Are video games better without stories? (Gaming)

by General Battuta, Thursday, April 27, 2017, 13:51 (2768 days ago) @ cheapLEY

Reread what I said about it. You have no agency because you have chosen to enter a devastated wartorn city and involve yourself in the local conflicts (i.e. you have chosen to play a war game). Some situations - like war - cannot be resolved with your moral agency intact. The only purely Right choice is to never enter the situation.

Okay, sure. That means the only right act is to not play the game, defeating the purpose of a video game. I get what it's angling for, it just doesn't work in the context of what a video game is. Of course I'm going to do what you tell me to do, that's sort of how video games work. There's an understood rule where I buy into whatever the game is selling to move it along and see what's happening--throwing that back in my face and saying, "look how bad you were, you shouldn't have done that" isn't exactly compelling. The thing is, I don't even think what they were trying to do was bad--it was just executed poorly, in that it's predictable. Again, the white phosphorous scene really stands out. When I (the player) can clearly see the big crowd of people are unarmed and not shooting at me, but the game forces me to kill them anyway, all sense of illusion is gone, and I immediately know what the game is trying to do. That completely kills the impact of the entire rest of the game for me.

I don't disagree, I think it's mean-spirited and wouldn't replay it.

But I don't think it is self-defeating. It's a successful story that can only be told as a video game. You say it yourself:

"There's an understood rule where I buy into whatever the game is selling to move it along and see what's happening--throwing that back in my face and saying, "look how bad you were, you shouldn't have done that" isn't exactly compelling."

The game is questioning this rule. Why do you want to play a game about war? Why are you willing to do whatever is necessary to keep the linear story moving? If you saw a large crowd of unarmed people, why did you do it? You should have turned the game off.

It's a video game take on Funny Games, and just as that movie depends on being a movie (the villain literally rewinds the movie with a remote control to prevent his victims from beating him), Spec Ops asks you why you're playing a game about war. It is necessary that it be predictable, because if you couldn't predict what was coming, you would not have the choice to turn away and refuse to cooperate.

Once you have chosen to invade Iraq, you cannot protest that the situation forced you to do hideous things. You chose to enter a hideous situation. This is Spec Ops' central comment, and it can only be made effectively in a game.