Moments in gaming that made you think
Scythe
Join Date: 2002-01-25 Member: 46NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Constellation, Reinforced - Silver
Join Date: 2002-01-25 Member: 46NS1 Playtester, Forum Moderators, Constellation, Reinforced - Silver
<div class="IPBDescription">A assume this forum still works</div>A couple memories recently dragged themselves up out of the bowels of my mind, prompted by an interesting moment playing DXHR. I recalled a few moments I experienced whilst playing games that made me think about what I was doing and why I was doing it. I'm sure other people have similar experiences.
The first game was Creatures 2, released in 1998. Creatures 2 was a life, genetics and learning simulator in the guise of a kid's game. These fuzzy little creatures named "Norns" were entrusted to your care. You'd raise them from an egg, teaching them, making sure they were fed and exploring their world. Sounds like some simple tat you'd give a kid to keep them busy for a while, but there was real depth to the game. The physiology of the Norns was simulated, heart, stomach, brain, etcetera, so was the psychology. I don't mean crap like happiness and sadness, though they were factors, I mean the game ran a neural net in the background for each creature as it formed links between objects in its environment, the names you typed in, the interactions between the objects and the reward or punishment you could mete.
The starting area of the game was fairly benign, it was a kind of crèche, filled with bouncy balls and educational equipment. There was a screen that cycled through images of objects in the game. If you could get your Norn to focus on the screen you could type out the name of the object and it would eventually learn it. There was also an incubation chamber into which an egg could be placed and hatched. The eggs were produced from a mating pair of creatures, or found in the world. The offspring would share aspects of the parents. After a while your norn could venture out into the world and explore. The environment was a bit Mystian, lots of mysterious-looking machines that would do stuff when you used them, such as lowering a drawbridge or dispensing fruit. As you explored the world you uncovered little toolkits, filled with useful stuff for digging deeper into the game. There was a brain scanner that you could use to see neurons firing in your Norn's heads, a bloodwork kit you could use to analyse your Norn's health, and an injection kit you could use to administer various chemicals to your Norns. I was too young to properly understand what any of these tools could really do. I only used the injection kit to pump some adrenaline into my Norns when I wanted them to be able to run away from something more quickly.
Once you got further from the starting area things got a bit more dangerous. There were deep pools of water in which your Norns could drown, volcanoes they could fall into or poisonous fruit they could eat. One of the more dangerous things you could encounter was a Grendel. They were horrible, scaly trollish creatures on the same scale as your Norns. They were easily-aggravated and generally hostile towards Norns. They were quite hard to find, and even harder to tease out into the wider world, but somehow I managed to get ahold of a Grendel egg. I figured I'd try the nature/nurture thing and raise a nice Grendel. I don't remember how but I managed to get the egg into the incubation chamber and hatch a baby Grendel. I began teaching it in the same way I'd previously trained my norns. It learned much more slowly than the Norns, but it managed to pick up a passable semblance of the language I'd taught my Norns.
I introduced the Grendel to my Norns, one at a time. It went smoothly, I taught the Norns what a Grendel was, and showed them how to play throw-the-beachball-back-and-forth. Things went well for a good while. I explored the world further, found a weird gene-splicing machine for producing eggs from two life-forms, a submarine and airlock, heaps of stuff. The world was super-detailed.
Later, I was watching the Norns and the Grendel play in the crèche and one of the Norns turned to the Grendel and said:
"Grendel detritus!"
I was amazed by this, I'd never seen a Norn use what I presumed to be an adjective. A few seconds later the Norn flew the length of the crèche and crunched against a wall. The Norn stood up, announced:
"Norn sleepy."
...and collapsed. I brought out my medical kit and hooked it up to the Norn. I couldn't make sense of it. As far as I could tell the Norn's blood pressure was dropping. I was thirteen at the time, and the internet hadn't happened yet. I had no idea what to do. I tried injecting the Norn with adrenaline. His heart rate and blood pressure spiked up, but then continued downwards again. I was at a complete loss. I had no idea what the chemicals did, so I just started injecting stuff willy-nilly in a blind panic. Predictably the Norn's condition worsened. There were hundreds of chemicals in the injection kit but only two I recognised. Adrenaline and cyanide. After agonising for a while I gave the Norn a maximum dose of cyanide.
I did the same to the Grendel and never played the game again.
--------------------------------------------------------------
The game was the original Red Faction, on PC. Destructible terrain, the true future of gaming. I'd found that if I attached one of the remotely-triggered explosives to an enemy they would run around shrieking, waving their arms about. As a sixteen year old boy I found this hilarious. I showed my Dad. He said, with genuine disgust:
"That's horrible. Don't do that."
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. I looked back at the screen and saw a representation of a human utterly terrified of imminent death and felt a horrible pang of sympathy. Moments ago I had thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever seen, but now I was sitting with this cold, clammy feeling in my chest. I finished the game without ever doing that again.
--Scythe--
The first game was Creatures 2, released in 1998. Creatures 2 was a life, genetics and learning simulator in the guise of a kid's game. These fuzzy little creatures named "Norns" were entrusted to your care. You'd raise them from an egg, teaching them, making sure they were fed and exploring their world. Sounds like some simple tat you'd give a kid to keep them busy for a while, but there was real depth to the game. The physiology of the Norns was simulated, heart, stomach, brain, etcetera, so was the psychology. I don't mean crap like happiness and sadness, though they were factors, I mean the game ran a neural net in the background for each creature as it formed links between objects in its environment, the names you typed in, the interactions between the objects and the reward or punishment you could mete.
The starting area of the game was fairly benign, it was a kind of crèche, filled with bouncy balls and educational equipment. There was a screen that cycled through images of objects in the game. If you could get your Norn to focus on the screen you could type out the name of the object and it would eventually learn it. There was also an incubation chamber into which an egg could be placed and hatched. The eggs were produced from a mating pair of creatures, or found in the world. The offspring would share aspects of the parents. After a while your norn could venture out into the world and explore. The environment was a bit Mystian, lots of mysterious-looking machines that would do stuff when you used them, such as lowering a drawbridge or dispensing fruit. As you explored the world you uncovered little toolkits, filled with useful stuff for digging deeper into the game. There was a brain scanner that you could use to see neurons firing in your Norn's heads, a bloodwork kit you could use to analyse your Norn's health, and an injection kit you could use to administer various chemicals to your Norns. I was too young to properly understand what any of these tools could really do. I only used the injection kit to pump some adrenaline into my Norns when I wanted them to be able to run away from something more quickly.
Once you got further from the starting area things got a bit more dangerous. There were deep pools of water in which your Norns could drown, volcanoes they could fall into or poisonous fruit they could eat. One of the more dangerous things you could encounter was a Grendel. They were horrible, scaly trollish creatures on the same scale as your Norns. They were easily-aggravated and generally hostile towards Norns. They were quite hard to find, and even harder to tease out into the wider world, but somehow I managed to get ahold of a Grendel egg. I figured I'd try the nature/nurture thing and raise a nice Grendel. I don't remember how but I managed to get the egg into the incubation chamber and hatch a baby Grendel. I began teaching it in the same way I'd previously trained my norns. It learned much more slowly than the Norns, but it managed to pick up a passable semblance of the language I'd taught my Norns.
I introduced the Grendel to my Norns, one at a time. It went smoothly, I taught the Norns what a Grendel was, and showed them how to play throw-the-beachball-back-and-forth. Things went well for a good while. I explored the world further, found a weird gene-splicing machine for producing eggs from two life-forms, a submarine and airlock, heaps of stuff. The world was super-detailed.
Later, I was watching the Norns and the Grendel play in the crèche and one of the Norns turned to the Grendel and said:
"Grendel detritus!"
I was amazed by this, I'd never seen a Norn use what I presumed to be an adjective. A few seconds later the Norn flew the length of the crèche and crunched against a wall. The Norn stood up, announced:
"Norn sleepy."
...and collapsed. I brought out my medical kit and hooked it up to the Norn. I couldn't make sense of it. As far as I could tell the Norn's blood pressure was dropping. I was thirteen at the time, and the internet hadn't happened yet. I had no idea what to do. I tried injecting the Norn with adrenaline. His heart rate and blood pressure spiked up, but then continued downwards again. I was at a complete loss. I had no idea what the chemicals did, so I just started injecting stuff willy-nilly in a blind panic. Predictably the Norn's condition worsened. There were hundreds of chemicals in the injection kit but only two I recognised. Adrenaline and cyanide. After agonising for a while I gave the Norn a maximum dose of cyanide.
I did the same to the Grendel and never played the game again.
--------------------------------------------------------------
The game was the original Red Faction, on PC. Destructible terrain, the true future of gaming. I'd found that if I attached one of the remotely-triggered explosives to an enemy they would run around shrieking, waving their arms about. As a sixteen year old boy I found this hilarious. I showed my Dad. He said, with genuine disgust:
"That's horrible. Don't do that."
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. I looked back at the screen and saw a representation of a human utterly terrified of imminent death and felt a horrible pang of sympathy. Moments ago I had thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever seen, but now I was sitting with this cold, clammy feeling in my chest. I finished the game without ever doing that again.
--Scythe--
Comments
--Scythe--<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Ah, guiltless sadism, good times?
I had a similar experience.
Was some top down alien shooter game but extremely bloody.
After a good thirty minutes of playing I finally said "I can't stand this much gore".
My dad who was watching me play told me he was happy I had finally noticed.
I had a similar experience.
Was some top down alien shooter game but extremely bloody.
After a good thirty minutes of playing I finally said "I can't stand this much gore".
My dad who was watching me play told me he was happy I had finally noticed.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
It wasn't the game actually called 'alien shooter' was it? Because that's a fun game.
Personally I find excessive gore in games to be more or less the opposite, fallout 3 was interesting in that it makes something as simple as shooting bandits fun again because you can blow their head into carefully modelled chunks in slow motion. Almost graceful, goes well with ballet music. Expands your appreciation of beauty.
Yes it was!
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Personally I find excessive gore in games to be more or less the opposite, fallout 3 was interesting in that it makes something as simple as shooting bandits fun again because you can blow their head into carefully modelled chunks in slow motion. Almost graceful, goes well with ballet music. Expands your appreciation of beauty.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Hmm I have to agree, but how thin is the line?
<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Personally I find excessive gore to be more or less the opposite, real life was interesting in that it makes something as simple as shooting bandits fun again because you can blow their head into chunks in slow motion. Almost graceful, goes well with ballet music. Expands your appreciation of beauty.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Now if someone said that he'd be declared a psycho.
My conscience does not approve.
Yet once it's a game it doesn't matter anymore.
No more moral dilemma.
I had a moment like that when playing Mass Effect 1, the "Bringing Down the Sky" DLC. The plot [stop reading now if you actually care about spoilers for this somehow] is that terrorists are trying to crash an asteroid into a garden world housing 1.6 million people, with no time to evacuate. For those who don't know the game, this is something that's completely and utterly banned from warfare, ranking far beyond thermonuclear weapons in severity, because a single impact has the ability to devastate the ecosystem of a precious garden world for a very long time, not to mention kill loads of people.
So of course, I, being a space hero, stop the plot and confront the terrorist leader, who has taken hostages. I can either defuse the bombs they are locked in with, in which case the leader gets away, or I can fight him, in which case the hostages die. Now I'm on a paragon run, so obviously the "correct" choice is to save the hostages, but I simply can't do it. At first I pick the renegade option telling myself that I just want to see what happens and then load a previous game and pick the "correct" choice, but in the end I can't change my mind. Very regrettable about the hostages, but this man is someone who had both the will and the resources to kill over a million people and devastate an entire ecosystem in one fell swoop, and might try it again. Even (my) paragon Shepard couldn't let a man like that escape, despite the cost in innocent lives.
So that made me think. I don't know what lesson to take away from this, but there's probably one somewhere.
It's been a while since I played it so the details may be far off, but the feeling I got from that game etched itself into my brain.
********************
* SPOILER WARNING! *
********************
Towards the end when you're holding your ghostly little "sister", Faith, in your arms, camera starts zooming out as she vanishes - everything is sad but in a good way.
Then questions start popping into your head. There is still so many unanswered questions.
A bit later: a beach. Your characters voice is narrating the scene. Camera pans inside a house. Your dad is sitting there, clearly agonized and worried but still calm in a way. Camera scrolls past him and to your bed. You are in it.. Supposedly sleeping(this will make sense if you play the game). "Wait. I'm still dreaming?" I think. A duplicate of myself pop up next to the bed. An out of body experience. I exclaim "HEY! Wait! Am I dead? What is this?".
I pushed my chair away from the desk and just stared at the screen for minutes. The scene carries on in the dream world. I didn't say anything. Just sitting there with a sad hollow feeling in my heart.
That was probably the video game character I felt most attached to ever.
Many questions were left unanswered for you to figure out yourself - and processing all the events that had happened so far in the game to pull some conclusions... Man...
Also, Scythes story about Creatures 2 interested me. Tried installing it, but sadly it didn't seem to work for Win7 :/
I had a moment like that when playing Mass Effect 1, the "Bringing Down the Sky" DLC. The plot [stop reading now if you actually care about spoilers for this somehow] is that terrorists are trying to crash an asteroid into a garden world housing 1.6 million people, with no time to evacuate. For those who don't know the game, this is something that's completely and utterly banned from warfare, ranking far beyond thermonuclear weapons in severity, because a single impact has the ability to devastate the ecosystem of a precious garden world for a very long time, not to mention kill loads of people.
So of course, I, being a space hero, stop the plot and confront the terrorist leader, who has taken hostages. I can either defuse the bombs they are locked in with, in which case the leader gets away, or I can fight him, in which case the hostages die. Now I'm on a paragon run, so obviously the "correct" choice is to save the hostages, but I simply can't do it. At first I pick the renegade option telling myself that I just want to see what happens and then load a previous game and pick the "correct" choice, but in the end I can't change my mind. Very regrettable about the hostages, but this man is someone who had both the will and the resources to kill over a million people and devastate an entire ecosystem in one fell swoop, and might try it again. Even (my) paragon Shepard couldn't let a man like that escape, despite the cost in innocent lives.
So that made me think. I don't know what lesson to take away from this, but there's probably one somewhere.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
In that we differ, I generally play good, but for two reasons.
Either it gives you better stuff later on, or it's harder and therefore more interesting, or I suppose it's inconsequential as I can get all the loot I need without being a tool.
Nobody ever makes a game where being good is a bad or difficult choice, so there's no reason to be evil unless you have weird evil roleplay fantasies or something.
Kinda why I don't get why people complained about not being able to kill children in fallout 3, my obvious answer is 'why would you want to?' They aren't particularly annoying characters and you wouldn't get anything from it mechanically, so why bother?
Really speaking when you're the main character you could go through the entire game just omnicidally killing everything you encounter and you'd still improve the world at the end. Just because the game tells you it's bad doesn't mean it is, it just means the game designers are stupid sometimes.
<i>*Scratches head*</i>