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grumbeld

How to care what happens in an FPS

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After reading this amazing article: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/8157257/line-explores-reasons-why-play-shooter-games a friend and I started to discuss how you could create an FPS where you feel bad about what you do. We had a great discussion, and he wrote up the key points. I'm interested what people think. Would it work?

PATHOS

PATHOS is an FPS designed to make the player feel sadness and remorse, rather than sadistic glee, at

killing legions of unnamed and unknown enemies. In many ways, PATHOS will be similar to other games

in the genre, featuring military missions and objectives, and enemies who stand in the way of those

goals. These goals will increase in difficulty, requiring the player to gain new and improved weaponry,

skills, and items in order to complete a mission.

Where PATHOS is different comes in the death mechanic of every NPC within the game. For plot

reasons, the player character is able to see the ghosts of the recently deceased. As every NPC is

ruthlessly slaughtered by the player, their ghosts will slowly rise above their corpses, each speaking a

unique bit of dialogue that deal with families and loved ones left behind, or goals left incomplete, or just

a general sadness of a life cut short. Each of these ghosts will slowly float upward, but will be both seen

and heard by the player before being removed from the scene. While the player has the ability to look

away, the voices will follow them for the entirety of the dialogue.

Some NPC’s will speak a different language, as will their ghosts, giving the player a brief respite from

the onslaught of sadness. At the same time, at this point in the game, the player might be wondering

what the hopes and dreams of that particular NPC may have been. They may wish they had been able

to communicate with that NPC in some fashion, but their death makes these wishes completely moot.

As the game reaches its frantic conclusion, more and more NPC’s will be killed at the same time. This

will allow the player to see groups of ghosts engaged in conversations above their head. Some of these

may become more philosophical, as the player is forced to face the consequences of total slaughter.

At this stage, it is unclear what the ending of PATHOS will be, but a few suggestions have been put

forward:

1. After the final, victorious stage, the scene blurs, and the player sees an endless field of tortured

souls in Hell. It is made clear that the player is, in fact, a demon who has the job of inflicting unending

torment on these poor souls. Satan comes forward and says “Who has two thumbs and is really good

at destroying the hopes and dreams of others?” The player then turns to a nearby mirror and sees their

face covered in blood. With a big smile, the player says “This guy!” Satan appears over the player’s

shoulder, and both laugh as the scene fades to the credits. (( Possible hardware could allow the player

to insert their own actual photo for the player character’s face in this scene. ))

2. Rather than Hell, the player character fades into an Egyptian scene. Standing in front of him is Osiris

with his scales. He balances the player’s heart against a feather. Based on the amount of killing the

player has done, the scale tips further and further down. Behind Osiris stands a legion of heroic/divine

figures, including Buddha, Jesus, King Arthur, Confucius, Paul Bunyan, Robin Hood, and others. Each

looks disappointed and shake their heads as the scale shows that the heart is too heavy. Osiris sighs and

says “Well, you’re fucked.” The game controller shakes as the screen flashes a bright white. The screen

then reads “You only get once chance at this life.” Afterwards, the game auto-deletes.

3. After the final victory, the player walks into the office of their commanding officer. On the desk are

two forms. One is a form allowing the player to retire from service with honor. The other form is a re-

enlistment. If the player chooses to retire, they watch the credits, which are laid over a montage of the

player character building a family and a life. Interspersed are brief remembrances of killing previous

enemies, and the player character bursting into tears. If the character chooses to re-enlist, they open

New Game + mode. The game is more difficult, and the lines of ghost dialogue are even more tragic.

However, the character also gains more acute hearing, and now they can also hear dialogue from the

living enemies. Rather than typical military jargon, these focus on the lives and friendships between

the enemy combatants. The player then gets to decide at which point in this conversation they wish to

break down a door and begin killing the enemies. In this mode, the enemies are generally less aware

and more likely to be taken by surprise.

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I think all three of those options are too blunt, or to put it another way, are trying to force you to feel bad about what you've done. I realize that's what you want to do, but all those options remove the agency of guilt/emotion and just go "Hey, look at what a jackass murderer you are! Feel bad now."

Honestly, I'm not sure it's possible.

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Honestly, I'm not sure it's possible.

The Walking Dead game series has made me feel guilty for violence numerous times already. Without being super overt or ham-fisted, simply remind the player "You just killed a person. That's pretty fucked up."

But scaling this up to a large scale FPS where the sole act of gameplay is killing would be hard. Any attempt I can think of has an almost Molydeux-fantasy taste to it.

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The Walking Dead game series has made me feel guilty for violence numerous times already. Without being super overt or ham-fisted, simply remind the player "You just killed a person. That's pretty fucked up."

But scaling this up to a large scale FPS where the sole act of gameplay is killing would be hard. Any attempt I can think of has an almost Molydeux-fantasy taste to it.

I meant more an FPS, yes. I mean if you're not desensitized to killing pixel men yet, then maybe you don't want to play video games.

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Yeah I agree that those endings kind of immediately flip over the table of slow buildup of remorse that might have been created by the rest of the game. Also the suggested dialogue in them is pretty out of place, it's kind of trying to be funny, and is also very contemporary, and in neither of the cases that included dialogue are the scenes actually funny or contemporary. Additionally the gimmick concepts in the first two ideas are probably bad choices, because 1) they will rely on technical aspects that probably won't work well (getting photos and shit to play nice is regularly completely out of the question, and trying to get a program to even auto-delete in the first place will be somewhat difficult in the age of UAC and so on, but even if you manage it it will barely slow down a player who really wants to replay the game) and 2) really are gimmicks - again undercutting any seriousness or profundity attempted with the game. Especially when someone uses a picture of their dick, as would inevitably happen.

The basic idea is interesting though, and could work as a very short game. If you try to make this take several hours it is going to go from sad to irritating and boring very quickly, I suspect.

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Yeah, I can't imagine this game would be longer than two hours or so for a play through. The photo stuff would only happen if it was also a Kinect game. You could do it by asking for a player to pose for their ID photo at the start of the game. Maybe the photo would change slightly as the game progressed and the player got updates from their commander, using your photo a la Metal Gear. The part that I really like about the idea is to hammer in the idea that the NPCs are in Hell and you're a demon tormenting them. If hints are dropped during the campaign, the player might buy into the ending twist.

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After reading this amazing article: http://www.grantland...y-shooter-games a friend and I started to discuss how you could create an FPS where you feel bad about what you do.

"You" as the player? or "you" as the in-game character?

I don't think you will succeed in making the player feel bad about this actions. It's all virtual anyway. This can be achieved through the role the player is playing.

Take for example Deus Ex: Human Revolution. You can play the game killing everybody, or you can play the game killing nobody, or some sort of middle ground where you only kill some people. I played the latter, I didn't kill any police, but I did kill the evil guys (and zombies). The way you play is not forced in anyway, and I think that is very important. Not killing anybody will give an achivement, but other than that it has hardly any influence on the game (only for certain key figures).

I think the important thing to you if you want to introduce some kind of feeling for killing, is that you do not force people into a direction. I think the article also goed into that a bit. You are forced to torture somebody, and after that you can decide if you kill him or not. There was no option in not-torturing. I think it would have been better if you had the option to torture, and get the info but also introduce some negative side effects, like some friendly NPC won't help you anymore. If you didn't torture, then you didn't get the info making the next part more difficult, but the NPC will still help you. Or, simply don't give any option at all and torture the guy and kill him. No fake morality systems please.

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I'm an atheist, and this approach would do nothing but seem ridiculous and clumsy to me. Something like the (NSFW) Lizard of Guilt from Oglaf, except producing accidental rather than intentional comedy. I think you should make it though, because I'm all for weird things existing.

I think that excellent Tom Bissell article already has some of the answers in:

Metro 2033: Killing stuff is depressing as hell. Enemies don't die easily. A lot of them are scared, freaked out. The world is not at stake and you're just pushing through enemies because you have to.

"The world is not at stake" being a crucial part of that, as so much else in popular culture portrays killing as okay if it's for something really super important. The first thing a game could do is take away that kind of context.

elmuerte gives another good example in Deus Ex: Adam's lethal takedowns were brutal enough to make me wince a bit, and given non-lethal options I felt no justification or desire for lethal force in the early levels. Even in the bits after the PMC soldiers come to kill you and I felt justified to retaliate in kind, the non-lethal takedowns were quieter so I still often used them instead of killing. All of those things went through my head without the game ever making a suggestion or passing judgment.

You can't bolt something on to work against context (i.e. making a shit art film): Putting ghosts into Unreal Tournament or Call of Duty won't make a jot of difference, because people see NPCs and avatars as things, not people, and narratives often set them up as just that or communicate "It's okay to kill these people".

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Deus Ex: Human Revolution is indeed a good example of this sort thing. I used non-lethal takedowns almost exclusively even though I knew I wouldn't be getting the achievement for that, and when infiltrating the police station, for example, I didn't even consider shooting the cops an option. There are games where you ruthlessly slaughter cops and security guards even though you are "the good guy", just because they are in your way and you don't have time to explain why your actions are so important to national security or whatever. I can hardly feel bad for making them not exist anymore if the game doesn't give me any other tools for dealing with the situation and if the world around me is so broken that it barely even registers this massacre. The lack of choice is partly why I think Pathos concept is not a very elegant solution to the problem. This and the ghosts.

If I remember correctly, the original Mafia did quite a good job in not-trivializing murder and violence. You started off as a taxi driver and actually had to drive people to their destination (something which many people hated, but I thought was very nice touch), before being slowly sucked into the world of organized crime. I disliked killing because I knew that I wasn't born a killing machine and that there were indeed other ways of interacting with people around me. At some point I could but marvel what monster I had become, even though I tried my best to stay good, with the boundary condition of staying alive and in favor of the Family at the same time. (And by "I" I mean the protagonist because the plot was very linear.)

Was there a browser or an indie game or a mod that always showed you the family of your victim being delivered the news of his death right after you had shot him, or was that just in my head? Somehow I remember No One Lives Forever (one or two) having a scene like this but I might be completely wrong.

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A lot of NOLF trivialised it, but in pretty funny ways. Guards discussing "To think we're missing The Man From U.N.C.L.E. to be doing this", and shooting a monkey ending a level in a fail state immediately, with the message "Unacceptable simian casualties".

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Why isn't NOLF available for purchase & download anywhere or is it and I'm just blind? Especially the second one which I have never played as there was always problems getting it to work on my computer.

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