And then you pick what you thought was a harmless dialogue option, but instead it sets off a cutscene where you’ve insulted the Emperor and now must murder everyone in order to survive.
Video game be teaching you about the “no gods no masters”
It’s actually funny, I could never play Fallout & Fallout 2 as an evil character because it made me feel bad. At the same time, I’d fire up Carmageddon & Carmageddon 2 and just mow down everything that walked or drove with utter glee. I’m sure there’s a psychological explanation for this dichotomy, but I sure don’t know what it is, and I’m in no mood to make guesses.
Carmageddon is a respawnable, resetable, impermanent world.
Its a toy.
Fallout 1 and 2 are not, or at least not as much or not as easily… they are deterministic, event driven, complex, and permanent.
Its a story.
You don’t tend to care too much about if some random team mate of yours dies in a team based shooter like Battlefield or COD.
Generally, they’re all randos you’ll never see again, despite being actual human beings on the other end of a screen.
You tend to care a lot if its one of your soldiers in XCOM or Xenonauts or one of your crew from ShadowRun Returns or Fire Emblem.
They’re literally fictional characters, sometimes barely even actually characterized, but, you have history with them, shared struggles.
Your brain tends to care more about things that are harder to replace, decisions with irreversible results… morality kicks in when we realize permanence is at play, that consequences actually exist.
… thats a long way of saying I do not know if there is a specific psychological term for all this, lol.
EDIT: Loss Aversion?
I was thinking that the other day I can do literally anything and I always end up doing what I would hope I’d do if I had my characters power.
It’s not that I don’t want to hurt their feelings. In fact I really want to give the smartass sarcastic answer. But I’m worried I’m gonna fuck up my quest. Or make things unnecessarily difficult for myself.
If you ever killed a Little Sister for more Adam, you are a bad person and you should feel bad.
Sometimes I feel like a bad person because I see posts like these of people given the freedom from consequence to be good or bad yet still choose to be good. Meanwhile when I play these games I love the fact that I can murder, steal and commit all manner of moral crimes.
Ah so games make you weak and less manly and emotional /s
