Red Gems, Please.

[woekitten]

whatifoundthere recently shared some magnificent insight on Papers, Please, "A Dystopian Document Thriller." Papers, Please is a time-management game of sorts that you "play" as a border guard for a grim, grey eastern European country at the height of the Cold War. True to life, corruption and bribery abound, and there is no right or wrong way to get through the

Comments

[whatifoundthere]

Man, I'm glad you wrote this, because I was thinking of following up my own post with a similar one about "moral ambiguity" in games. It was on my mind because I got a free copy of Spec Ops: The Line on Steam for some reason -- I have literally no idea where this game came from, maybe some long-forgotten Humble Bundle or summat -- and the reviews all said that it was a masterpiece because it was very morally ambiguous and dark. I played about half an hour of it, and I was so grossed out I immediately uninstalled it. Apparently their definition of "moral ambiguity" is "you're an American soldier killing a whole bunch of brown people and eventually you will feel bad about it." FUCK that. I AM a brown person and do not need to pretend to kill a whole bunch of me just to learn an after-school special lesson about how maybe racism is a problem. (BUT THEY ARE HOLDING GUNS THOUGH, YOU HAVE TO KILL THEM, OR ELSE THEY WILL KILL YOU! IT IS A TICKING TIME BOMB SCENARIO, LIKE, LITERALLY!) Seriously if someone has something to LEARN from

[kaiser_tbd]

Man, you -really- need to give The Line another shot. The game spends about three hours setting the stage, but, uh...

All the enemies are US soldiers. The only 'brown people' I remember from that game are the unarmed civilians.

[whatifoundthere]

Thanks for the correction. I work pretty hard to avoid spoilers so I just played with what I saw -- the opening scene has "insurgents" in kaffiyehs shouting at each other in Persian and you shoot them all, and there's a radio transmission calling for help in English, and you find a whole bunch of dead Americans and are sad about it, and you are playing a white guy in a team of white guys, and so I just got disgusted and assumed that the whole game was more of the same.

I don't intend on playing the game any more so I read the plot on Wikipedia and I see that the whole thing is a commentary on Heart of Darkness. OK. I do think part of my point still stands -- that opening scene is clearly designed to create an expectation that is later questioned, but I reject the entire setup since the PC's team is just as much a representative of American colonialism, in my mind, as the Kurtz character. Seems I'm not the only one who thinks so; some other critics are quoted in Wikipedia as saying that an FPS is not really the place for moral

[kaiser_tbd]

I think it was the writer who said the secret good ending was the one where you put down the controller and never played it again. Not because it's a bad game, but because it's a painful, abrasive one.

But, whatever. This post isn't about The Line.

I'm picking up Papers, Please today. I've heard too much good stuff now, even though my hard drive creaks under the weight of Steam sales and Humble Bundles. Thanks for the commentary~

...Also should arrange time for another playthrough of Terranigma. I think it's my favorite SNES game, but that's a tough choice.

[neontiger]

Man, you just had to remind me of Illusion of Gaia... heck, the entire Soul Blazer trilogy. There was just something about those games that both disturbed and intrigued me. Maybe it's because I had never encountered those kinds of messages before and I was pretty young, but to this day, there's still this... fascination with them, even if they depress me so much.

The same for the Mother series, honestly.