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.

The game is beautifully animated, and the eponymous monsters of the title are magnificently designed. Every trailer looks like a wonderful Discovery Channel nature documentary of a world that never was, full of dinosaurs and dragons and even more exotic creatures -- right up until you get to the gameplay, which involves killing things and dismembering them for their body parts to make cheesy, tawdry consumer goods kewl weapons and armor and magic items.

It's jarring.

The generation that grew up on Cute And Fuzzy Cockfighting Seizure Monsters has graduated to Heroic Head-Bashing Harp Seal Hunters. Look at these marvelous creatures! The loving detail that went into their creation! The magnificent, balletic fluidity of their motion! LET'S HIT THEM WITH CLUBS!

This is a game that comes from one of the last whaling nations on Earth. I'm sorry -- this is that "wide, bigoted swath" I mentioned -- but I can't help but see a connection.

This doesn't piss me off as a guy who pretends to be a dragon online. This pisses me off as an Environmental Scientist, and a human being raised with some semblance of decency and empathy toward the natural world.

I don't put much credence into combat games as "murder simulators", but I do think the prevalent attitude these games have that animals serve no purpose other than to exploit, enslave or slaughter provides a bad example.

I wish I could believe that this was meant ironically, or as a commentary on the exploitation of the natural world. The unambitious modeling and jerky animation of the player avatars certainly suggests that; they're raw, brutish intrusions on the elegantly savage ballet of the "monsters". A decade of Happy Cartoony Cockfighting Games For Little Children makes that hard, though.

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And after all that self-righteous ranting to my homies about how terrible it is to brainwash kiddies into seeing the slaughter and exploitation of magnificent animals as something fun and exciting, I announced that I was gonna go grab a burger before work.

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And then, at work, I was chatting with two of my regular customers, and one of them said, "you really need to get a PSP. Do you have any consoles at all? There's this game..."
"Funny thing, that", said I...

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Comments

[paka.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

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.

While it's true that playing with human beings makes your options theoretically more limiting, for many games, most RPGs are, basically, "Walk down this corridor and kill this beast." And a fair number of computer RPGs nowadays, Fallout 3, Mass Effect, games of that ilk, are actually more open-ended than most tabletop games.

Even in a lot of action or shooter games, the stories generally are more open than many tabletop games. They have "morality" systems that change some of the story events in the games. Oh, you end up fighting pretty much all the same people and all, but the games usually have several significant stories to choose between. Which is more than many RPGs where the players don't. They can't choose to save the Republic or destroy it. They don't get to decide if the galaxy will be a democracy or a brutal tyranny.

A few thoughts, hehe.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

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 Republic, in one of those centuries that the KotOR games haven't touched yet. That's expressly so we can decide if the Galaxy will be a democracy or a brutal tyranny, at least for a generation or two.

Both my Star Wars GMs were exposed to Ironclaw relatively early in their gaming careers. As I said in the OP, "I can't help but see a connection." =D

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

I wasn't even doggin' on the one path style of gaming. It's not a bad thing. It's just a thing. A lot of players want to really really be told, "This is the game and your role in it is THIS." They want to be told, "You are the adventurers who save the land from the evil king" and want there to be a series of adventures constructed with only one, really, choice.

Which I think is fascinating. In video games, I'm not really interested in cut scenes. I'm there to play the game. I kind of like them, but they don't make or break a game for me. I have friends - in the Final Fantasy crowd - who live for those cut scenes, that the cut scenes define the game for them, these triggered events over which they have absolutely no control. I asked them why, and they said that it was like watching a movie except you got to play the action scenes. I suspect that a large number of table-top players are after the same experience. They really like bein' on that railroad. ;)

As you know, I don't like it. I'm all about the sandbox. And as a GM, I flatly tell my players, "Ideally, I want YOU to come with the adventures. You will come to me and say, 'I'm interested in those bandits, let's go and kick their asses' or whatever." Hehe.