The moment that inspired this question:
A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.
The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.
One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”
I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.
… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.
I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.
This was a smaller moment, but similar to yours, OP, in that it revealed some unconscious thinking in my head.
But I was playing Crusader Kings II quite a few years back. And I basically had a King with the Genius trait and some other stuff I could pass down to his kids. I think I had somehow lucked into the Byzantine Empire or something, so I was basically seducing and inviting a bunch of lovers with other traits from all around the world (north and south, east and west) so I could spread Genius around. I wanted a smart council full of my bastards, heh.
So my genius slut-king has a bunch of kids. I’m naming them after my absolute favorite characters from books and such, because they’re part of my family and dynasty–so I’m giving them names that have a lot of personal “worth” to me.
Then I get to the kid in my dynasty who isn’t white, and I couldn’t figure out what name to give her. I had all these awesome names that I was using over and over through the generations in my dynasty, but somehow none that felt “right” for her. I tried and tried to choose a name, and none “fit”.
And after a while, it suddenly hit me in the face how SUBTLE racism can be. This was just a video game, but I had something that was “high worth” to me to give out, these favorite character names, and I was handing them out like candy until I got to the one kid and struggled, making all sorts of excuses why this not-white video game kid couldn’t get the name of this other character I really liked.
Now, if I was doing that in a frickin’ video game, imagine what people are doing with REAL LIFE things that are “high worth” to them. Hiring at jobs, giving gifts and presents, selling a house, etc.
And it wasn’t like I was going around in the game consciously picking which kids to screw over. (I mean, moreso than you usually do in Crusader Kings, the game where people glitch themselves into marrying their horses and creating witch covens with devil-babies so they can spread satanism across the world.) I ended up screwing this virtual kid over because I was going on this “gut feeling” that my really cool favorite-character names just somehow “weren’t right” for her, even though that frickin’ inbred cousin over there with a family tree like a wreath was proudly wearing it already.
So yeah. Learned a big lesson on how internal gut feelings influence you to do racist shit really subtly sometimes.
Wow, such a cool revelation. I think the devs of CK2 would be proud that you engaged with their game like this.
Great story!
Were any of the female characters you idolized black?
You make it sound like it’s a direct racist association, but in reality your brain just doesn’t have any good frame of reference for a probably stereotypical high-fantasy black person lol.
I’m sitting here thinking you were going to end it with saying you treated that person with the respect they deserved by not wantonly giving them some bogus high fantasy white name.
There’s a reason why so many black people give their children uniquely non-Anglo names. There is nothing new about it, and you’re right, it probably wouldn’t fit. Because most white names are distinctly non-black lol. Even moreso most uniquely white names are distinct in the same way that uniquely black names are.
Understanding that all people hold intrinsic biases is essential, but acknowledging cultural differences isn’t racism lol.
https://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-black-names-from-perlie-to-latasha-130102
https://www.thedailybeast.com/are-blacks-names-weird-or-are-you-just-racist
Kind of feels disparate from it being a video game, but it’s difficult to really make this experience another way:
I wanted to play a healer in an MMO. It was a shitty MMO, so healers could only be female characters wearing skimpy armor.
Well, it took about half a minute until I had people walk up to me, to then just stop 3 meters away. From the way they were moving, I have to assume, they were working their cameras to look underneath my skirt, and probably doing so with only one hand.
Some of them were sending me “hello :)” messages, which I guess is basic decency, if you’re going to use my body, but it felt weird, too, since we had nothing to talk about.
All in all, it felt uncomfortable. And I did not even have to fear for them to start touching or even raping me. Plus, I was able to log out, delete my account and basically just leave all of that behind.
Well, except for one thing I did not leave behind: I do not want to be the other side in that experience either.
When sexist objectification accidentally teaches a point against sexist objectification
When i first killed someone in DayZ back in the day, when it was just the ArmA 2 mod and all the hype.
I finally found a gun and started to learn my way around the zombies, when i heard a player in a bush nearby the hospital in Elektrozavodsk. I thought he was probably out to get me, so i emptied my Makarov clip at the bush and shortly after heard the fly noise they had put to mark dead players.
As i searched his body with my heart pumping like crazy i found him to have nothing but a can of beans. I felt profoundly shitty in that moment because he was just like me at the time. Some new guy playing a tough sandbox multiplayer-game, where everything and everyone can kill you. He probably didnt even hear or see, where he got killed from, just like it happened half a dozen times to me before.
I showed cruelty to someone in whose shoes i’d had demanded mercy.
Fuck everyone pitching people to fight each other
DayZ was such an amazing experience at the time. Battle arena games hadn’t taken off yet and you really had to pay attention to your surroundings.
Great story! War is hell
Disco Elysium was full of such moments for me. Here’s one:
You spend a lot of time in the game basically talking to yourself and your inner voices, and one of these voices is volition. If you put enough points into it, it’ll chime in when you’re having an identity crisis or struggling to keep yourself together and it’ll try to cheer you up and keep you going. At the end of Day 1 in the game you, an amnesiac cop, stand on a balcony in an impoverished district reflecting on the day’s events and trying to make sense of the reality you’ve woken up into with barely any of your memories intact. If you pass a volition check, it’ll say the following line:
“No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it’s still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You’re still alive.”
This line in combination with the somewhat retro Euro setting, the faint lighting, and the sombre-yet-somewhat-upbeat music was very powerful. The image it painted was quite relatable for me. I just sat there for a minute staring at the scene and soaking it all in. Even though this is a predominantly text-based game with barely any cinematics/animations, I felt a level of immersion I had rarely, if ever, experienced before.
Oh, look at that. Someone actually made a volition compilation. 😀 This video will give you a better idea of what I’m describing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENSAbyGlij0 Minor spoilers alert!
This thread is filled with comments on DE, but it was your comment that convinced me to finally play the game.
Thanks for the story!
Nothing as profound as what you described there…
But… The Last Of Us was an experience for me…I hadn’t played a “new” game in about 8-10 years at that point, so the huge increase in development was mind blowing to me.
But really, the intensity of the story is what really did it for me. I legit got teary eyed in the intro, and then the burning restaurant scene made me ball my eyes out…Phenomenal fucking game
Or, to bring it back to my youth… The Illusion of Gaia was probably the first game I played that made me feel things. That was so long ago, and I was so young when that came out that being specific about it is hard. But I think I really related with the main character, and I remember really feeling things during the lost-at-sea raft scene.
I might need to go find the ROM now…
**Or, to go a bit further back, Dragon Warrior.
That was the first game I ever played that really captivated me. It was the first RPG I ever played, and even tho the storyline is incredibly basic and cliche, it was the first time I experienced a story at all in a video game. It’s definitely the reason that I prefer fantasy RPGs over every other type of gameFor some reason, there’s this one little throwaway line in The Last Of Us that just lives in my head. It wasn’t even part of a cut scene, just some random banter as you’re walking around but Joel asks Elly after they first meet where her parents are, and she matter-of-factly says “I dunno, where are anyone’s parents?” and carries on with whatever she’s doing.
Disco Elysium is so fucking wild. It’s the most empathetic game I’ve ever played. I am someone who has an easy time putting myself in other people’s shoes. The character is an alcoholic mess, on the brink of a depression so deep he has totally fractured his own memory and sense of self. He’s a genius. He’s also an idiot. And he’s a cop/detective in a world that really despises cops. It’s what I would call the idealistic cop: the one that would put themself between a group of armed men and a group of innocent people with nothing but a dinky pistol and say stand down.
Anyway, I love how it makes me feel about everything in its place. The ideologies that drive us. The youth we waste on fooling around. The insanity and, somehow, the humor of racism. The mistakes that make us who we are. The idealistic pursuits that are so high they can never be achieved. How heartbreak never goes away.
Most importantly, I played a game with an internal monologue built-in as the RPG system, and it nearly exactly matches how I think and feel. My mind is also fractured as identifiable pieces of myself. I gave some parts of them names because it made it easier to separate the thoughts from how I truly felt. I have nearly all the same psyches just with different names from Volition, Half-light, etc. And it floored me. I have never played a game that was as introspective as I was. Right down to the simultaneously protective and self destructive thoughts clashing within and one winning out. It gave me a third person perspective of my own self destructive and unhealthy thought processes. And it helped me love myself a little bit more. I feel like I’ll never be able to play anything like it again for the rest of my life.
No Man’s Sky - Finally lifting off the planet into space for the first time reignited my love of space and the cosmos. Made me feel awe and wonder
The Stanley Parable - never had a game make me laugh till I had tears in my eyes before. This game really fucks with your perception of what is real and just how common / predictable some gaming tropes have become
No Man’s Sky had a couple for me. The first time I summoned my freighter from a planet was pretty incredible
Seeing your fleet exit hyperspace in orbit from the surface is something else. Just absolutely stunning. Every now and then I load up the game just to summon my fleet from a planets surface.
It’s kinda cheating but The Beginners Guide is a game I think about all the time. As someone who makes things, the themes it explores about validation and the purpose for creating art really hit home.
For just a profound moment, the sun station in Outer Wilds.
HUGE spoilers
It really marks a turning point in the game when you find that out. I assumed like most people that it was a classic tale of science gone wrong, and now I have to fix it. As a video game it’s also really easy to assume that your goal is to fix everything - to save the solar system. But there is no villan, and no solution. You and everyone in the solar system will die and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s a really powerful subversion of expectations that works well with the games themes.
Outer Wilds, like all of it. Falling into the black hole made me actually scream in terror, then shiver for how small being away from the solar system makes you feel. Also the quantum moon, and that ending holy fuck
Outer Wilds. The universe is, and we are.
One of those games where it’s better to play absolutely blind. For the experience of discovery is the gameplay. You can never play it for the first time again.
Seriously! I still am on the hunt for that feeling all over again in another game or watching others experience this game for the first time. It’s crazy because even the Steam description of the game is a major spoiler.
I literally tried that game a month ago, and after a couple hours of flying blind in space, with a not great flight control system, having no idea where to go, it completely lost me.
Maybe I missed the point, or maybe it’s an issue with me not having enough free time, but if didn’t grab me at all.
A few hours? Something about your post tells me that you didn’t play past 22 minutes.
Call it a hunch.
sorry I offended your game, oh fragile one. I even blamed myself for missing something or not having enough time. I ran around the starting area talking to everyone for about an hour, just wandering, and then finally went up into space, struggling with the controls. Landed somewhere with just a guy and a radio, ran all around there, again maybe a total of an hour after my first launch. Crashed a few times at first, of course.
He says that because the main mechanic of the game is that the entire game resets every 22 minutes.
So you couldn’t have ran around for hours without noticing that, which is kind of the first clue as to what kind of game it is.
Notably, 22 minutes from when you see the nomai statue. So the commenter could have spend over an hour in the tutorial area, and then quit before experiencing much of the actual game
It’s interesting you bring up the controls, because that is one of the things that instantly grabbed me about the game. Before I even knew what was going on, I knew I absolutely loved moving around in the world. I used to spin up the game just to zip about for a half hour.
But of course everyone is different. Not every game is for everyone. I really grew to love Outer Wilds more and more over the days.
I could never get into it either. People are so so obsessed with this game. They tell you to never look anything up, etc. I’ve tried it on mouse and keyboard, I’ve tried it on controller and the gameplay does not feel right, so I’ve never left the ground tutorial area.
You basically haven’t played any of the game then lol. It’s a long slow burn but it’s absolutely beautiful. Make your way through that tutorial section and get your ship, from there it really opens up.
Three pretty stereotypical ones.
- I played diablo 1 when I was 6 years old. And you already know where this is going, but that butcher room caused me some intense fear.
- That moment in fallout 3 when you first leave the vault and there’s a semi cinematic experience. I was in complete awe at how beautiful the post apocalyptic wasteland looked.
- That first time logging into WoW original back when it first released. So much to explore and experience it felt absolutely amazing to be a part of
Man that Butcher fight gave teen me the sweats every time. Diablo 1 did such amazing things with atmosphere, I still hear the environmental guitar music from the demo every time I think about that game.
Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura still remains my favourite to this day.
The world’s setting is centred around how capitalism and industry affects society, how it pushed aside feudalism, how racism remains endemic and easily seen as normal, how history is swept away to hide attitudes, all sorts of complex things. Early on in the story, you get involved with a strike by exploited half-orcs and the wealthy factory owner who would rather they all died. Thinking back, it was a big part of how young me started to realise industrial relations are fucked up in capitalism.
One moment (of the many cool things) that really hit me, is that there’s an entire sub-plot across the whole continent that’s never explicitly mentioned, but is entirely noticeable if you actually pay attention and listen, not to the quest-givers or the industrial leaders, but to the servants of the powerful men you meet. If you’re lucky, near the end, you suddenly realise you just… swept all these weird characters and remarks under the rug as you had ‘important’ people to talk to. I had relegated servants and whole in-game races to an ‘unimportant’ role, when actually their stories are key to a whole second sub-plot of their own that affects everything in the world.
I know a lot of that behaviour is because I’m playing to typical game design, but, I dunno, having a real moment where you think back and realise you’ve been ignoring what should have been an obvious pattern of so many exploited people, and I just glossed over it 'til that moment, it affected me.
Probably different to most people but I remember the first year of Uni summer holidays I spent playing Fable 3… which ended up being the entire 3mth holiday. I realised in real terms I just moved from one part of the cd to another and hadn’t accomplished anything else with my life in that time, no hobbies, friends or shared experiences.
I packed up my Xbox and refused to play another game for about 10yrs. Now I have a much better balance with games and my life
moved from one part of the cd to another
Damn. That wisdom hits me a little too hard. Thanks for sharing!
For me, it was the surprise song in Dragon Age Inquisition, when they performed “The Dawn Will Come.”
You’d just had a huge battle, the hero was a low point, and they break out into this… thing. It’s stunning and so well done.
0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov fucked him over personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.I had to stare at the window for an hour afterwards.
