The Hoard Potato: Heroic Head-Bashing Harp Seal Hunters

[athelind]

I announced today, to my FurryMUCK clique, that I didn't want to see any more trailers for Monster Hunter 3. The game doesn't just annoy me: it actively pisses me off, and worse, it makes me think badly not only of gamers in general but of Japanese culture, in wide, bigoted swaths

Comments

[silussa]

I've always found the disconnect between what we advocate and what our games advocate a bit jarring. ("we" in the societal sense)

[cpxbrex]

I have a similar struggle with the Splinter Cell games. They're about an illegal NSA black-on-black organization that goes around killing brown people. But, damn, I like playing these games. Even though I know they're a symptom of America's obsession with state sponsored murder in the name of foreign policy, and the idiotic belief a military-intelligence elite should not be restricted by morality or law. But . . . fun games. Oh, no, hehe.

[bfdragon]

It's hard for me to decide on this one because I know I'm a bit more sensitive then the usual to the idea of killing dragons and the like, and indeed, monster hunger makes me rather uncomfortable

[athelind]

Which is exactly why I brought up the burger: not as a "joke", but as a self-examination of my own habits.

[silussa]

It's cheap, and people don't have to confront where it comes from. I'm certain that if either changed, the demand for meat would drop off noticeably. Referring to it as "dead flesh", for instance (which is pretty much how a vegetarian DOES think of it) is a major turnoff for folks.

As for whales....at one time they were, and they did. Then they got rare and expensive...and they found alternatives.

The same will probably happen with meat one day; the entire world can't eat like the US does now. The ecosystem simply won't support it sustainably.

Apologies; I appear to have gotten onto a rant which was not intended.

[cpxbrex]

I certainly believe that meat should be more expensive, taking into account its environmental effects. But that should be true of everything and meat is hardly the only, or even worse, offender (tho' it's high on the list).

But, uh, no, having to slaughter your own animals does not, in fact, reduce meat consumption. I say this with considerable historical perspective. Farmsteads, manor houses, colonia - people who lived close enough to the land to raise and slaughter their own animals - as well as hunter-gatherer societies were not detracted by either the mess or pain suffered by the animal in slaughter or hunt.

[silussa]

Couple of points.

Economically, I suspect meat has the "virtue" of a lot of externalized costs (costs which are not paid by the product, but by others). It certainly does have some success in using almost every bit of the animal; that may subsidize the cost of the meat somewhat.

As for farmsteads and such, if I'm not mistaken, meat was a rarity on the table; it's expensive to raise, relative to vegetables, fruit, and the like. But they certainly knew where it came from; most people, I suspect, would answer "the supermarket" if they were asked where their hamburger came from.

[wy]

I would imagine the amount of meat in a 'farmstead' would be determined by the amount of pasture lands which were not suitable for crops, or the amount of excess foods that require 'reprocessing' by pork, and the total size of the chicken flock. Just a thought. Or, if there were not farmstead at all, but instead it was, say herders...

[paka]

I think it's part of the basic disconnect of games.

I mean, you know this one; the designer ideally wants to give the player characters this amazing experience. A DM spends hours making props and writing out detailed, often beautifully imaginative worlds, or a company will hire amazing concept artists, skilled animators, talented composers all to make sure the player has this immersive experience. Then the players will show up.

In a tabletop game, players can and will go anywhere. But options are more limited with computer games, and killing stuff to get boss gear is the straightforward option to set up. It's like having Tolkien set up all of Middle Earth for the sole purpose of having the Fellowship wade through orcs in Moria.

[athelind]

And this is why I don't play computer games.

[cpxbrex]

I will slightly disagree. When I was playing Planescape Torment, I was sitting there playing it and, uh, I felt I had more options than in many tabletop RPGs I had been in. You could go and interact with NPCs, your interactions would largely determine the fate of those NPCs, you could solve virtually every mission in a way that was more open ended than many tabletop games

[athelind]

You know, that's something that we deliberately tried to avoid with the setting material and adventures in Ironclaw. The political situation was set up with the idea that PCs could shift the balance of power, tipping things in favor of one House or another.

Hell, the very first adventure supplement effectively puts the PCs in the position of deciding who sits on the high throne of the land. One of the fun parts about sitting down with IC players from different campaigns is that everyone has a different answer for "how did Rinaldi play out in your campaign?"

The second adventure includes a section about "What Happens if the PCs Fail?" -- which includes options up to and including Zombie Apocalypse Survival Horror Anthropomorphic Fantasy.

On the flip side, that's why the guys GMing the Star Wars Saga games I'm currently playing in have picked Big, Empty, Untouched Chunks of the canon timeline. One's set in the Legacy era, 140 years after the movies (and based on comics written by John "GrimJack" Ostrander); the other's in the Old