10 Gaming Moments Where You Play Like An Utter Dick
There are some games that will ramp up the moral quandaries, and others that just force you to indulge your inner-nihilist all for the sake of that extra gold star.
Arguably one of video game's most questionable aspects is the medium's ability to make the player distance themselves from the action. You mostly play as the hero, but it's not uncommon to deviate from that role within the game and start messing around with mechanics and structure in order to entertain yourself. It's here we distance ourselves from the game on two levels. On one, we're not "playing" the game anymore as it was intended, and more so just messing around for our own enjoyment. In another, we distance ourselves from the often morally questionable actions we're committing. For better or worse, games have always been this way. Online or off, video games have always provided us with the potential to be complete jerks to those around us. Oftentimes, video games will call attention to this on their own, or the player will reach a certain point where they start to recognise what's wrong with their actions, whether it's through the sheer absurdity of them, or because they're tapping into something a bit deeper. Let's start counting down the moments in gaming where you realised you were being an utter dick:
10. Dragon's Dogma - Pawn Destruction
This one goes at the tail end of the list because, really, you're not exactly the dick in this situation, you just feel particularly guilty for the actions of your party. Dragon's Dogma is an open-world action RPG where your party (aside from yourself) is comprised of "pawns", which the game tells you are some sort of human-like race from another dimension that live to fight for you. This leads into a bunch of philosophical implications and questions about the nature of humanity and all that, but Dragon's Dogma doesn't have time for such things, and neither do your pawns. They only have time to fight, smash objects, and utter repetitive phrases in bad accents. The gameworld is full of breakable boxes and barrels, as is typical of the genre. They tend to blend into the scenery, easily missed. Not by your pawns though, with those hawk-like eyes of theirs. The moment you enter a town or city, they hone in on those innocent storage containers and tear through them in a Tasmanian Devil-esque whirlwind of madness, leaving you feeling downright embarrassed. What did these poor civilians do? You're supposed to be helping them after all; they're already being oppressed. It just feels cruel, and there's nothing you can do to stop it, short of cutting your party down to only yourself and your original pawn, whom you can let die and then never resurrect, which is kind of dickish in its own right. Perhaps this is some sort of meta-commentary on the nature of these types of games, in which the player can break and steal things to their heart's content without any repercussion? Maybe they want to make you aware of how odd your actions are. Dragon's Dogma is such a glorious mishmash of ideas and concepts, even your character class by the end is some sort of unique hybrid. It's from Capcom though, so in the end, who really knows?
