And my point is I don't care about the character's feelings and don't want to control them if they seemingly have no understanding of what they're doing (and neither does the story).
Okay. Character remains interesting to me.
It ain't being void of emotion. It's being a lot more grim when doing grim things like murder. Acting like an uppity child despite engaging in extreme violence is pretty terrible writing in my opinion (unless there's some justification for this, like the character being mentally unhinged).
Do you think people become "grim" when they kill people? The effects that killing people has on people is very complex and varied, its on no way implicit that someone should become grim for murdering anyone.
Some societies made killings a form of entertainment, sometimes criminals, sometimes people who had committed no crime. Grim these events were not! We can totally have a character who kills and isn't a grim piece of cardboard or some absurd. Tweak how the society views the value of a human life, done.
Ok. I phrased it badly and could probably find jRPGs where the characters aren't horrible people who'll engage in a game of tag over someone's corpse.
Yeah, to put it mildly.
The innocently cheerful murderer that somehow isn't considered crazy or evil is an archetype I remember encountering a lot in jRPGs, tho.
It can come up, but its not very common, certainly it does not define the genre. Its a different flavour.
Don't get me wrong. Normally I'm not for wanton murder (and would honestly really want to see a game with non-lethal solutions to such issues), but between soldiers and bandits, the profession of soldier is the far less morally reprehensible one.
Making a statement about this without knowing anything more about a character doesn't seem right to me at all. I could say that a bandit is *probably* more morally wrong than a soldier, but declaring this for an individual character is wrong to me.
This is where it starts to become unrealistic. In real life, that bandit and soldier have a history, complex personality and various motivations I can use to judge the morality of their character. In a video game, these elements disappear as bandits and/or soldiers turn into game play elements. It becomes impossible for me to properly judge the morality of killing either one of these people.
This is where the realism starts to break down, where my character is judged to be good due to actions I can't determine to be good. I am supposed to accept "bandits", or other mooks as inherently and unambiguously bad. Although this is incredibly simplistic and entirely unrealistic, I ignore this when killing bandits because banditry is not the focus of the game, there are more important and interesting things to concern myself with.
The same holds with the 100 soldiers. Their responses are not realistic, but I am not concerning myself with it because that is not the focus of the game, and it is not what I am interested in.
Also, the ethics projection part is funny coming from someone talking about harmless bandits in video games. When has that ever happened? I can name a few examples where the soldiers were just some hapless, clueless people doing their job, only to get cut down by the protagonist who looks a lot like a murderer at that point. Just think of all the jail escape scenes where you murder some jobbers who's task is to isolate thieves and murderers from the rest of society.
When has this happened in video games? I can't think of any situation. That's my point. What I described is not unreasonable in the real world, but is in the video game world. These games present a false and unrealistically simplistic view of evil and morality.
I did not intend to imply that you are wrong to project your own ethics onto characters. I am projecting my own ethics too, I fully accept this. This is the reason why we can relate to different characters. My issue was that you seem to think that ignoring this soldier murder is some objectively bad writing. The banditry examples are to provide counter-examples to the video-game idea that these bandits are the bad guys, and soldiers are the good-guys, and to demonstrate that morality in the real world is very complex. The banditry example is to demonstrate that you are happily accepting that these people are bad with nothing more than a title, it is to demonstrate that your judgement of these characters is not based on real world ethics, but rather assumptions you make about these characters that you hold to be true.
And I'm hardly projecting my own ethics. It's more a matter of ethics as suggested by the society presented in the game world. If I'm not seeing the protagonist as part of some viking or fascist culture, then I cannot buy that they would just brush off committing murder on a non-outlaw, even on an enemy soldier (and even then their innocently cheerful mentality would not remain intact).
The implication that the effect that killing a human can have on a persons psyche, can be influenced by the accepted ethical beliefs of the setting is addressed below.
I don't find that realistic. What I can find realistic is a society that'd consider it fine to kill or maim outlaws as punishment, especially ones who took someone's life. That's a thing that's been common in history since forever.
You are projecting your own ethics. Most modern societies
do not consider it fine to kill or maim outlaws. That is why torture, lashing etc is no longer a punishment. That is why (most) western countries have abandoned the death sentence
because it is no longer viewed as ethical to kill or maim outlaws. In fact, many places specifically have laws protecting outlaws against these cruel punishments.
I have a feeling you are assuming RPG's are inherently medieval. Even then, the ethical system of the time period, and the treatment of criminals is quite complex.
And no, a mugger cannot get by on threats alone, because eventually they will get called out on their threats, and then either resort to violence or gain the reputation of one who throws empty threats you can just safely ignore.
One off mugging? Only a few muggings? Luck (there's a hell of a lot of bandits in video games)? There is some ethical questions here regardless. If someone mugs you for your wallet, and you try to stab them, some systems will still punish you for escalating a situation to a potentially lethal one when a non-violent solution is possible. Some places put the life of a mugger above your wallet.
If the person paying for the killing has legal authority, then nope. It's called a bounty. Also, you're applying modern laws and ethics to video game realms where those usually don't apply.
I assume your thinking of just a medieval RPG. My point here is that the systems presented by video games are shallow and incredibly simplistic, but this is just accepted and ignored. Ethics is complex, even in medieval times.
If someone can go around and dish out justice by murder and be totally cool with it due to the ethical environment, can the same not apply to any soldier murder scenario assuming a different ethical system?
Yeah, here's the thing. Fighting and killing other people who's purpose it is to fight and kill you is far less reprehensible in any society than preying on the weak like bandits do is.
Also, looting is not something inherent to being a soldier. The assault and murder is meant to be directed at other combatants, rather than anyone who's weaker like in the case of bandits.
Really? I can think of quite a few societies which view killing as simply that. Killing. Killing weak or strong is killing. What makes you come to the conclusion that any society view killing the weak and the strong differently? How do you even define strong? A peasant conscripts is not exactly what I would consider strong, and they certainly don't become stronger by being labelled a soldier.
Regardless, Many portrayals have bandits go after rich people, or large targets. As above, you can't really judge how "honourable" they are without information the game does not give you (and expects you to fill in yourself).
A well written character is one that's believable, one that takes all the things that make up a person's personality into account. Ommitting parts is lazy and creates blatantly unrealistic archetypes like the cheery cutesy high schooler war criminals.
Media omits parts all the time, you fill in the rest yourself. For example, without knowing anything about this character who kills soldiers, you assume with no other information, they are a war criminal. If that character is a soldier themselves, they are not, by most definitions, a war criminal.
All media does this in order to make an interesting plot. It is particularly common in video games, and particularly common in RPG's, as killing is most of the game play.
Well, just about any society in the world will consider outlaws a less valuable form of life, to different extremes, as unfair as that may be. Dehumanizing others makes it easier to justify killing them to one's self. And being branded a violent criminal is extremely dehumanizing.
Good point, enemies are being dehumanised, and our protagonist is the good guy for killing these sub-humans. Doesn't sound like a character I can relate too.
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Topic: Gaming Pet Peeves (Read 527094 times)