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rionaleonhart) wrote2024-09-11 07:10 pm
rionaleonhart) wrote2024-09-11 07:10 pm
Entry tags:
Self-Loathing Simulator 2020.
Has a videogame ever made you feel like a bad person? Or, to broaden the question for the non-players amongst us, has a work of fiction ever made you feel like a bad person?
I've wanted to make this entry for a while, but I've been dragging my feet on it. I've mainly been reluctant to type up my own example, because, uh, you'll never believe this, but thinking about it makes me feel like a bad person.
My personal example of a videogame making me feel personally awful comes from Omori. Heads-up: there's discussion of animal harm and suicide below the cut. This takes place within a dream sequence in a videogame, though, so it's doubly removed from reality; no people or animals are harmed either in the real world or in the 'reality' of the game.
In a late dream sequence in Omori, I found myself in a room. In the centre of the room was Mewo, the family cat, strapped to a table. Next to me was an anthromorphic cat in a butler's outfit, henceforth 'the butler'.
I spoke to the butler. All the butler would say was 'Mewo has been very, very bad.'
I examined Mewo.
'Mewo stares at you. She does not know what is happening,' the game's narration informed me. 'Do you want to cut open Mewo?'
I was given the options 'yes' and 'no'. I selected 'no'. I did not want to cut open Mewo.
I looked for a way out of the room.
There was no way out.
I spoke to the butler again. It was the same thing: 'Mewo has been very, very bad.'
I examined Mewo. The game asked me again if I wanted to cut her open. I said no.
I had another look around for exits.
Okay. I could see where this was going. Obviously the only way to get out of the room was to harm the cat. Fine. If I wasn't going to be able to progress with the game otherwise, I was just going to have to do it.
I braced myself and examined Mewo. Did I want to cut Mewo open? I said yes.
The game asked me again. 'Mewo stares at you. She tilts her head out of curiosity. Do you want to cut open Mewo?'
I lost my nerve and said no.
After a moment, I gritted my teeth and went back to say yes. It was the only way to progress, after all, and I wanted to see the rest of the game.
The game asked me over and over again, while Mewo became increasingly distressed, whether I wanted to cut her open, and I said yes every time.
I hated this. But I didn't have a choice. It was the game. It wasn't me. This was the only way to carry on, so I was just going to grit my teeth and do it.
'Do you want to cut open Mewo?'
Yes. Yes. Yes, I want to cut open Mewo. Just get on with it.
It was done, in the end. I examined Mewo's body, but all I got was the message 'You cut open Mewo.'
I looked for an exit. There still wasn't one.
I spoke to the butler.
'Waiting for something to happen?' the butler asked. 'If you want a way out, there always is one... but...'
Shit! Shit shit shit.
I'd seen that message before. It appeared on occasions when you had the option to open the menu and stab yourself, kicking yourself out of your dream. I checked the menu and, sure enough, the 'stab' option was there.
This wasn't a room you got out of by cutting the cat open. This was a room you got out of by stabbing yourself.
I didn't have to harm Mewo.
I'd persuaded myself that I had to do this, that it was the only way. I'd cut her open, blaming the game design for it the entire time. I had to do it.
But I didn't have to do it. It didn't achieve anything at all. I just hadn't looked hard enough for alternatives, and that whole horrible sequence was for nothing.
I reloaded my last save immediately, so I could redo that room and leave without hurting the cat. But I was intensely conscious that I had hurt her, that I was just papering over that fact. What if I'd mistakenly persuaded myself I had to do something terrible that I couldn't then undo?
(Huh. I think writing this up has helped me truly understand the thematic significance of that scene.)
I had trouble sleeping the night after playing through this sequence. I don't think it would have hit me nearly as hard if it actually had been unavoidable. But the realisation that it could have been avoided, that I just failed to avoid it: that's what really made it stick in my mind.
Wow, I did not enjoy typing that out. Please share your own stories of guilt-inducing moments in fiction, and we can feel bad about ourselves together.
I've wanted to make this entry for a while, but I've been dragging my feet on it. I've mainly been reluctant to type up my own example, because, uh, you'll never believe this, but thinking about it makes me feel like a bad person.
My personal example of a videogame making me feel personally awful comes from Omori. Heads-up: there's discussion of animal harm and suicide below the cut. This takes place within a dream sequence in a videogame, though, so it's doubly removed from reality; no people or animals are harmed either in the real world or in the 'reality' of the game.
In a late dream sequence in Omori, I found myself in a room. In the centre of the room was Mewo, the family cat, strapped to a table. Next to me was an anthromorphic cat in a butler's outfit, henceforth 'the butler'.
I spoke to the butler. All the butler would say was 'Mewo has been very, very bad.'
I examined Mewo.
'Mewo stares at you. She does not know what is happening,' the game's narration informed me. 'Do you want to cut open Mewo?'
I was given the options 'yes' and 'no'. I selected 'no'. I did not want to cut open Mewo.
I looked for a way out of the room.
There was no way out.
I spoke to the butler again. It was the same thing: 'Mewo has been very, very bad.'
I examined Mewo. The game asked me again if I wanted to cut her open. I said no.
I had another look around for exits.
Okay. I could see where this was going. Obviously the only way to get out of the room was to harm the cat. Fine. If I wasn't going to be able to progress with the game otherwise, I was just going to have to do it.
I braced myself and examined Mewo. Did I want to cut Mewo open? I said yes.
The game asked me again. 'Mewo stares at you. She tilts her head out of curiosity. Do you want to cut open Mewo?'
I lost my nerve and said no.
After a moment, I gritted my teeth and went back to say yes. It was the only way to progress, after all, and I wanted to see the rest of the game.
The game asked me over and over again, while Mewo became increasingly distressed, whether I wanted to cut her open, and I said yes every time.
I hated this. But I didn't have a choice. It was the game. It wasn't me. This was the only way to carry on, so I was just going to grit my teeth and do it.
'Do you want to cut open Mewo?'
Yes. Yes. Yes, I want to cut open Mewo. Just get on with it.
It was done, in the end. I examined Mewo's body, but all I got was the message 'You cut open Mewo.'
I looked for an exit. There still wasn't one.
I spoke to the butler.
'Waiting for something to happen?' the butler asked. 'If you want a way out, there always is one... but...'
Shit! Shit shit shit.
I'd seen that message before. It appeared on occasions when you had the option to open the menu and stab yourself, kicking yourself out of your dream. I checked the menu and, sure enough, the 'stab' option was there.
This wasn't a room you got out of by cutting the cat open. This was a room you got out of by stabbing yourself.
I didn't have to harm Mewo.
I'd persuaded myself that I had to do this, that it was the only way. I'd cut her open, blaming the game design for it the entire time. I had to do it.
But I didn't have to do it. It didn't achieve anything at all. I just hadn't looked hard enough for alternatives, and that whole horrible sequence was for nothing.
I reloaded my last save immediately, so I could redo that room and leave without hurting the cat. But I was intensely conscious that I had hurt her, that I was just papering over that fact. What if I'd mistakenly persuaded myself I had to do something terrible that I couldn't then undo?
(Huh. I think writing this up has helped me truly understand the thematic significance of that scene.)
I had trouble sleeping the night after playing through this sequence. I don't think it would have hit me nearly as hard if it actually had been unavoidable. But the realisation that it could have been avoided, that I just failed to avoid it: that's what really made it stick in my mind.
Wow, I did not enjoy typing that out. Please share your own stories of guilt-inducing moments in fiction, and we can feel bad about ourselves together.
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I think the most guilt-inducing moment in video games I've played was in Neopets way back when. I hit the point where I wasn't playing consistently and the pets were becoming horribly starved due to inconsistent feeding. So I gave them up to the pound, and had to go through the whole sequence of them begging to stay with me.
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You're a much more responsible Neopet owner than me, and it's a shame the game guilted you for that! I've still got all the pets I had twenty-four years ago, all starving. Sorry, guys.
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Oooooooof yeah, this is definitely one of the moments from that game. Often brought up. It's been ages since any of us have touched it but we had someone watching our first time through, who immediately advised us on what to do so we could avoid the pain. We're not any more sensitive than the average person on that front (which is to say we are but not to an extent where we wouldn't be able to finish the game) and I wonder how we would've dealt with it, but it's certainly nice to not have any real memory of... that.
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I don't know if they're as 'bad' as what you experienced because I decided against reading it, but both of those things made me feel pretty terrible and are amongst the reasons I want to replay W3. Eventually...
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Spoilers for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, discussing character death
Me, personally, I had a moment like this while playing The Witcher 3– there’s a side quest early in the game called On Death’s Bed, where Geralt comes across a woman named Lena who’s succumbing to fatal wounds from a griffin attack, and the player is given the option to give her one of his healing potions, with the caveat being that since it’s for Witchers and not regular humans, it might kill her, and she’d be in agony worse than her current agony the whole time. But it’s either that or stand by and let her die without trying to save her.I felt guilty for standing by, so I made the decision to trust probability and gave her the potion. She dies. Horribly. No matter what you do, she dies in excruciating amounts of pain, but the player’s action makes her suffering worse than the player’s inaction would have, and that screwed with my head.
I’ll be honest, I cried, and I couldn’t pick up the game for weeks after that. Just looking at the case on my bookshelf filled me with dread, because it was an early quest that set the tone shockingly well and I didn’t want to play through the rest of a game that would be, as you put it, a self-loathing simulator.
That’s the only personal story I’ve got, but I wound up going down a rabbit hole of internet research a while back, so I know an inordinate amount of trivia about Spec Ops: The Line, a game that pretty much hinges on the concept of players’ guilt. That one doesn’t even give you a choice or the illusion thereof within the game itself; your options are be terrible and be shamed for it, or quit playing altogether.
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I also fell down the Spec Ops: The Line research rabbit hole without playing the game itself! It sounds like a fascinating game I absolutely never want to play. I suppose, by opting out, I've... won it, in a sense?
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And afterwards I was like wtf does this say about me? I should have stronger morals than that! But maybe I don't, and I should just be grateful this sort of thing doesn't come up in real life ...
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It's a shame because Reyes Vidal is, in my opinion, the only interesting romance in the game. Whereas the OT romances had a foundation of the LI's loyalty to Shepard, it makes so much thematic sense that a green pathfinder would end up in an entanglement with someone whose motives are nebulous and occasionally duplicitous. (I love the moment where they're drinking wine on the roof and Ryder gives him a hard time for not being genuine, and when Reyes replies, "I'm always genuine, Ryder. In my own way." You can tell he wants so badly for them to believe him!)
But letting Sloane die is such a bucket of cold water. It's weird that it's played as the happiest ending, especially since Sloane had been coming around to Ryder and was a very interesting character. This is something I desperately want to write fix fic for.
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there's also Clickholding, which i played recently. everything is entirely avoidable, but in the way anything in any game you play is avoidable: you can simply turn the game off. Clickholding reminds me the most of this scene you described, but it also sounds like it's just not effective in the same way Omori is; i wasn't personally affected by Clickholding because the only way to get to the end of the game was to keep going, even when you knew things were going to end badly, so like you say, knowing something is unavoidable makes it less terrible: it merely becomes part of the gameplay.
the other thing this reminds me of, specifically because of the cat, is Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, which features similar scenes of violence towards cats and which remains one of the hardest things for me to read, despite how much i enjoy the book otherwise. actually now i'm wondering if the Omori devs might not have been influenced by it, due to the dream element involved in Kafka as well.
anyway i didn't mean to ramble this much;;; thank you for sharing your reaction to this scene. it does sound really really distressing and honestly i'm kind of glad to now know ahead of time how to avoid this!
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Never having heard of Clickolding, I just looked it up on Steam. It looks very unsettling! One of the reviews contains the evocative line 'I haven't been on an adventure this erotic since I rolled around nude in the banned books list.'
I'm glad to have shared the secret to avoiding that scene! Good to know that perhaps I've saved dream Mewo in another universe.
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I might not have played enough really dark games to have a good answer for this, but it did remind me of something that happened in World of Warcraft years ago. In a new zone there was a quest that involved killing X number of deer, which is not unusual, but the deer for the quest were not just individuals roaming around, but whole families of deer--stags and does with fawns. This is not a game with a playerbase known for its sensitivity, but it really bothered people and there were a lot of complaints! I found it interesting how it took people out of the mode of seeing these polygony representations of deer as just pixel-things to mow through in the name of the XP grind and evoked empathy instead.
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This is not a game with a playerbase known for its sensitivity, but it really bothered people and there were a lot of complaints! I found it interesting how it took people out of the mode of seeing these polygony representations of deer as just pixel-things to mow through in the name of the XP grind and evoked empathy instead.
This is so interesting! Reminds me of how, the moment I realised The Last of Us had a mechanic where you could take the bandits hostage, I didn't want to fight the bandits. If they're not willing to shoot when there's a risk they'll hit a fellow bandit, that means they care about each other!
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I think probably the guiltiest a work of fiction has made me feel is As Meat Loves Salt. Normally whenever I'm reading something, for the duration of the novel I am 100% rooting for the protagonist no matter how much of a complete shit they are, even when it's something like The Debt To Pleasure where the protagonist/narrator is bonkers and awful, intentionally. But with AMLS it felt like being shown "you, but the worst possible version of you, like if someone just pushed all your worst tendencies up to 11", so it was a very squirmy and unpleasant experience. It did not, however, stop me from rooting for Jacob Cullen even after he'd done murders and rapes. Apparently the Protagonist Effect is just That Strong with me.
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It's really interesting to see a non-videogame example of this! I was struggling to think of any, but it makes a lot of sense that identifying too much with an unpleasant protagonist would inspire similar uncomfortable feelings.
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But for me, it's a bit of a one-off that the fandom tends to find comedic. Namely, pushing a merc out a window in Mass Effect 2. I see a lot of comments on Reddit that are like, "I always play as paragon but I take the one renegade interrupt to shove this guy." I did it once and disliked it so much that I reloaded a save. It's just cruel. Shooting someone who is shooting me in a game? Fine! Pushing someone out the window of a skyscraper in the middle of a conversation? That's terrifying.
The Dishonored series has a very clever morality system where the amount of people you kill and the destruction you cause effects the end state of the game. You can be stealthy and non-lethal, or you can be bloodthirsty and vicious. I can't do high chaos playthrough because the setting is so fleshed out and enjoyable, I can't cope with the idea of leaving this world worse off than it was when I entered it. Even in Dishonored's much more frenetic stealth sequel, Deathloop, which doesn't have the same morality mechanism, it still took me a while to be okay with killing NPCs. I had been trained out of doing so for this publisher's IPs.
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the setting is so fleshed out and enjoyable, I can't cope with the idea of leaving this world worse off than it was when I entered it.
This is a really interesting reason! I'm trying to think of other games where I'm really attached to the setting in particular, now. I suppose Pokémon is the obvious one, but somehow I doubt that I'll be presented with a 'do you want to kill all these people or find ways around it?' dilemma in a Pokémon game.
Huh, I've been aware of both games for a while, but I hadn't realised Deathloop was in the Dishonored universe! I've never looked seriously into them because first-person games give me such bad motion sickness.
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Okay, so there are some very high-level players who can essentially play even the hardest modes forever, but in earlier releases, and for players with more moderate skill levels, it's designed more as a "How long can you survive before you succumb?" experience, and especially before you get overfamiliarized with the game mechanics and the underlying code and the loot spawns and stuff, it's immersive and haunting and beautiful.
So, I was watching a player of moderate skill playing one of the harder difficulties, and this is something like thirty episodes into a run, or something. They've been surviving against all odds in this frozen wasteland, scavenging for food, sewing up and mending their own gear, fending off or running from hostile wildlife, and just ekeing out this existence as best they can. And it's miserable, and they're always on the verge of starving or freezing to death, scrabbling from one little patch of warmth and safety to another.
Then they get this affliction that will essentially drain their health until they die, and they need something – antibiotics, I think? - in order to cure it, and the problem is, this is a rare loot, and it might be in any one of a bunch of structures... but it probably won't be. It is vastly unlikely on this difficulty setting that it will be. And to make things worse, it's bitterly cold outside, it may even be blizzarding, and the place they're in is not a place with a lot of structures handy.
So, like, what do you do, right? As a content creator, you kinda have to go out and try to make it from house to house hoping against hope that there's going to be an antibiotic in one of them. You can't just sit down and let your character die; you have to make the attempt to keep going. Even if the chances are really, really low. So they do, and it still kinda messes me up that the end result was that rather than making this fictional character as comfortable as possible in her final moments – maybe in a bed by a fire, or something – she went out into the biting wind, moaning in agony from the affliction and the cold, and we watched her struggle and watched the screen fading in and out and listened to her heartbeat get loud in her ears until she died by the side of a road, far from anywhere.
Because that's the content we owe to the viewers, who'd be disappointed if we just gave up.
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That story sounds really distressing, and I'm fascinated by the way it made you feel complicit in the character's suffering as a viewer, not just as a player. Thank you for taking the time to share it!
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There were a lot of moments in Pentiment that made me feel genuinely bad about the choices I was making but I think Act 2 takes the cake for
Spoilers for Pentiment acts 2 & 3
Caspar's death. Caspar is Andreas' young apprentice. If you encourage him to pursue art and treat him like a son, during the abbey siege and subsequent fire, Caspar will refuse to escape and stay with Andreas instead - there's a check, there, that will fail explicitly because you've been nice to him. Eventually, Caspar will go back in the fire to save Andreas and die in the attempt. It made me feel terrible. I had doomed a kid by being kind to him. But I couldn't bring myself to be cold and distant and rude to him because he's just a kid who looks up to Andreas so much! I could have saved him if I'd kept being an asshole over and over and over, but I didn't, and that moment really hit me bad also because act 3 spends a while implying that Andreas died in the fire, making Caspar's death a meaningless sacrifice.no subject
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So what makes Spec Ops: The Line so remarkable, other than basically everything, is how intentionally it refuses to use game mechanics to make the same justifications. Game pacing still makes for a constant onslaught of etc., that is how most game loops work, and the protagonist/player acclimates in the same way to the obviously awful things they're doing. Micro moral choices exist, but the macro moral choice of war has been made by the setting, the narrative, the existence of war: a solider cannot chose not to fight. But the power dynamic is explicit and inverted in a way that confronts assumptions of the macro narrative: these people (protagonist specifically, US military in general) repeatedly inserted themselves into a situation where they were not wanted to exert power and commit war crimes, full stop. Protagonist and player acclimatizing to violence becomes a source of horror rather than a convenience that makes the game loop possible. The albeit-tropey ending makes the entire game into a macro moral choice that does indeed exist: the decision to participate in the first place.
I think it's meaningful that your example & lots of comments are video game examples. Partially, obvs, it's the initial question itself. Nonetheless. Like
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Micro moral choices exist, but the macro moral choice of war has been made by the setting, the narrative, the existence of war: a solider cannot chose not to fight.
I love your phrasing here.
I included a general 'fiction' version of the question because I didn't want to exclude non-gamers from the discussion, but also because I was curious about whether other forms of fiction were really capable of inducing guilt in the way games can. I found it hard to think of examples from any other medium, so it was interesting to see
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I might have phrased myself badly; I'm just thinking about times people have felt guilty for actions they've taken in a game, even though those actions aren't real. The sequence I describe in the post felt awful to play through, but I think it's fine that it exists in the game, and I don't think it actually made me a worse person in any way; it just shocked me into a moment of self-reflection.
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I spent sooooo long playing Dragon's Dogma 2 and did so many sidequests, but there was one time-limited part at the end of a sidequest I just plumb forgot to do, which meant I killed an NPC permanently. The game has a mechanic to revive people, but not that guy! I probably won't forget about it even when Dragon's Dogma 5 is out. =_=
Or the super bad end in Suikoden V (when you don't recruit enough characters). I told my friend about it and she didn't even realise the ending could be that terrible. I did a full replay after that because oh my goddd.
I'm sure there were multiple things like this in Dragon Age, but that's how that entire series works.
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This sounds agonisingly like something I would do and feel terrible about. I've just got such a bad memory!
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It's interesting cos I think if I actually was forced, I'd probably just be annoyed with the game - there's a subset of "oooh COMPLICITY" games that I personally find kinda annoying. Like, video games can definitely do interesting things with the level of choice/complicity players have... but they can also do less interesting things with it, haha. But the element of kinda tricking you into thinking you had to, and then realising you didn't, is interesting. And upsetting!!!!
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Yeah, it's interesting to reflect on how I was dealing with it by just blaming the game for making me do it. These weren't my own actions; it was the game's fault! And then it turned out that they were my own actions, and I went from 'I really disliked having to do that, but I did have to do it' to 'oh God I feel genuinely terrible'.
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I don't think I've ever had an experience quite as harrowing as that, but it's mostly down to not often playing games that are challenging in that way. But I have had a couple of experiences where I've felt bad for not feeling bad and have given up a game because of it. Like when I played Crusader Kings III and was aware of just how often I was murdering people for my own convenience without feeling any qualms about it, because the game is set up to have that be a pretty frictionless and quasi-funny but not quite subversively funny mechanism.
I started out playing like, "I'm going to stick to my island, I'm not going to commit colonialism or cultural genocide, I'm just going to focus on making this a well-functioning country," and soon enough, thanks to the general uneventfulness of the game and focus on smaller stats, I soon found myself switching gears to "I'm sick of employing this vassal on my council and he annoyingly won't agree to a matrilineal marriage to my daughter, so I'm going to murder him and all of his heirs until his land just reverts to me," and then "Yeah, I guess I'll violently take over the adjacent island and 'spread my culture' just to have something to do." Just the banality and - as you say, the complete avoidability of it - then bothered me.
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This makes me think a little of The Last of Us, Part II. It's a game that wants you to think about the consequences of killing the enemy, and I want to minimise deaths when I'm playing it. But, at the same time, killing people in that game mechanically feels really satisfying, especially in melee or stealth. There's a good weight to it! It feels really good to murder these fictional people with my bare hands! Sorry, guys.
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It wasn't guilt-related, but Undertale did absolutely terrify me at one point: when Flowey crashes the game at the final battle. It felt like something he was doing to attack me, the player, rather than the character I was playing; I wasn't prepared for it at all!
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I don't play enough games like that, that I'd genuinely feel bad about doing certain things... At most maybe games like DA/ME, but I also never choose the options I would hate to even fictionally pretend to choose haha so it's kind of a moot point. Like I have no problem killing people all over Kirkwall, but agreeing to give Fenris back to his former master? Never in a million years.
Actually I guess there was a moment in The Walking Dead game where, I forget what I even did, I think killed a guy? idk he probably deserved it sjfhskjfds BUT THE LITTLE GIRL CHARACTER YOU'RE WITH SAW ME DO IT and it popped up that "Clementine will remember this" message in the corner and I IMMEDIATELY reset the game and did not kill that guy lmao. Like Clem my baby girl you will NOT be emotionally scarred by this you're already having a rough enough time in the zombie apocalypse. I can't be a bad influence on the video game child.
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And I imagine if you'd found the out before going through the motions it wouldn't have been nearly as good
It's an interesting gamble on the part of the game! It's possible for the player to have a less effective experience, but creating that possibility means that other players will have a much more effective experience.
I'm thinking a little of Undertale, now: how it goes to so much effort to have consequences for violence, and how it calls the player out if they reset to avoid those consequences, and how most players will never see those details because 'don't kill anything if you want the true ending!' quickly became so widely known.
BUT THE LITTLE GIRL CHARACTER YOU'RE WITH SAW ME DO IT and it popped up that "Clementine will remember this" message in the corner
Oh, God, awful! I would also have reset. I agonised so much over the impact my actions were having on your nine-year-old companion Daniel in Life Is Strange 2.
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