yeah over the years i have also had Thoughts about this game but you know what?
everybody gets one.
Sounds like the real-life Japanese Antarctic whale research boats that produce highly scientific whalemeat burgers
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I’ve been wondering why Monster Hunter is the one series that makes so many players start asking ethical questions?
MH3 has to be the only game I’ve ever played that I stopped for political reasons, I couldn’t bear being such an asshole killing peaceful monsters and disrupting ecosystems
But, obviously, 95% of videogames have the player kill things, destroy ecosystems, and / or be an asshole
I think the main issue here is that while most games don’t seem to care about the topic or have weighed the issues at all, MH has and it thinks that Actually the complete domination of all nature by humans is wonderful
It is essentially an NRA member who goes on paid safaris to kill lions and who tells you that he knows animals better than you, therefore he cares more. In videogame forum
(I have no idea whether this is intentional or not)
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Man I never knew people read the story in MonHun games.
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Monster Hunter tends to draw more intellectual players
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Monster Hunter is internally consistent enough to feel real despite videogame trappings
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People who played MH before would play the games obsessively to get good at hunting/murdering the animals
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Everything in MH is directed towards the hunt and it never seems to question that (AFAIK. Please compare something like Bloodborne)
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The animals are beautiful and are given lives outside of fighting you. The first time I got weird about killing monsters in MonHun was when I had to kill a mom
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I remember when I played Modern Warfare 1 and 2 and antiwar quotes would pop up everytime I died and it was weird and morbid and felt right
I mean, like I have been playing these games since the first PSP on in NA, and I just never felt really bad because it just never felt real at all.
But also thinking about it now, the message sure seems to be that the monsters are winning, given the whole continued need to hunt them.
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They usually narratively justify it as monsters going on rampages, shifting to ‘unnatural’ threats caused by the demonic monsters later in the campaign.
I think it’s related to how most people feel worse about hurting non-/partially-sentient innocents than hurting ‘guilty’ sentients. Does the monster have a consciousness of how it hurt people, or is it just doing its thing?
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pack it in, we got the rick and morty of games 
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This is a bit of a half-contradictory “thinking out loud” post that jumps around a bit… sorry:
My enjoyment of Monster Hunter in general (this being my third time playing one after MHU3/MHU4 on 3DS) comes mainly from its gameplay and systems. I like how it feels to play control wise, and I think its offers cool challenges that feel satisfying to complete. Most of the time I can divorce the enjoyable parts of the game from the inherent politics of the game’s premise: “Hunt things. Kind of for research but also… just… hunt things because i put my hands on my hips and i am ur commander.” Other people have discussed this with more nuance above, and I agree that the game’s premise is gross.
The part that gets particularly muddy in my (admitted) reduction of the game’s enjoyability to its systems/gameplay, is that some of the more interesting moments within its interacting systems come from how it represents different ecosystems and animals coming into contact. There is an aspect of this stuff that does “feel real.” The quests which involve fighting the monsters in the challenge arena inevitably feel very different to the ones where they are in their habitat (quick side note: the monsters all being referred to with “it” pronouns is interesting re: what the game’s opinion of these animals is). I’m still parsing where my sense of guilt sits while playing the game. I like hitting the monsters with the hammer and dodging and getting loot for the same reason I like fighting weird monsters in (say for example) Bloodborne.
I don’t find the interaction between the hunter and the ecosystems/animals/world interesting in the same way I find their co-existence so fascinating and impressive. With that said, I like playing the game because it offers an interesting “living challenge” in a sense, which inevitably links it to blood sport, and makes it more difficult for me to say “replace them with robots and it’s the same thing.”
It might be cool for me to think through what the New World looks like without humans in it. I’d be curious what a tourist mode looks like that isn’t limited to Ghillie suit cooldowns, and what I might learn from or feel about the world if I was offered the opportunity to experience it as a habitant rather than a coloniser. What is the world without the hunter? I’m not entirely sure what that would look like, but I do know what my life would look like at the moment without a satisfying grindy and challenging game, and it’s far noticeably grimmer than what it’s like with this distraction in place.
With each new Mon Hun I’m kind of forced to rethink what my ongoing policy might be or should be regarding monetarily supporting games whose inherent or underlying politics I disagree with. It also offers me a chance to self-critique my ability to overlook a game like Golf Story because I saw a screenshot of misogynistic dialogue, while still preordering this game about battering and capturing or killing animals for sport.
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this does bother me (it’s the main reason that I don’t think I’ve fought a single non boss enemy without being required to), and it is absolutely weird the extent to which it’s taken for granted. I think in my case it actually helps that I’ve ignored the franchise for over a decade so my expectation is actually taking a lot of the weird trappings for granted.
It also feels fundamentally like a cartoon in a way that other exploitative stuff (like the last of us 2 trailer) does not, though it’s simultaneously weird enough to not be condescending.
and in my case this is all irrespective of the story as such, which doesn’t register on any level other than “this is an excuse to frame the mechanics they wanted” (though frankly the invocation of “the new world” is imo irredeemably colonial).
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but it’s definitely strange that I’m more willing to play a game in which you invade and cripple indigenous species then chase them back to their nests to finish them off than I am something in a similar format like destiny because at least it’s not cloyingly serious
I would wager that an American or European developer could not pull this off, for which I am grateful
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speaking of Destiny did @idiot even buy this >:|
I haven’t heard his smooth voice in like 5 months
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I would actually go so far as to say that this is a pretty good example of how I’ve pretty much given up on vidcons having any real politics or anything meaningful to say – shadow of the colossus was twelve years ago, and everyone loved it and wanted to take it seriously, and now at a time when everyone is much more attuned to issues like representation and wanting games to be held to a higher standard, we just have this.
Read a book imo and then play monster hunter with a totally separate mindset. We happened not to have the technology to make a fully realized co-op King Kong simulator back when there was cultural appetite for it, and now we do, so only this rump culture is really willing to go there, for how good of a game it remains.
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although this analogy is obviously imperfect, and does omit the kinds of politics that games actually are held to by consensus – anyone waiting for the power of the playstation four to be dedicated toward Harassing Women On The Street Simulator is probably going to have their hopes dashed – but really this just reinforces how much these design decisions are subservient to how the game plays or could (excitingly!) play.
also, there’s probably an argument to be made that leisure suit larry already got there in this case.
Maybe it’s the Pokemon Snap-like catching small animals game. It’s attempting to place markers, collect readings, samples in monster habitats without disturbing them. It’s running in terror when they wake up, improvising hiding spots like Amnesia?
Subnautica runs with this nonviolence in a modern survival template, but we can go back to Aquanaut’s Holiday, Endless Ocean (why are the nonviolent games so often underwater-themed?).
Personally, I feel less bad about killing animals in this game than I do killing humans (even evil ones) in any other game. I can feel my cute-response rising but that always seems illogical next to a human being.
This is particularly difficult for me because I am fucking terrified of that kind of underwater.
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The PS3 Aquanaut’s Holiday is real good y’all.
I wish Afrika had been that good.
I almost certainly have more empathy for animals than humans on balance (sorry) but on average, games are actually way more willing to depict humans realistically suffering than they are animals, because there’s a belief that the former can have some artistic value. which isn’t necessarily untrue though it is almost never earned.
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Well, and they know how much more you can goose out of hurting an animal and don’t need to just to shake out a response. Can you imagine the Last of Us 2 trailer, but with puppies?
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