It's not JUST about manipulation. Like, all stories try to elicit a certain response out of you, right? But, y'know, sometimes the very premises you're working from are garbage. Ferelden fucking sucks. It's an unjust, racist, theofascist garbage country and it can burn.
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I saw a comment from
@chrysopoetics I liked, which is that sadomasochism is a valid form of pleasure in and of itself without needing justification beyond that -
Violence can be aesthetically pleasing because it's balletic, poetic and cathartic and it can also be pleasing because it's brutal and ugly and horrifying and tragic
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I mean, i feel genuinely bad about stuff like that, tbh -- i can't play bad guys in games! -- but I'm objectively pretty fucking broken, too.
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Weirdly, for me, it's not necessarily even doing evil stuff that gets me. It's getting called out by the NPCs for doing evil stuff. The guilt gnaws at me.
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I don't know if you're calling me dumb or what, but maybe I should put it like this: if it seems like a game is trying to make me regret a forced choice, I am more likely to regret playing the game at all I identify with the characters I role-play, "dumb" or not
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But that's how the genre of tragedy works There's a whole set of emotional responses that can only happen if the main character of a story does something they regret
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I think in theory there is room for another angle to this where the game /is/ trying to elicit something like guilt in the player by, say, a plot twist that makes you reevaluate choices you had been confidentially on board with.
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Like if the game can get you emotionally invested in a line of reasoning and then show that line of reasoning as false and evil it might um "make you think" so to speak?
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