Games you can’t/won't play for personal or emotional reasons

Games
41

I had never thought of this workaround.

Or this one, for that matter.

Somewhat related to this, I can’t watch my wife fail at games. I am litterally heartbroken when she doesn’t win. I don’t even want to think what I may feel if we were to have kids.

As for me, I can’t play Papers, please, because of its subject matter, and its realistic depiction of it.
I don’t want to digress to much into political territory, but a person very dear to me was thrown out of my country. Getting that person back in proved to be a nightmare. Watching that person being thrown out of my own country was a terrible experience. It was also a crushing disappointment. I can’t forgive my country, and it is probably one of the reasons why I am not living there anymore.
Papers, please is often considered as a view on former Soviet countries or autoritarian regimes’ practices. Reading around opinion about it, it is largely viewed as a parody, or a warning, at most. This a tragic way to look at things, because, to me, it has been the vivid mirror of my own experience with a Western democracy.
Unspoken regulations layered one after the other, stacking up. Numbers to be kept, because numbers are never political, they are science. The slow, constant dehumanization of the people trying to live their lives. Until, like the proverbial boiling frog, the people working for the state themselves slowly turn inhuman, because they have a job they want to keep, and probably because if you don’t detach yourself from such terrible tasks, how can you live?
This is what I felt and experienced in Papers, Please. Pretty shortly in, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I just quit. I like to think that this is a consideration of the author of the game. You can quit the game, like you’d quit the job.
I prefer to not think about what may have happened to my in-game relatives after that decision.

Something I didn’t expect to discover first hand is that, however broken democracies may often be considered, popular vote can change all that. It changed that in my country, for a few years. The difference was absolutely staggering: the closed doors were wide open again. The same worker that used to be “as heartwarming as a door jail”, as we say here, was now all smiling, and even giving us hints on how to make it easier to get better papers.
But now, vote has changed it back again. Papers, please is, once again, becoming more of a simulation than an allegory.

42

I don’t think that’s the case.

Of Papers, Please, Ahmed said, “The jury found this an excellent example of a game with the power to affect people and the way they think about contemporary issues of identity in a subtle but powerful way, and all while effectively holding down a desk job.”

I mean that’s just one example I remember of how the game was received not only as fun to play but as powerful social commentary.

And another.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/10271115/Papers-Please-review.html

At first, you rattle through the immigrants like a good worker drone. Processing them correctly, whisking the properly equipped through and sending the others packing. Then comes your first guilty pang, as you deny entry to a mother returning to her son, whose entry permit is a single day expired.

Papers, Please is terrifically written, the characters of the immigrants laid bare in a couple of sentences. It burrows into your moral psyche as the choices you make get ever tougher. Will you allow a married couple to enter even though they only have one entry permit between them? A woman with an expired passport pleads she will be killed if she returns home, can you live with yourself if you don’t admit her?

The most awful question the game poses is: can you live with yourself if you do? At the end of each day your paltry wages go towards keeping your extended family fed and warm. If you don’t process these people as the state say you should, you may not be able to afford medicine for your sick son. Is it the kind of thing that drives a man to detaining people for mild violations because a border guard has offered a few credits for extra prisoners?

43

I was referring to the opinions of “gamers” (whoever they may be) I had come across; I do not doubt the way to see the game as a mirror was shared by many people who are used to question games (that bit about GTA in the first article is revealing).
The telegraph link didn’t seem to work, so here is one that worked for me.

To put it one step further: I wonder if I would have given the game the same thought without my personal experience. Maybe I would have just seen it as a dark, twitch game. This is what may be the most scaring aspect of it to me. It didn’t raise issues with me because they are issues: I had never thought about immigration before my experience with it. In either case, it put me in a very dark place.
I have to stop editing, but this is a very strange thing to think about, for me.

44

Wow! I found this thread really interesting.

Although I can understand the reasons I find it alien that people would avoid media (especially video games) because they evoke a negative emotion. Although I certainly experience excitement, adrenaline etc whilst playing games I can’t think of any that have evoked much of anything else. To me, the game (or movie or book etc) is always completely separate to my own individual emotional state. If a character experiences something violent or painful then my thought is always, “It’s just a game/movie etc”.

So, for me the answer is no - I’ll happily play any game (if it’s entertaining) regardless of its content.

45

I just can’t play Age of Wonders anymore (other games of the same genre: yes, but not AoW). I do love this game! It is just when my father died of cancer, i was playing A LOT AoW to drown the sorrow of the loss. It did help me get over it. I just can’t play it anymore because of my association of the feeling of loss with this game.

46

Games with ridiculously scantily clad women, often in cold environments, normally combined with fulsome and deeply unrealistic cleavage. JRPGs are particularly bad for this, but plenty of other genres seem to go this route. Overwatch walks oh-so-carefully on this line, for instance.

It actually makes me uncomfortable and embarrassed at how much a part of the gaming industry this is.

47

Yup, this.

48

I mentioned this in the “Your Name Used As A Character’s Name in a Movie 3x3” thread, but I don’t think I’ll ever get around to playing The Last Of Us. My name is Joel, my little sister’s name is Ellie, we once had to escape a zombie apocalypse… I think it would just stir up too many emotions.

49

That’s why I do all my Black Friday shopping online.

50

In a similar but different vein to what’s been expressed in this topic, I can’t play old school Alpha Centauri. At all.

I was in college when it came out and I was having an absolute blast with it. Unfortunately, around the same time, I was diagnosed with a significant illness and continued to play it heavily to keep my mind occupied.

I’ve since overcome the health issues, but I haven’t been able to so much as look at the game without it dredging up the experiences and it causing me nausea. I have such fond memories of it and yet I won’t return to it. I was able to play Beyond Earth with zero issue besides the fact that it was a horrible game. :)

51

I quite enjoy Ultimate General: Civil War but cannot bring myself to play as the South. Something about playing as a faction whose stated purpose was to enslave other human beings turns me off more than a bit. The same goes for Nazi Germany.

I played Life is Strange twice but I do not believe I could do it again. My brother had passed away unexpectedly just a short time before and it was at a point that we were not communicating much. The whole aspect of Max leaving Chloe behind and Chloe dying strikes far too close to what amounts to my single biggest regret in my life. It is an utterly fantastic game but I played it through tears the entire time.

52

Something somewhat similar happened to me but with a board game. I was setting up this premiere, epic game of Space Crusade in my living room, when I was taken down by a terrible stomach pain. I spent the night sitting on chair, agonizing. Turns out it was an appendicitis bordering on peritonitis that got me on the surgeon’s table straight the next day. Unlike you though, I have zero fond memory, and when I tried to open up that box later, I never was able to. Even glancing at it in my parents’ locker, years later, induced physical reactions in me.
I am so glad Alpha Centauri wasn’t my target!

53

Yeah, you dodged a bullet there for sure!

54

Huh. And to think i thought I was strange not wanting to play nazi.

55

No, no games that affect me so much I couldn’t even play…

Ok, forgot about that game.

56

I have a strong aversion to games with sexualized children (almost every asian MMO). And I won’t play That Dragon, Cancer.

These are places I prefer not to park my mind.

57

I still have no objections to playing as Nazis.

I mean, c’mon. Their outfits are rad.

58

I can’t play a bad guy! I couldn’t play blackguards, and I almost didn’t play tyrants (finally able to play just trying to save everyone I could except those killing others). So many rpgs have story lines Ive never explored…

59

Here’s a weird one: Event[0]

I feel uncomfortable playing AI games in general (Creatures or Black & White), but Event[0] made me even more uncomfortable.

Essentially, I loathe the idea that how we treat others should be a means of achieving self-centered goals. In real life. It’s manipulation, which I find psychopathic, or sociopathic, or whatever. Loathsome, at best.

Event[0] basically asks the player as its central conceit to treat the AI as a person and to manipulate it to favor you. So you can win, I guess. I played it for a half-hour and felt dirty about it.

60

I have a similar problem, in games that offer you a choice to play as good or evil, I just can’t swing evil. I’ve never played Sith in the KOTOR games, I’ve never taken the evil path in the Fallouts - I could not blow up my home in Fallout 3, that’s just nuts!

But I must say that in games that give you no option, like the GTA games, I’m fine with playing an amoral jerk. Though if they gave you the option of robbing people vs rescuing puppies, I’d probably go the puppy route.