Ya, he got a virus, but the dumb noob was using Internet Explorer."
"Ya, she got a virus, but the dumb noob used MS Security Essentials."
"Ya, he got trojaned, but the dumb noob didn't run Malwarebytes or Combofix in Safe Mode."
"Ya, her WiFi was infiltrated, but the dumb noob only used WEP."
"Ya, his server was infiltrated, but the dumb noob didn't use port forwarding."
"Ya, her box was infiltrated, but the dumb noob used Windows instead of Linux."
"Ya, his network was infiltrated, but the dumb noob used Ubuntu instead of Red Hat Enterprise."
"Ya, her network was infiltrated, but the dumb noob used FreeBSD instead of OpenBSD."
Ya, crap happens, because I'm a dumb noob about a lot of subjects. Who isn't?
One more, and back on topic: "Ya, this game is about Korea invading the US, but didn't the US in reality invade Korea in the 1950s? And just because the US did it, does that mean Korea deserved it?"
Or maybe you're just projecting a whole bunch of bullshit to make yourself feel superior, when in fact you're too fucking dim to realize that the game is just RED FUCKING DAWN AS A VIDEO GAME.
That's it, period. It's Red Dawn, but a video game, because someone saw Red Dawn and thought "boy that'd make a pretty rad game".
Get off your high fucking horse and go find an ounce of cultural knowledge, kid.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
There's a slippery slope hidden in that. More realistic modelling of human interaction removes a fairly important cue that we normally use to separate it from real social environments, and that could poison the social development of young gamers. But it's just a thought.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
That foreigners are dangerous, evil people with no worth as human beings. What could possibly be the outcome of that belief...
you had me at #!
Unfortunately most people simply won't get it, and consider that perhaps North Korea has been pissed off with the US being in their country for the past 60 years. But if its someone invading the US, oh its all good.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You think those actions were in the interests of US citizens? Haha, cute.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Or perhaps an adventure game?
Call it: "The Good Soldier"
Follow a young man from his hometown, through training, through war, and back home, and readjustment.
Instead of focusing around the shooting, make it a heavy-rain adventure where you make a series of choices and consequences. Small general ones like skipping on some bonding time to put in some after hours work on your own. Or bigger ones like who do you send to draw out the sniper. Respond to orders in the field from a commander that doesn't understand the situation on the ground. For game purposes, fill it out with game-like choices of tactics in the field to form the gaming "meat" throughout the war, because you need to break up the pacing.
Campfire after-action chatting with the boys, and grim consolation of the last survivor of a squad you sent on patrol last night.
Go back home and see your friends and family who have no idea what you've just been through. Listen to petty complaints about their daily life with flashbacks to life you've just left behind. Snap back and finally tell them about what real shit is all about? Or keep it to yourself, because telling them might push them away, and you want to regrow lost a lost relationship. Pick up a job you don't know and start a new life. Ignore your wife's complaints about you staying out late /again/, because you need to take care of a comrade that's having a hard time readjusting to life back home.
End on a reflective note instead of a big climactic finish.
That was precisely what came to my mind as well, that German soldier seeing the humanity in the dying Frenchman as he lay in the artillery crater
All Quiet On The Western Front was a powerful film in general (yes, I read the book too), but that scene was definitely one of those that stood out.
I think there's definitely an analogous point, though: being shown the humanity of those you're shooting at interferes with the will/ability to shoot at them.
the xkcd does make the point that doing so can hurt the gameplay experience.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
"When people witness someone subjected to some misfortune, they're susceptible to suggestions that the person deserved it and thus see the misfortune as evidence of karma or justice"
I always assumed this was only true of fascists and other psychopaths moral defectives.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
That would be the saddest story I ever heard.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
You think those actions were in the interests of US citizens? Haha, cute.
Well, some beneficiaries are citizens. Of course, in the case of the international bankers who are financing both sides, you're right, some are not even citizens.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
So the bankers acted as nuetral bankers. Thanks for pointing out the fact that they did not participate in the war.
To Swiss bankers neutrality meant not discriminating against Nazi gold.
That is exactly what neutrality means, they did not pick sides. So Nazi gold was as good as fold from the Allies.
"The only NK I remember who was morally amiguous was a North Korean woman who attempted to kill US patients after Hawkeye had stuck up for her. She was turned over to a South Korean officer who was portrayed as a monster, and we saw that she was being patriotic to her side."
Funny but I do not see how killing a helpless patient as morally ambiguous. I also didn't see as being patriotic for the act. I just saw two monsters instead of one.
If it had been an American solder that tried to murder a helpless patient I doubt that anybody would say that he was being patriotic no matter how terrible the enemy was.
Any way my MASH comment was meant to be a joke but your comment so creeped me out that I just had to reply. Just what??? You have a very odd view of the world is all I can say.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
This line of discussion started with morals. So far you've avoided that topic with the single exception of "I've been playing Homefront, and it reminds me why pacifism is an morally corrupt philosophy." We seem to be just trading words and not getting anywhere. So perhaps, if you're at all interested in expanding moral philosophy beyond a cartoon war game, you'd consider checking out Kohlberg's work on moral development. Hint: believing your (or any country's) government is always right is obedience to authority, a child's level of morality.
"You have a very odd view of the world is all I can say."
That wasn't my view of that, but the way it was portrayed in the show. At least the way I interpreted it.
Given the way that it showed Hawkeye sticking up for her (or at least cursing the officer) even when he heard the translations of what she was saying, it's hard to say the show was portraying her nearly as negatively as the ROK intelligence officer.
In fact, I had much the same reaction as you, not having a warm fuzzy for any one of them, including Hawkeye who seemed at best naive.
But there were many shows in that not long past Vietnam era that tried to be "cool" or "edgy" by showing rather sympathetic viewpoints of those opposing the US, and negative viewpoints of those we had supported.