Portal is a First Person but not much of a Shooter
You fire portals i guess, it's kinda abstract
TBH it's more my kinda game, it definitely has more in common with the stuff i particularly liked about Undertale than Spec Ops: the Line or Conscientious Objector, or for that matter Splatoon
Portal uses core FPS mechanics of first-person perspective and mouse aiming.
It is indeed an FPS. Just not one where you aim your gun to kill humanoids or other animals.
It also doesn't deliver a rebuke of FPS violence either.
The closest thing I can think if is Spec Ops: the Line, and I am very, very surprised it has not been discussed more in this thread.
There's not much to say. You're a horrible person for playing the game, and the only way to not be a horrible person is to stop playing.
And no, for the purposes of this thread, Portal doesn't count. While yes, it has FPS mechanics, Portal's focus is different, and we are specifically talking about violence, or rather, how to explore what it is and means in an FPS context.
In Nier, there's a bossfight against a giant robot being ridden by a particularly small Shade, one of the standard enemies of the game.
In NG+ you get to learn what the enemies were saying in the language you didn't understand and it turns out you just murdered The Iron Giant and his child pal
You're a horrible person for playing the game, and the only way to not be a horrible person is to stop playing.
This is, in a nutshell, why despite having access to the game legally I have no interest in playing it.
This is actually a suuuuper reductionist approach to the game and it drives me bonkers
It's not "about" making the player feel horrible. The technique the game uses is that it forces extreme empathy with the protagonist and/or an uncomfortable disconnect. It's just a means of emotional engagement but it's not what the game is "about."
The game is about- to a far greater extent- the danger of villain icing others as a means of dealing with your own issues, as well as the difficulties created when a third party enters a situation they lack the context for (this latter part is why the game is interpreted as about US foreign policy)
Undertale's premise is that there were two races at war, humans and monsters, and you are a human who has gotten trapped in the cave where the monsters live
so in that game, killing every enemy *is* a genocidal action
you can understand someone feeling it might be a little too gruelling for them, no?
Oh absolutely. The game is extremely committed to being as ugly and unpleasant as possible and that isn't for everyone but like it's also super important to me and I don't like the way a lot of the discussion has been framed.
I feel like if I cared for FPS' in anything other than the meager amount I already do, Spec Ops: The Line would be one of my favorites for the genre (not that that's saying much), but as is I stay at thinking it has cool themes and looks interesting.
I feel like if I cared for FPS' in anything other than the meager amount I already do, Spec Ops: The Line would be one of my favorites for the genre (not that that's saying much), but as is I stay at thinking it has cool themes and looks interesting.
Man is a most complex simple creature: see what he weaves, and how base his reasons for doing so.
At any rate, Spec Ops is very clearly not what we're talking about, because a design intention to "stop playing the game" is not acceptable in this discussion.
incidentally "the only way to win is to stop playing" *is* a theme of Undertale (on the no mercy route)
SOtL is less metafictional and more about the real world, in that respect
No Mercy does ask you to stop, but you have to really work to get to it in the first place. You are given very many, numerous choices to change your path. So no, I don't think it's actually a "stop playing" thing. I think it's a "please play a different way" thing.
Oh, okay, but like, in Spec Ops the choice is actually "turn the console off." Which is miles different.
I actually kinda disagree? The whole "you can quit anytime you want" thing is more of an intentionally dismissive reaction to people who say the game "forced them to do bad things." The choice is more a matter of "do I choose to relate with Walker and what he does or do I choose to recognize that he could have left at any point before the white phosphorus, or even before the water depot"
In that sense Undertale and Spec Ops the Line are kind of antithetical; the No Mercy path of Undertale is essentially saying "You want to reject the game's themes out of hand? Okay then, fuck you." Spec Ops the Line is really more of a singular story. The player is supposed to feel boxed in and like they don't have any choice. The important thing is establishing distance from Walker's myopic, self-centered morality.
Ultimately I think it comes down to a disagreement in philosophy on how these things are handled. I don't think "well you didn't have to play the game" is a valid response to player criticism.
Ultimately I think it comes down to a disagreement in philosophy on how these things are handled. I don't think "well you didn't have to play the game" is a valid response to player criticism.
The player criticism ultimately boiled down to "this game won't let me be a good guy." And I think some dismissiveness is warranted there since allowing a way to play the game that prevents Walker's physical/mental/moral degradation would completely devalue the game
Also stuff like "the game blamed me for doing bad stuff!" which, like, honestly I don't have any real reaction to? Because it's such a clear non-engagement with what the game was actually doing.
to clarify, my position here was that Spec Ops is not about "turning off the console" at all, that's just, like, a thing you can do because you don't want to play the game anymore
it's not metafiction in the sense that Undertale is
Man is a most complex simple creature: see what he weaves, and how base his reasons for doing so.
I maintain that it's basically a bonk on the head for people who play jingoistic military FPS for showing them what U.S. imperialism would look like beyond the scopes of their big oiled American guns, and for everyone else it's a vague idea about player culpability.
to clarify, my position here was that Spec Ops is not about "turning off the console" at all, that's just, like, a thing you can do because you don't want to play the game anymore
it's not metafiction in the sense that Undertale is
And I agree, and it's why I find the tone of conversation surrounding SOtL so frustrating.
Ultimately I think it comes down to a disagreement in philosophy on how these things are handled. I don't think "well you didn't have to play the game" is a valid response to player criticism.
The player criticism ultimately boiled down to "this game won't let me be a good guy." And I think some dismissiveness is warranted there since allowing a way to play the game that prevents Walker's physical/mental/moral degradation would completely devalue the game
Yeah but does a game that aims to have player choice as one of its themes but then doesn't let the player make any choice have any value in the first place?
I'm not claiming to answer that, it's an open question and people (myself included) have raised similar criticisms of things like The Stanley Parable.
I've also seen people argue that player choice isn't actually a theme of Spec Ops, which goes back to "getting out what you put in" as an idea. If you go into it with that expectation, you'll be disappointed. And it's not like the devs are totally in the clear here, because if they didn't want it to be perceived as a standard military shooter than why is there a token multiplayer mode?
It's weird. I've kind of gone from hating Spec Ops to just not understanding what it was trying to do.
Ultimately I think it comes down to a disagreement in philosophy on how these things are handled. I don't think "well you didn't have to play the game" is a valid response to player criticism.
The player criticism ultimately boiled down to "this game won't let me be a good guy." And I think some dismissiveness is warranted there since allowing a way to play the game that prevents Walker's physical/mental/moral degradation would completely devalue the game
Yeah but does a game that aims to have player choice as one of its themes but then doesn't let the player make any choice have any value in the first place?
Because the player will, nine times out of ten, be all for the choices Walker makes on his own. It guides the player along the same paths that he takes. The only positive choice he could have made was to withdraw from Dubai entirely, and the narrative is structured in such a way that the player won't even consider this.
Ultimately I think it comes down to a disagreement in philosophy on how these things are handled. I don't think "well you didn't have to play the game" is a valid response to player criticism.
The player criticism ultimately boiled down to "this game won't let me be a good guy." And I think some dismissiveness is warranted there since allowing a way to play the game that prevents Walker's physical/mental/moral degradation would completely devalue the game
Yeah but does a game that aims to have player choice as one of its themes but then doesn't let the player make any choice have any value in the first place?
Because the player will, nine times out of ten, be all for the choices Walker makes on his own. It guides the player along the same paths that he takes. The only positive choice he could have made was to withdraw from Dubai entirely, and the narrative is structured in such a way that the player won't even consider this.
Plus, with "choice" being a theme sometimes you get a lot of power by directly dramatizing how little your choices actually change.
The major "choice" moments of SOtL are as follows:
]-Save some civilians and avoid a major, difficult battle, or try to save a soldier (and fail anyway)
-Choose a soldier or a civilian to execute. The situation is a hallucination.
-Shoot a man trapped under a burning truck or let him burn to death.
-Shoot the civilians who killed your squadmate or fire into the air and get them to disperse. The fact that not shooting them is an option is never stated.
But what all of these have in common is they have very little impact on the overarching plot and ultimately serve as means for the player to express the way they interpret the themes.
Ultimately I think it comes down to a disagreement in philosophy on how these things are handled. I don't think "well you didn't have to play the game" is a valid response to player criticism.
The player criticism ultimately boiled down to "this game won't let me be a good guy." And I think some dismissiveness is warranted there since allowing a way to play the game that prevents Walker's physical/mental/moral degradation would completely devalue the game
Yeah but does a game that aims to have player choice as one of its themes but then doesn't let the player make any choice have any value in the first place?
Because the player will, nine times out of ten, be all for the choices Walker makes on his own. It guides the player along the same paths that he takes. The only positive choice he could have made was to withdraw from Dubai entirely, and the narrative is structured in such a way that the player won't even consider this.
ok but then what is the actual point of the game
Don't go into complex situations without a thorough understanding of what's going on, sometimes HQ is right (your initial orders are to quick check for survivors and everything after the first chapter is Walker acting of his own accord), true villains in the video game sense don't exist and what most would call a villain is someone acting according to their own limited perspective, and sometimes the best option is to just disengage
Ultimately I think it comes down to a disagreement in philosophy on how these things are handled. I don't think "well you didn't have to play the game" is a valid response to player criticism.
The player criticism ultimately boiled down to "this game won't let me be a good guy." And I think some dismissiveness is warranted there since allowing a way to play the game that prevents Walker's physical/mental/moral degradation would completely devalue the game
Yeah but does a game that aims to have player choice as one of its themes but then doesn't let the player make any choice have any value in the first place?
Because the player will, nine times out of ten, be all for the choices Walker makes on his own. It guides the player along the same paths that he takes. The only positive choice he could have made was to withdraw from Dubai entirely, and the narrative is structured in such a way that the player won't even consider this.
ok but then what is the actual point of the game
Don't go into complex situations without a thorough understanding of what's going on, sometimes HQ is right (your initial orders are to quick check for survivors and everything after the first chapter is Walker acting of his own accord), true villains in the video game sense don't exist and what most would call a villain is someone acting according to their own limited perspective, and sometimes the best option is to just disengage
Basically the entire game is Walker confronting his idea of someone who deserves to die or someone whose death is justified
To the point where the final choice of the game happens after Walker has fully understood that all his beliefs have been founded upon a lie:
A. Shoot yourself. Walker is still embroiled in his own idea of who "deserves to die" and understands that he qualifies
B. Give up your gun. Walker either slips further in denial or has finally understood that his conception of a villain is fundamentally wrong. Either/or.
C. Fire at the rescue team, but die in the attempt. Walker is broken by the events of the game and recognizes that within his own standards of an "earned death," he deserves to die, but still seeks to vilify the people who came to rescue him.
D. Fire at the rescue team and kill them all. Walker jumps headfirst into his own moral desecration for whatever reason.
Comments
You fire portals i guess, it's kinda abstract
TBH it's more my kinda game, it definitely has more in common with the stuff i particularly liked about Undertale than Spec Ops: the Line or Conscientious Objector, or for that matter Splatoon
thing with Spec Ops the Line is, it's a pretty powerful critique of violence in FPSes, but it's most definitely not a non-violent game itself
It's not "about" making the player feel horrible. The technique the game uses is that it forces extreme empathy with the protagonist and/or an uncomfortable disconnect. It's just a means of emotional engagement but it's not what the game is "about."
The game is about- to a far greater extent- the danger of villain icing others as a means of dealing with your own issues, as well as the difficulties created when a third party enters a situation they lack the context for (this latter part is why the game is interpreted as about US foreign policy)
you can understand someone feeling it might be a little too gruelling for them, no?
SOtL is less metafictional and more about the real world, in that respect
people use the term "genocide" for "kill everything" routes/options in videogames
the more correct term is "omnicide"
so in that game, killing every enemy *is* a genocidal action
not 'stop undertale', 'stop with the no mercy'
it's not metafiction in the sense that Undertale is