Hello faithful FR readers and happy Tuesday! We have a post from Stephen today, so enjoy! Thank you, Stephen.
Just to ease back into the swing of things, I mean aside from missing my Monday deadline because I fell asleep about the time I normally start writing, I thought I might do something a bit unusual and review a recent video game purchase now that I have had time to play the game.
Despite reading reviews about the game GreedFall and how heavily influenced it was by the SJW counter-culture, I thought, “How bad could it really be?” I was wrong.
As an initial introduction it is a RPG set in an alternate world undergoing an age of exploration settling a newly discovered world filled with primitive natives and a playing style reminiscent of Dragon Age Inquisition, that is heavily reliant upon theatrical animation based upon character interactions with a minimally complicated game play.
The graphics, which many people confuse with games the way that many people confuse movie special effects with an actual plot, were pretty good with a similar integration of your personalized character into the script of the game.
The setting of the game seems interesting enough, you start as a mercantile character in a world with swords and armour, early style firearms, and magic rings. Your character is of significant rank setting off to a newly discovered island where your rank and privilege promise to become pretty meaningless as you must survive upon your own merit. And to further complicate matters, i.e. provide the essential motivation, your society has been recently suffering from some sort of virulent mortal plague of unknown origin.
And, that is essentially the entirety of the good points. An interesting premise in interesting settings promising engaging character interactions. None of which will it ultimately deliver. However, playing this game did provide me some interesting observations of the leftist SJW mind-set and precisely where and how it goes awry.
The game society is divided into six main cultures . . . sort of, but not really.
There are actually three main nations and one primitive culture upon the island, however there are two groups which appear as sort-of independent trans-national cultures. Each of these is largely a caricature of real historical cultures mashed in a blender and re-assembled primarily for PC points for the game creators.
You start as a member of the “Merchant Congregation”, the other two nations are “Télème” and “The Bridge Alliance”. All three nations employ people sailing ships called “Nauts”, not very original, and mercenaries called “Coin Guards”, equally unoriginal. And of course, you have the primitive natives.
The nations are mash-ups of historical societies twisted in predictable SJW fashion. For instance, Télème is basically the Church as a nation state, both corrupt and fanatical; the Bridge Alliance is sort of a combination of Indian & English, in SJW fashion with the Indians in charge; and the Merchant Congregation a general European feel who would sell their own children for a bit of money, quite literally in this case.
(Irritatingly “science” is relegated to making essentially magical potions, or explosive potions, so that their “science” is closer to magic which I guess is more how SJWs actually view science instead of actually understanding the topic.)
What struck me most was not the numerous slanderous insults of society in general but the indulgence of embracing stereotypes and tropes to a ridiculous level. Much like Hollywood, GreedFall generalizes not merely people but whole groups and nations as flat two-dimensional characters.
For instance, one sidekick, as the player’s team is made up of the player and two chosen sidekicks for each mission, is an ambassador priest from Télème who immediately proposes to help your character get salacious dirt on the head of his own faction betraying his own nation for not discernable reason. Another sidekick helps thwart a coup attempt by the Coin Guard betraying his own faction to help your character’s faction, but at least there is an attempt at some reason behind this betrayal. It seems to be a running theme of sidekicks to betray their own in favor of the lead character.
In real history each nation state had its own navy, soldiers, merchants, scientists, et cetera. In GreedFall all soldiers are grouped together and all are for hire; navies all belong to another group, one nation has all the priests, another nation has all the scientists, and so forth.
This backdrop brings me to the real problem of the game stemming from the SJW influence. It is not the shallowness of the characters, the stupidity of the unrealism of the factions, but the forced plot and storyline.
The essence of any good RPG is the ability of the character to make choices and for those choices to change and alter the world. In GreedFall, the choices for the character to make are incredibly stark. By stark I mean that there is in moral terms a clear good and bad choice.
The decision tree lacks any moral ambiguity.
Moral clarity should never be so stark and one-sided that a character’s options are simply to be good or evil. A good game would present valid arguments for different sides to create a moral dilemma for the character in trying to do what they consider the right thing. The same decision may be viewed as right or wrong often depending upon the perspective of the individual.
From such moral dilemmas, players, through their characters, can think about the situation choose sides and feel justified in their character’s path. Without the moral ambiguity, the game makers do nothing but preach at the gamer that one-sided perspective of the author.
It reduces the “game” into a movie interrupted with tasks for the gamer but no meaningful participation or decisions of the player other than the two paths of good or evil, destroy the world or save it. I got the impression that these game makers would have been better suited to simply make a feature length anime rather than pretending to give the player “choices” while preaching their philosophy through the scripted scenes.
It is this simplistic, juvenile moral clarity which characterizes the SJW game reflects the perspective of the SJW in real life, politics, and philosophy. They see the world in stark black and white terms where each position or stance is as simple as good or evil. This is why their opponents are all “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobic” “nazis”.
These are people who simply cannot understand that different perspectives even exist, much less could admit that they have valid, moral, or good reasons for choosing to be on the other side of any issue.
True moral clarity must be earned. It does not come from simply saying that my side is correct and any other side must be corrupt and immoral. True moral clarity comes from painstakingly evaluating differing arguments, weighing and evaluating the merits of all sides and recognizing that people on different sides of the issue are all trying to do the right thing.
One of the things I learned from gaming when I was young, history as I got older, was that circumstances can lead to good men being at war with other good men each fighting for that which they hold to be a noble cause, just as sometimes bad men fight each other rather than finding common cause simply because they may be competing with one another.
This is the tearing down of statues and the vitriolic rewriting of history from the simplistic moral clarity of fools in the SJW society.
An RPG without moral ambiguity, like GreedFall, becomes an unentertaining preachy irritant, similar to certain “woke” cinema entertainments which have been oozing out of Hollywood. A game, like any entertainment whether movie, television, or a book, can not stimulate the mind of the audience if there is no moral ambiguity.
As much as people don’t like to admit it, entertainments are a means for intellectual growth, not merely diversions. To be intellectually stimulating, those entertainments need some form of moral tension which can only be created through a well crafted moral ambiguity which creates depth in the characters.
Isn’t it ironic that moral clarity only occurs in fools who have not bothered to actually think about moral dilemmas and in wise men who have reasoned through the many sides and principles of moral dilemmas; but moral ambiguity is the natural state of everyone else who still wrestles with the issues?
