I played it a bit then had to stop as I got too depressed. Then again “Everyone’s Gone to the Rapture” hit me like a ton on bricks too. I needed things to turn out differently in how that game ended. It was a good ending, but the humanity part just, gah. Was very emotional.
I hope @Rod_Humble might ease in here to post his selections as I liked his posts on this subject in the other thread.
Sure! Yeah my moral queasyness is quite specific and shows up when I least expect it. WW2 is probably the most severe. I just cant enjoy playing a U Boat commander (but I have zero problems that most other people can), however I can and do enjoy playing a US sub commander who are arguably doing exactly the same thing to the Japanese. I would enjoy playing a British submarine commander if anyone made a game about it, you would think with the size of the Royal Navy sub force and the fact it mainly focused on enemy warships as targets then it would be ripe for a gaming treatment.
East Front WW2 is where I get very finicky, I have a very hard time overlooking the genocides which were commited during that conflict. There are no good guys on the East Front, just two scumbag regiemes intent on murder. I made Stavka/OKH to explore this. It just really pissed me off how wargame after wargame had you happily driving around Panzers or Soviet tanks completely brushing over the fact that two hexes away thousands of innocent people were being lined up and murdered and as we have discovered over the years the regular armed forces of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were up to their arms in blood. So for the East Front I like there to be an acknowledgement of that, at least.
But like I say its odd, I have zero problem wargaming the Russian Civil War for example which is a pretty vile conflict but for whatever reason it just doesnt trigger any response with me.
Also its not like its a hard rule. I can cheerfully fly around German or Soviet planes in IL-2 for example. I have no idea why. I DO get a little uncomfortable with allied bombing games. Its tough for me to enjoy a victory in those games when it is “yay, I made it to the target and we dropped incendaries on the city!” Again though I recognize this is all very personal, I certainly have no judgement towards fellow gamers who CAN enjoy these particular areas, which is interesting in and of itself, because I am a pretty judgemental person most of the time. Just not here. Shrug.
Great thread!
p.s.
Like others I cant game anything that involved kids getting hurt or sick.
Lately, I’ve been having trouble playing mostly board games about colonization that have no representation of the natives of the land being colonized. This really bothered me in the board game Mombasa where players play as European “chartered companies” dividing up Africa. The core symbol of the game is the pith helmet as a symbol of European adventure (I think?), but the game has very few images or references to the people who lived in continent during the colonization.
Most of these style of games are pretty abstract (the designer of Mombasa has explicitly said that he choose the location because he thought chartered companies would be an interesting game mechanic). Which bothers me even more because it wouldn’t have been hard to just use a less dismissive setting.
Other similar recent games include Amerigo, which is about colonizing some apparently empty islands in the Americas, and Santa Maria, which has the same theme as Amerigo.
I don’t mind playing colonizing forces in games when the game at least acknowledges what’s happening. I love Archipelago and Imperialism 2 which I think both look more directly at colonization well. Those games also make me uncomfortable, but in a way that feels fitting given their subject matter.
I’ve played the board game Puerto Rico with friends who feel it obscures the Atlantic slave trade and makes them uncomfortable. I felt that game was subtly acknowledging it with how worker cubes come to the island and that those cubes are brown, but that’s definitely arguable. For reasons I can’t put to words, this doesn’t bother me enough to make me dislike Puerto Rico, but I’ll readily acknowledge it as a fault.
I’m not sure what about Mombasa hit me so hard, but it made me re-evaluate most of my board game collection. I only ended up getting rid of Amerigo, but it’s a new issue I’m considering when getting games. I have friends who are not as bothered by Mombasa but will acknowledge its setting is problematic, which makes sense. I’m not as bothered by Puerto Rico.
To clarify: I am not judging the people who play and enjoy these games. I’m also not judging the designer (I like quite a few other Alexander Pfister games). I have trouble enjoying them because I can’t get over the theme while playing them.
Since we are also discussing game we won’t play because of prejudice or other things, the games I don’t play because of their theme are the ones about the first World War.
I have no idea, no rational about it. I simply can’t.
But I conceive other playing wargames about it, no issue.
Where it snapped in the most peculiar way to me, was that I remember when EA announced their Battlefront game, I was litterally outraged. So angry, yet without any clear reasonning. Which is why I didn’t try to ever argue with others about it.
I suspect it might be due to education, although not in the academic sense: the Great War was hardly taught in school in France when I was a kid. It isn’t personal: one of my great-grandfathers died there, but I never even bothered to ask his name.
Why I do not share this feeling for other, more recent conflicts? Zero idea.
Why do I not share this anger toward other games themed about WW1? I think it has been discussed by others in all sort of terms. Probably because they seemed to show so little respect for it. Not an argument, I know, merely an insubstantial feeling, but I can’t suppress it.
It is very disturbing, to me, to be so sensitive about something, with so little clues as to why.
I’ve grown to dislike anything that’s more or less a murder simulation. The sniper series comes to mind. Anything that bases its theme on the misery of others…prison architect…people use the word “privilege” a lot now-a-days, but boy does the design of that game reek with it. Yah, prisons…a light hearted subject to base a video game on…fuck you.
In general, I’m weary of sociopaths, and the march towards total and complete numbness to any kind of violence or horror. In my lifetime, the curve of what is “normal” in terms of popular culture, has degraded to the point of absurdity. Sportsmanship, empathy, courtesy, all of these things have all but vanished.
I honestly don’t get the hate for Prison Architect. Life in an average prison isn’t pleasant, but it’s not like everyone is getting raped and beaten and shanked on a daily basis. Most of the time, most of the people there are getting along with each other and trying to get through the day without any trouble. If anything, I think this negative attitude is a bit disrespectful to the prisoners who use that time to get their shit together and fix their lives.
For me, it’s games built around outrageously vapid “male gaze” characters. I don’t mind a little eye-candy like that one NPC ally that flirts and dresses provocatively, or even bikini armor, (although I think it’s really dumb) but a whole game about that like some JRPGs or fighting games? I’m out.
I don’t hate it at all. It’s brilliant and well done. I played it as much as I could but just couldn’t get out of my mind what goes on in American prisons. The problem is that American prisons are getting worse every year. As Wall Street tries to squeeze money out of states, the fed, and the prisoners and their families themselves it is pretty disgusting. Then you have the vultures who feed on them via phone systems, bail bond system and the poor are often housed for weeks, months, years, and even a decade before their trial comes along to show they were actually innocent. You have immigrants dying in ICE detention facilities or withering away when they haven’t done anything but contribute to their local community and were arrested due to trump’s edicts.
You should watch John Oliver’s stuff about prisons. He has done several major spots on it. Depressing beyond belief. Meanwhile there is one prison system I saw that seemed really good and it was where comedian Jeff Ross performed. Brazos County Jail in Texas I think. At the time it was government run (hopefully still is), the warden seemed like a really good guy as he wanted to help prepare inmates to get re-integrated into society.
When he did the women’s special what was striking was several women were there for theft. Theft to feed or diaper their children. Texas is not known for providing a good social safety net for its people so it is depressing there are people in jail with murderers because they wanted to feed their kids. People don’t really understand abject poverty until you’re living in it without hope. And when people don’t have hope, nor access to nor the education or the mental state to seek help (and being the South maybe being told “we don’t care”), this is what happens. Also my sister was a county sheriff. Their prison was OK, but a few in this state are horrible. One of them even adds massive debt onto prisoners shoulders when they leave so not only do the ex-prisoners have almost no job prospects because of what’s on their record, but they have the prison or collection agencies coming after them for money they don’t have or never will have… most will never ever do anything but drown and can’t get ahead.
That is some evil shit indeed JPinard. In many ways the USA are the evil empire. Come to europe, where socialism isnt a dirty word and religion a quaint bit of history.
Yeah that’s a great and hard to read write-up @jpinard. When Prison Architect is at its best, I feel like what you’re writing is why it’s powerful. It’s also painful. Defcon was as well. I can’t always handle those kind of games, but when I can they keep me aware of those problems and wanting to help / understand them better. But I do find it hard to “enjoy” them the way I enjoy Mario.
2007 called and wants its reality back.
@jpinard good summary, and yet far from complete. I could never play the game either. At least WW2 ended a long time ago.
I like to imagine that my prison is in a place where they actually do more than just dump the inmates out in the real world and tell them to fend for themselves. It’s too depressing if I think of them getting out and trying to live an honest life but finding they can’t get a job and turning back to crime just to get the money to pay their fines and fees.
Thanks, but if Europe is full of people like you, I think I’m gonna pass.
Why the ad-hominem? haven’t got any real counter arguments to make?
Also I am freaking awesome so you miss out mate! :P
Counter arguments to the USA being an evil empire? Maybe we should send that one over to P&R and get back to games.
Yes lets get back to the games :)
GTA games made me physically sick when I was still trying to play them (before 4, basically). That random violence. I am a chicken.