being dumb and loving it goes a long way to making it palatable for me; the serious, real tone demanded by today’s testosterone junkies to cover up their insecurities around their fantasies makes it a lot worse
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it seems like gun-games have taken two wildly divergent paths, one like Fortnite or Overwatch or whatever where the whole thing is just so divorced from reality as to be absurd, and the other where they feel the need to just go whole-hog into trying to make violence Meaningful and Provocative
the former can be ok and the latter typically sucks on unprecedented levels
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Then what would it be in a way that makes sense?
Like, what do the two opposing forces then become?
I assume you’re referring to The New Order and The New Colossus, which require context and cutscenes and theme work to justify their violence, and it’s precisely the absence of all this that makes The Division 2 such a pure “videogamey” drug hit. It’s arcade fascism. If it tried to seriously justify what was going on in any way for longer than literally 20 seconds in 2 hours, I would be annoyed, and I would let you know I was annoyed.
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I don’t believe that you are so completely lacking in imagination that you can’t think of a single scenario for a mindless shooter that doesn’t require explicit fascist framing. I think you’re just trying to justify the shitty parts of a game you like.
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you just
don’t make a game where you’re The Last Heroic Fed Ventilating Gang Members For Resources To Build Playgrounds Because Gang Members Don’t Even Like Playgrounds!!! In A Weird Settler Fantasy
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you just don’t
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It’s OK to have a problematic fave, you don’t have to rationalize the crappy parts away.
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make it fucking Robotron 2099 Now With Loot In Every Room
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I’ve played a billion shooters and very few of them were actually set within the bounds of the ryanverse
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Yeah, I can’t think of any game in recent years that created a situation where all the bad guys were realistically written nazis and the good guys were a diverse coalition of vaguely left-wing freedom fighters.
Or a game where you fight weird space monsters instead of actual people.
Or a game where, like Diablo, you fought demons from hell but now you have guns.
Or a game where everything is some kind of scifi bloodsport people are playing for prizes.
But alas, we don’t live in a world where games with those plots are possible, and we must keep killing anarchists.
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i think it’s actually less and less okay to have a problematic fave
and we really should have less videogames that are about the “pleasure” of shooting someone in the face
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Non ironically love this idea. Set it in the Smash TV universe for extra fun.
But that would be way duller to look at than what’s here. If you’re gonna have a real city this gorgeously depicted as a backdrop for a videogame about shooting dudes nonstop, you’re gonna have a problematic image.
It’s a shooter game set in Washington D.C. Bad taste? I don’t know, it’s a videogame.
I guess I subliminally-until-now accept that “videogames” at base have a minimum bar for problematicness and fascism just due to their primal focus on empowering the player and giving them absolute Godlike agency.
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this is absolutely worth keeping in mind but it in no way obviates the other points raised itt
In Spaceyear 2099 All The Human Manz Moved From Their Old + Busted Cities To Live Beneath The Crystal Domes Leaving the Ruins… For Sports Combat
dang I did it
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You’re telling me a game where instead of boring human there’s the potential for dozens of brightly colored robots with completely different movesets and power that could explode in satisfiying showers of parts is more boring than murdering regular people with guns.
Like the more I’m thinking about this the more I want a Robotron inspired loot shooter because it actually solves most of the problems the genre has from a narrative and game design perspective.
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What if I want to use virtual real guns to kill virtual real people in a virtual real city in my videogame, though?
I mean, you can say a shooter set in the current year is too politically close to home for you to feel comfortable with, but I don’t think the inherent tactile joys of real-world weapons and the beauty of real-world cities should not be allowed to be exploited.
Cops killing anarchists is punching down AND advances the ideology and agenda of a dangerous and ascendant far-right extremist movement that is CURRENTLY killing people IRL and just happens to also be closely intertwined with late-2010’s “gamer” culture.
If your irrepressible gamer id cries out for realistic human murder then there are so many ways you could frame it that aren’t as irresponsible and shitty as Division 2.
For example, what if you played as a revolutionary anarchist defending their DC-area commune from counterrevolutionary cops?
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An why? There’s a literally infinite number of possible games out there. Why does skipping one that reinforces the fucked up realities of our world have to be a huge loss?
Or we could use that ‘real world cities are only used for sport’ premise Shrug suggested. That would work fine.
it would be cool if more games were not about killing and/or mutilating things.
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