Are there choices that a game shouldn't give a player? (Was: Are games inherently trivializing?)

[Fiogan]

@122B

@Fiogan, may I ask why you think @AllenGies´s Tin Star treated that with gravity? I love the game, but IIRC, the MC never loses sleep over or is haunted by anything they do; only the NPCs can react negatively, and the consequences of the MC´s actions are only touched upon from a detached “legend” point of view.

Tin Star in general wasn’t a game where one was asked often how one’s character felt about events—perhaps in the opening scene, but not much afterwards, I didn’t think. Which was fine with me.

However, in the scenes in question (warning! nasty description of murders and genocide follows) You can murder natives who were just talking to you. Yiska looks on, and is broken. In another scene, you can be responsible for the genocide of an entire tribe. The game didn’t spell it out, although some of the characters did—Families are lying dead in the dirt, who were shot just walking along. Children’s bloody bodies lie mangled on the ground. That is all my MC’s fault. All of it. It almost makes it worse to me that I’m not hanged for my crimes.

I found several points in Tin Star very powerful in this sense, personally. And I felt that observing how broken the other characters were about what happened, even characters who were not directly affected, and sometimes even characters who were not even present, was much more effective than my MC simply going on murder sprees and then thinking ‘ah, perhaps I shouldn’t have done that after all’.

Not that I’m saying this is the only way to handle, well, conscience I suppose we could call it, in games. Not at all. But it is one way, I think, and I found it effective in Tin Star.

@Cataphrak put it much more eloquently than I would have been able to, since this sort of game, or play through, at least, is very much not my usual cup of tea. Much of his post above is relevant to my current thoughts on the matter (as I said above, still parsing all this out mentally). Particularly, this section:

@Cataphrak

However, I can’t be ignorant of my power as an author to shape opinion. The narration can justify the player character’s abhorrent actions and beliefs to the player in a way which might frame them as just or necessary, but as an author, I have a responsibility to ensure that while the player character might be able to use those justifications to sleep soundly at night, the player will not be able to, and this is why I couldn’t write Sabres of Infinity or Guns of Infinity as a power fantasy: because the player needs to be aware of the sort of creature their own creation is becoming.

And:

@Cataphrak

when I present the consequences of something horrible that the player’s done, it’s rarely through the player character’s eyes, but through mine. I show them the consequences of their actions, and I compare them to the justifications they used, and with descriptions of broken bodies, and dying screams, and faces contorted in suffering, I silently ask them if they still think their actions were justified.

In short, I run them through the Third Wave Experiment. Ultimately, I want the player character to feel that their actions were justified or necessary, but I want the player to be full of self-loathing

With @AllenGies’s Tin Star, playing that evil run through, I very much felt like I couldn’t get away from the enormity of the murderous Marshall’s actions. Character after character reacted, sometimes violently, sometimes with cold logic, sometimes with tears, depending on who it was. You lost allies. But of course the MC didn’t find it objectionable, any more than another character in the game who was also involved in the possible massacres and killings did.

I don’t necessarily expect the soul-searching to come from the perpetrators of violence, in real life, in films, in books, or in games. But in the case of games, I think the soul-searching and the horror can, possibly, with care and excellent crafting, come from (or to) the player.