The moment that inspired this question:
A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.
The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.
One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”
I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.
… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.
I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.
This was a smaller moment, but similar to yours, OP, in that it revealed some unconscious thinking in my head.
But I was playing Crusader Kings II quite a few years back. And I basically had a King with the Genius trait and some other stuff I could pass down to his kids. I think I had somehow lucked into the Byzantine Empire or something, so I was basically seducing and inviting a bunch of lovers with other traits from all around the world (north and south, east and west) so I could spread Genius around. I wanted a smart council full of my bastards, heh.
So my genius slut-king has a bunch of kids. I’m naming them after my absolute favorite characters from books and such, because they’re part of my family and dynasty–so I’m giving them names that have a lot of personal “worth” to me.
Then I get to the kid in my dynasty who isn’t white, and I couldn’t figure out what name to give her. I had all these awesome names that I was using over and over through the generations in my dynasty, but somehow none that felt “right” for her. I tried and tried to choose a name, and none “fit”.
And after a while, it suddenly hit me in the face how SUBTLE racism can be. This was just a video game, but I had something that was “high worth” to me to give out, these favorite character names, and I was handing them out like candy until I got to the one kid and struggled, making all sorts of excuses why this not-white video game kid couldn’t get the name of this other character I really liked.
Now, if I was doing that in a frickin’ video game, imagine what people are doing with REAL LIFE things that are “high worth” to them. Hiring at jobs, giving gifts and presents, selling a house, etc.
And it wasn’t like I was going around in the game consciously picking which kids to screw over. (I mean, moreso than you usually do in Crusader Kings, the game where people glitch themselves into marrying their horses and creating witch covens with devil-babies so they can spread satanism across the world.) I ended up screwing this virtual kid over because I was going on this “gut feeling” that my really cool favorite-character names just somehow “weren’t right” for her, even though that frickin’ inbred cousin over there with a family tree like a wreath was proudly wearing it already.
So yeah. Learned a big lesson on how internal gut feelings influence you to do racist shit really subtly sometimes.
Wow, such a cool revelation. I think the devs of CK2 would be proud that you engaged with their game like this.
Great story!
This is a great write up, thanks for sharing!
Were any of the female characters you idolized black?
You make it sound like it’s a direct racist association, but in reality your brain just doesn’t have any good frame of reference for a probably stereotypical high-fantasy black person lol.
I’m sitting here thinking you were going to end it with saying you treated that person with the respect they deserved by not wantonly giving them some bogus high fantasy white name.
There’s a reason why so many black people give their children uniquely non-Anglo names. There is nothing new about it, and you’re right, it probably wouldn’t fit. Because most white names are distinctly non-black lol. Even moreso most uniquely white names are distinct in the same way that uniquely black names are.
Understanding that all people hold intrinsic biases is essential, but acknowledging cultural differences isn’t racism lol.
https://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-black-names-from-perlie-to-latasha-130102
https://www.thedailybeast.com/are-blacks-names-weird-or-are-you-just-racist
Very interesting and I appreciate the candor.
No Man’s Sky - Finally lifting off the planet into space for the first time reignited my love of space and the cosmos. Made me feel awe and wonder
The Stanley Parable - never had a game make me laugh till I had tears in my eyes before. This game really fucks with your perception of what is real and just how common / predictable some gaming tropes have become
No Man’s Sky had a couple for me. The first time I summoned my freighter from a planet was pretty incredible
Seeing your fleet exit hyperspace in orbit from the surface is something else. Just absolutely stunning. Every now and then I load up the game just to summon my fleet from a planets surface.
Not sure why someone has downvoted our subjective experience of a game we enjoy. “Fuck you for enjoying things”, right?
There’s also that moment in No Man’s Sky when you figure out what the story is implying. I’m being vague here to not spoil it for anyone. But it doesn’t have a single point in time where you piece it together. There’s a growing amount of evidence before the game outright tells you what’s going on.
Yeah the lore is buried fairly deep. Raises some serious questions though! It’s a shame so many will be put off by the bad launch. I know the game won’t be for everyone but I’ve sunk so many hours. It’s almost meditative at times.
When i first killed someone in DayZ back in the day, when it was just the ArmA 2 mod and all the hype.
I finally found a gun and started to learn my way around the zombies, when i heard a player in a bush nearby the hospital in Elektrozavodsk. I thought he was probably out to get me, so i emptied my Makarov clip at the bush and shortly after heard the fly noise they had put to mark dead players.
As i searched his body with my heart pumping like crazy i found him to have nothing but a can of beans. I felt profoundly shitty in that moment because he was just like me at the time. Some new guy playing a tough sandbox multiplayer-game, where everything and everyone can kill you. He probably didnt even hear or see, where he got killed from, just like it happened half a dozen times to me before.
I showed cruelty to someone in whose shoes i’d had demanded mercy.
Fuck everyone pitching people to fight each other
DayZ was such an amazing experience at the time. Battle arena games hadn’t taken off yet and you really had to pay attention to your surroundings.
Great story! War is hell
Kind of feels disparate from it being a video game, but it’s difficult to really make this experience another way:
I wanted to play a healer in an MMO. It was a shitty MMO, so healers could only be female characters wearing skimpy armor.
Well, it took about half a minute until I had people walk up to me, to then just stop 3 meters away. From the way they were moving, I have to assume, they were working their cameras to look underneath my skirt, and probably doing so with only one hand.
Some of them were sending me “hello :)” messages, which I guess is basic decency, if you’re going to use my body, but it felt weird, too, since we had nothing to talk about.
All in all, it felt uncomfortable. And I did not even have to fear for them to start touching or even raping me. Plus, I was able to log out, delete my account and basically just leave all of that behind.
Well, except for one thing I did not leave behind: I do not want to be the other side in that experience either.
When sexist objectification accidentally teaches a point against sexist objectification
It happened to me when I played Star Wars: The Old Republic. I’d played it since the beta and finished the story with all classes but I decided to play as a female sith warrior and I constantly got messages from dudes complimenting my thick ass or wanting me to humiliate them and be their dominatrix mistress. It really put into perspective the shit women go through. Especially since my character didn’t even have a skimpy outfit.
I’m a woman who has played SWTOR since its inception 12 years ago and I’ve never had anything like that happen. I’ve played through the whole story on 16+ toons, one for each class/sex combo. I’m not surprised by what you say, just lucky I’ve never experienced it.
Happened to me multiple times on that character. Never with any of my male characters.
For me it was playing Life is Strange for the first time. I bought it because it had been listed on Steam as “Overwhelmingly Positive” for ages, and at the time I was really enjoying the story-based games that companies like Telltale were producing. So, knowing nothing about the game, I picked it up and started playing it.
The first act was slow. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the writers were establishing Arcadia Bay, a city in the Pacific Northwest, as a character. All the people in it needed to be recognizable, so it took time for them to teach the player about who they were, what mattered to them, how they fit in to the city, and what their flaws were. I actually stopped playing for a while after the first act. But, luckily, I picked it back up over the holiday season.
I still remember playing it in my living room. I was so thoroughly absorbed into the story that when something tense happened in the second act and I couldn’t stop it the way I normally could, I was literally crushing the controller as if I could make things work by pulling the triggers harder.
I am decidedly not the demographic that Life is Strange was written to appeal to, but they did such a good job writing a compelling story that it didn’t matter. I got sucked in, the characters became important to me, and I could not. put. it. down. I played straight through a night until I finished it.
(If you’ve played it and you’re wondering, I chose the town the first time I played it.)
I’ll never forget that game. I’ll also never forget the communities that spawned around it. I read the accounts of people who had just played it for the first time for about a year because it helped me relive the experience I had when I played it. It was incredible.
Bae>Bay
I won’t play it again, because the story is burned in to my memory exactly how I want to remember it.
Yes, the scene at the end of Act 2 is what hooked me on the series. It’s a shame they didn’t do something similar at the end of Act 1, because so many people stopped playing due to the slow start.
My most profound moment in those games was at the end of The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit. Even though it’s the smallest story in the games, that final dialogue put me through the floor.
When I had to choose at the end, I wound up closing the game and thinking about it for a couple days before finally going back. Bae forever.
Yeah, that was the only game that actually made me cry. I was definitely invested in the story.
For my Life is Strange 2 was so much more impactful. There’s actually multiple endings. A big part of the story is the relationship between the brothers, since I’m an older brother it just hit close. The ending I got was so bittersweet, it wasn’t all happy but it captured the reasoning behind my decisions in the game so we’ll. I was telling myself “this is so sad… but… it’s exactly what I wanted”
There’s also a scene where you can come out of the closet to your dad. I was really blindsided by this, I came out to my parents before, the scene plays out in a really authentic way. I kept pausing the game to mentally process it, and kept rewatching it on YouTube right after. I just couldn’t believe it was real.
Disco Elysium was full of such moments for me. Here’s one:
You spend a lot of time in the game basically talking to yourself and your inner voices, and one of these voices is volition. If you put enough points into it, it’ll chime in when you’re having an identity crisis or struggling to keep yourself together and it’ll try to cheer you up and keep you going. At the end of Day 1 in the game you, an amnesiac cop, stand on a balcony in an impoverished district reflecting on the day’s events and trying to make sense of the reality you’ve woken up into with barely any of your memories intact. If you pass a volition check, it’ll say the following line:
“No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it’s still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You’re still alive.”
This line in combination with the somewhat retro Euro setting, the faint lighting, and the sombre-yet-somewhat-upbeat music was very powerful. The image it painted was quite relatable for me. I just sat there for a minute staring at the scene and soaking it all in. Even though this is a predominantly text-based game with barely any cinematics/animations, I felt a level of immersion I had rarely, if ever, experienced before.
Oh, look at that. Someone actually made a volition compilation. 😀 This video will give you a better idea of what I’m describing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENSAbyGlij0 Minor spoilers alert!
This thread is filled with comments on DE, but it was your comment that convinced me to finally play the game.
Thanks for the story!
I really hope you get as much out of the game as many others have. What an experience.
I feel that. It’s the only game to date to leave me just sat there wondering why my face is leaking.
Fucking hell yeah, brother, volition is the best
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=ENSAbyGlij0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Volition may be one of the “boring” companions, but what it lacks in dynamism it makes up for by being uplifting.
Outer Wilds. The universe is, and we are.
One of those games where it’s better to play absolutely blind. For the experience of discovery is the gameplay. You can never play it for the first time again.
Seriously! I still am on the hunt for that feeling all over again in another game or watching others experience this game for the first time. It’s crazy because even the Steam description of the game is a major spoiler.
TUNIC is another game that you can only play once. I recommend it to anyone who likes elaborate puzzles
Oh man that one was good. You can get a couple endings but yeah it’s hard to really replay it I have found. I actually really did like Death’s Door if you like Tunic. It’s a lot simpler but has nice mechanics and a very dark and lovely story
Return of the Obra Dinn will scratch a similar itch
I agree and I loved Obra Dinn! Case of the Golden Idol is very similar, I recently ran across it and couldn’t stop thinking about it until I finished it.
When I first played I didn’t even know that you left the starting town. It was just strongly recommended to me by a trusted friend, and I took their word for it, and bought it without even reading the store description. It was truly the kind of wonder producing experience that old gamers don’t get often.
Lol I didn’t know anything either, and a friend of mine also strongly recommended because he wanted to talk about it so much. I tried it and stopped after like 7 min. He was IRATE. I didn’t give it a proper go until like 3 years later. He thought I was trolling him when I started playing it, and it quickly turned into one of my all-time favorites.
Rofl, yeah if it hadn’t come so highly recommend I would not have stuck it out. Because at first I was put off by the very obviously stock Unity-looking visuals, floaty feeling physics… it wasn’t a good first impression IMHO. But it made a great second, and third, and fourth impression 😉 Game just got deeper and more poetic the more I played
Completely agree! I know a lot of people say you can’t play it more than once, but it’s actually a nostalgic journey for me to replay and do all the lore pickups. Have done it several times now and it hasn’t taken away my enjoyment in the slightest.
Definitely. It feels good just moving around, checking things off your lists. 😌
I literally tried that game a month ago, and after a couple hours of flying blind in space, with a not great flight control system, having no idea where to go, it completely lost me.
Maybe I missed the point, or maybe it’s an issue with me not having enough free time, but if didn’t grab me at all.
There is an autopilot that isn’t terrible but be careful if the sun is in the way. I didn’t realize there was a boosted jump with the rocket pack for like 30 hours. Seriously looking up the controls would be a good idea.
But to get started I really just recommend fly to a planet and just explore it as long as you can. Take note of what you can’t do and once you feel good just go to a different planet and start again. It doesn’t take much time and you are limited to about 20 minutes anyways.
The game rewards starting again. And sometimes jumping into space without a suit is a fast way to do that. But it is a slow puzzle/exploration game essentially in the vain of Myst so if it’s not for you that’s fine.
Honestly, I found it hard to enjoy too, even though I finished the game. The game can be really fun, but it can also get a bit annoying to realize that you have missed something on a planet and if you did, it might take a boring amount of time to find what. The problem is that the save limitations means you basically have to waste a ton of time whenever you were wrong about something or mess up. The ship computer can hint at when a planet has more to see, but it’s not necessarily easy to figure out where to go, how to reach it, or if you’re supposed to do a different planet first to get a hint.
Fuck Brittle Hollow. I almost quit the game with how much time that stupid planet wasted. A quick save/load function would have made the game massively more fun for me. Replaying stuff I’ve already done because the game has bleh checkpointing is just not fun.
A few hours? Something about your post tells me that you didn’t play past 22 minutes.
Call it a hunch.
sorry I offended your game, oh fragile one. I even blamed myself for missing something or not having enough time. I ran around the starting area talking to everyone for about an hour, just wandering, and then finally went up into space, struggling with the controls. Landed somewhere with just a guy and a radio, ran all around there, again maybe a total of an hour after my first launch. Crashed a few times at first, of course.
ship log will tell you where there’s more stuff to find
It’s interesting you bring up the controls, because that is one of the things that instantly grabbed me about the game. Before I even knew what was going on, I knew I absolutely loved moving around in the world. I used to spin up the game just to zip about for a half hour.
But of course everyone is different. Not every game is for everyone. I really grew to love Outer Wilds more and more over the days.
I could never get into it either. People are so so obsessed with this game. They tell you to never look anything up, etc. I’ve tried it on mouse and keyboard, I’ve tried it on controller and the gameplay does not feel right, so I’ve never left the ground tutorial area.
No game is for everyone but here’s some ideas to enjoy it more. It sounds like you never really got to the call to adventure.
The core quest will not reveal itself until you survive after take off for 20minutes. Even then there isn’t really a explicitly stated goal. Let your curiosity guide you, read all dialogue, especially the translations bits and just enjoy exploring, you are a space archaeologist. If you have trouble finding a place to start I would recommend using your signal scope and chasing one of those signals. This is a game about exploring and gathering information about a mystery, the reason people are so particular about spoilers is because there’s nothing gating your progress except your own knowledge, if you know the final puzzle you can ‘beat’ the game in like 2 minutes. the only save state the game has is your ships computer that stores the clues you have uncovered so far. Also if you got the DLC I would recommend disabling it or ignoring it until you complete the main story.
This is easily one of the best games of all time I’ve played. I’ve bullied all my friends into playing it and letting me watch and Noone quite experiences the story the same way.
For me though the most memorable moment wasn’t even one that I think was an intentional part of the game. I was about half way through and I so was still under the impression that
spoiler
The Naomi were responsible for blowing up the sun
I decided to just fly as far as I could away from the solar system, I flew so far the sun was just another star. I sat on the nose tip of my ship and watched the stars, occasionally telescoping in on them. Then
spoiler
I noticed the sky was much emptier than before, I zoomed in in a star and watched it explode. I realized that it wasn’t just our solar system that was dying it was everything. I zoomed in on the home star and listened to the musicians play, and as that music started to play I listened as they one by one stopped playing, and I looked around one last time at the now completely black sky before restarting the loop, and the playback was mostly just the stars slowly fading away.
I did this in the early days of the pandemic, and I would be lying if I wasn’t crying my eyes out, but afterwards, it really made me feel better about the pandemic and life in general.
Spec Ops: The Line
It’s story is based on Heart of Darkness, the same book Apocalypse Now was based on, so they share some commonalities.
Gameplay wise it’s a pretty standard 3rd person cover shooter, nothing really memorable.
But man that game fucks with your head and expectations of a shooter. While you mow down hordes of fellow American soldiers who have gone AWOL with their commander, the tone of the game constantly shifts ever so slightly. You lose people from your team, you get to be more and more vengeful and violent. And at first you think nothing of it, because that’s almost every shooter I’ve played.
But they let you see yourself in a mirror, so to say.
I think the first time it really hit me was when on one of the loading screen tooltips, that usually said stuff like “You can throw grenades back.” or “Flank your enemies.” it just said “Do you feel like a hero yet?”. Felt like I’d been punched in the gut. It gets more and more intense from there and I can’t really describe it all, because it’s been a decade or so and it was mostly the sum of a lot of smaller things.
I know some people called it corny and pretentious but it really stuck with me.
It’s a shame about the game’s uninspiring name and generic box art. Probably kept a lot of people from playing it. I only played it on a recommendation like yours.
I think a lot of the genericness is part of it.
It’s supposed to feel like every other game, until it doesn’t. The name, the plot, the art, the genetic cover shooter gameplay. It’s even got Nolan North voicing the main character.
I think the first time I noticed something was amiss was when some civilian darted out in front of me and I riddled her with bullets. No red X’s, no “do not kill civilians” messages. Just the game silently going “well, I won’t tell if you don’t…”
Removed by mod
That game is probably one of the best mind-fucks in gaming. The white phosphorous scene for me was so powerful that I immediately went into Youtube and looked up how other streamers reacted to it.
Something I don’t often see people talking about this game is the ending, which probably had the largest effect on me of any game I’ve ever played.
spoiler
Before I played Spec Ops: The Line, I was staunchly against suicide in all instances.
The ending puts you in a situation where you’ve more or less committed genocide (or at least horrifying war crimes), for ultimately no real cause. There’s no solution to make amends, you can’t undo what you’ve done.
It then puts you in a position where you can effectively choose to commit suicide.If given the choice, most people would go back in time and kill hitler. But what if you WERE hitler, and suddenly realized the true implications of your actions. You were responsible for the torture and murder of millions on innocent people, actions that are impossible to forgive. Would the moral and ethical action be to kill yourself? Even if doing so wouldn’t prevent further death or harm to others?
That ending made me rethink my stance on suicide, the topic is far more complicated than I used to think it was. To this day, every now and again, I still think about the choice at that ending.
Why should I believe you? You’re Hitler!
I watched my roommate play that game, and we just sat there in stunned silence.
This will date me, Missile Commander. When you lose the game doesn’t reset, you had to reset it. So if you don’t you just see dead cities on a screen, with silence. This was right about the same time I saw War Game. The only wining more is not to play.
Nothing as profound as what you described there…
But… The Last Of Us was an experience for me…I hadn’t played a “new” game in about 8-10 years at that point, so the huge increase in development was mind blowing to me.
But really, the intensity of the story is what really did it for me. I legit got teary eyed in the intro, and then the burning restaurant scene made me ball my eyes out…Phenomenal fucking game
Or, to bring it back to my youth… The Illusion of Gaia was probably the first game I played that made me feel things. That was so long ago, and I was so young when that came out that being specific about it is hard. But I think I really related with the main character, and I remember really feeling things during the lost-at-sea raft scene.
I might need to go find the ROM now…
**Or, to go a bit further back, Dragon Warrior.
That was the first game I ever played that really captivated me. It was the first RPG I ever played, and even tho the storyline is incredibly basic and cliche, it was the first time I experienced a story at all in a video game. It’s definitely the reason that I prefer fantasy RPGs over every other type of gameFor some reason, there’s this one little throwaway line in The Last Of Us that just lives in my head. It wasn’t even part of a cut scene, just some random banter as you’re walking around but Joel asks Elly after they first meet where her parents are, and she matter-of-factly says “I dunno, where are anyone’s parents?” and carries on with whatever she’s doing.
I remember that line too
Nice note about illusions of Gaia. I still remember that little pig “Hamlet” sacrificing himself. That transformation space with the blue flame. And I can hum more than one theme from the music nearly 30 years since I heard it.
Telltales Walking Dead had a similar impact on me and for similar reasons
It’s kinda cheating but The Beginners Guide is a game I think about all the time. As someone who makes things, the themes it explores about validation and the purpose for creating art really hit home.
For just a profound moment, the sun station in Outer Wilds.
HUGE spoilers
It really marks a turning point in the game when you find that out. I assumed like most people that it was a classic tale of science gone wrong, and now I have to fix it. As a video game it’s also really easy to assume that your goal is to fix everything - to save the solar system. But there is no villan, and no solution. You and everyone in the solar system will die and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s a really powerful subversion of expectations that works well with the games themes.
Outer Wilds had so many profound moments, imho. Just listing a couple more:
Spoilers, obviously
- The core of the interloper
- The dead Nomai in Dark Bramble (two of them in an embrace, iirc)
- The messages from other Nomai tribes in the Vessel
- Having to remove the warp core from the ATP
- The number of loop iterations in the probe tracking module
- The ending of the DLC
!Oh man the DLC ending was incredible. The tragic story that unfolded as you played was incredibly sad, but then inviting the prisoner to join you at the fire and add their song to your music was beautiful and moving.!<
Those devs really caught lightning in a bottle. I can’t wait to play whatever they make next, whenever it’s ready.
Btw. You can use >! and !< blocks to create proper spoiler tags.
I think the first time I read the board in the sun station I decided to just stay… Wait it out as it was inevitable. I ran around trying to find anything I missed for a while but eventually stopped and just looked out the window. It was always over, but at least I’d have, for one loop, the best seat in the house.
The Beginner’s Guide is excellent, it’s always surprised me how little I see it talked about.
Three pretty stereotypical ones.
- I played diablo 1 when I was 6 years old. And you already know where this is going, but that butcher room caused me some intense fear.
- That moment in fallout 3 when you first leave the vault and there’s a semi cinematic experience. I was in complete awe at how beautiful the post apocalyptic wasteland looked.
- That first time logging into WoW original back when it first released. So much to explore and experience it felt absolutely amazing to be a part of
Man that Butcher fight gave teen me the sweats every time. Diablo 1 did such amazing things with atmosphere, I still hear the environmental guitar music from the demo every time I think about that game.
AH! FRESH MEAT!
6 years old fresh meat!
Many years ago, my 2 kids an me playing multiplayer COD 2, I had 3 networked PCs we went in the map and worked together, I was in the first floor laying down with my sniper rifle, the kids were covering the stairs behind me, we owned that map, working together it was an amazing and thrilling experience for all of us, we talked about it for ages afterwards and was the started of many great COD multiplayer sessions for us.
Disco Elysium is so fucking wild. It’s the most empathetic game I’ve ever played. I am someone who has an easy time putting myself in other people’s shoes. The character is an alcoholic mess, on the brink of a depression so deep he has totally fractured his own memory and sense of self. He’s a genius. He’s also an idiot. And he’s a cop/detective in a world that really despises cops. It’s what I would call the idealistic cop: the one that would put themself between a group of armed men and a group of innocent people with nothing but a dinky pistol and say stand down.
Anyway, I love how it makes me feel about everything in its place. The ideologies that drive us. The youth we waste on fooling around. The insanity and, somehow, the humor of racism. The mistakes that make us who we are. The idealistic pursuits that are so high they can never be achieved. How heartbreak never goes away.
Most importantly, I played a game with an internal monologue built-in as the RPG system, and it nearly exactly matches how I think and feel. My mind is also fractured as identifiable pieces of myself. I gave some parts of them names because it made it easier to separate the thoughts from how I truly felt. I have nearly all the same psyches just with different names from Volition, Half-light, etc. And it floored me. I have never played a game that was as introspective as I was. Right down to the simultaneously protective and self destructive thoughts clashing within and one winning out. It gave me a third person perspective of my own self destructive and unhealthy thought processes. And it helped me love myself a little bit more. I feel like I’ll never be able to play anything like it again for the rest of my life.
And also the overwhelming sadness and abandonment of Martinaise, yet the life goes on despite.
This game didn’t cure my depression, far from it. But it helped me understand it and myself more.
I came here ready to post about Disco Elysium and was thrilled to see it was the first post that came up. Mostly the Dora storyline just hit me like a freight train but just the whole thing man. Wooph.
I get very into games so it’s really hard to pick. But the longest lasting impact IRL was when Mass Effect 2 gave me a revelation on human relationships.
I never understood cheating on your partner. I just didn’t get it. I mean if you want to be with someone else, just leave. Shitty people who just don’t care, I get that, but normal people, not at all. I could kinda wrap my head around it if alcohol was involved, or staying because of kids. Other than that nah.
Now I play RPGs as if I was actually going to make those decisions. So I get even more into them than others. Liara wasn’t a love interest and she was who I originally went with in the first one. I was bored without the cute interactions with her, so I started talking to the other females on the ship. But they weren’t Liara. Each one had something I found similar to her. It got to the point where Jack asked me if I was talking to anyone else. I didn’t want to hurt her so I said no. And then Tali asked me the same thing. But better her and Jack, I wanted her. So I said no.
I honestly didn’t realize I was seriously leading them on until I messed it up and they both were mad at me. Then it clicked. Cheating is impulsive because you are looking for someone else. Sometimes you don’t realize you’ve set yourself up until it’s too late. 🤯
Cheating sucks, but that’s definitely the game to teach about why it sucks.
Thanks
❤️ Liara ❤️