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It’s not like the ancient Greeks didn’t have that figured out already.
Have you seen their thoughts on chickens?
Dev’s usually can’t help but incentivise good behaviour. Unless it’s Fable, Overlord, KOTOR, Torment? Any others that actually let you play the bad guy?
Most western rpgs let you be the bad guy (Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Baldur’s Gate, etc.). But then most npcs will try to kill you on sight.
Also Undertale.
Games often present moral choices that are too binary. e.g. kill everyone or save everyone. In that case being evil would naturally be a lot harder because most characters would try to stop you.
Would be more interesting if the moral question is more ambiguous, or maybe have some moral dilemmas. Like you thought you made a difficult decision but the right one, (perhaps even with many in game characters telling you that you are right), only to find out ultimately you were the bad guy after all.
I’ve been playing through Cyberpunk 2077 again and they’re all bad choices.
The final level of Last of Us had me hesitating, too, because the “right” choice felt wrong. Not that you really get to decide, but it was a cool gameplay moment for me.
For cyberpunk 2077 I figured out the good ending. Just never take that job. You can’t leave that one part of the city or see credits roll, but hey.
In most of them there are many decisions that are not black and white. There are many factions you can join or antagonize, and usually you have to decide to help one or another as they are confronted.
Black and white [ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_%26_White_(video_game) ].
Though being very evil was much harder than being good, if I remember correctly.
Evil god, good monster. Convert villages with displays of power while your loveable idiot puts out fires and gathers food. Slam dozens of worshippers into the pit to fuel your miracles. Having an evil beast is way more chaotic and you spend a lot of time cleaning up.
It’s one of the reasons Tyranny is such a good game. You start out as a bad guy in an evil system. You can try to do good, but you never really succeed because you’re trapped in an evil system.
This is not the case for RimWorld, where running a slave labor powered human organ farm sounds like the “easy” way.
Yet here I am only imprisoning raiders who wronged me and even then trying to reform them so they can be part of the gang.
to me, all you need as a counterpoint to the whole post is GTA-- it does disallow the player doing some terrible things, but not many. and it’s enjoyed by millions.
that said, i’ve played every GTA since OG part 1 and have yet to turn into a murderous car jacking bank robbing mean person
Funny enough, GTA4 was the one I played the most, in part because Niko felt less like a legitimately bad person and more like just a very damaged man. I went out of my way to avoid headshots because I knew I could shoot limbs and the enemies would go down, while Niko would acknowledge it, saying things like “I don’t want to shoot you again, stay down!”
Every time I mention I like Undertale and get “Did YoU bEat Sans?”
No, because I’m not a genocidal monster and I never will be. I did the pacifist route. Game over, nothing else to see here.
Many, probably even most of us, are capable of separating game from reality. Bits don’t have feelings.
I think it’s funny when you do something bad to video game characters.
I think it’s good to be able to empathize with fiction, to naturally resist the choice that hurts people or things, even if it’s fake.
But yes yeeting a fictional child over a building can still be hilarious to watch.
Especially considering we’re entering an era where NPCs / robots are getting more and more human-like. Smh it feels more twisted to mistreat an android or AI-NPC than some vacuum or stickman NPC.
That’s it, philosophy over; turn out the lights and let’s go home, everyone
Which way out of this cave, Plato?
points in a direction your mind can’t understand, with the finger seeming to disappear as it bisects into a higher plane
“over there to the left after the bathrooms”
What if feeling bad is one of the consequences that no longer exists?
To this day I can’t make myself do a joja run, despite my dislike of the guy who owns the store in SDV.
I do all sorts of evil shit in games. If you can kill it in the game I will. Dogs, cats, Klombo, fuck em.
