Forum Overview :: Reviews :: Re: Morrowind

[quote name="Zseni"][quote]What I could never get past is the alignment business, the RPGs' abstraction of good and evil into a checkbox: Click Evil, your clothes and motives darken, next question. The designers miss the purpose of evil -- that is, to galvanize "good" into existence -- and that to have one eradicating the other is not just nonsensical but <i>paradoxical</i>. Self-consistency in these franchises would have each installment cannibalizing some fringe element of the previous good into a lesser evil, destined to be fought by a lesser good until, by episode Ten, the two <i>great, opposing</i> forces are separated only by the hemlines of their kimonos.[/quote] Yeah, that's probably why (escapist, unrealistic) games don't do things that way. It would be super if Good didn't need Evil, wouldn't it! Mormons are very upfront with me about the Duality Of The Universe, a trait they share with Zoroastrians and Maoists, but everyone else would much rather believe what the video game designers believe, which is that Good and Evil are sort of like The Traveller and The Borg except sort of universally prevalent. If the really smart philosophers and theologians made games, they would all be like Earthbound or, alternately, Solitaire. But Earthbound and Solitaire have already been made, so the big thinkers are moving into the publishing field. [quote]Orson Scott Card, whose "Ender" series followed a diminished hero and his dead enemy, said that readers will believe the impossible, but never the improbable. In a genre whose titular purpose is role-playing, I can't accept a role so improbable as what they offer.[/quote] What a queer thing to pick out as the key RPG oversimplification. What about the part where every single RPG hero decides to go after the big guy personally instead of becoming rich and hiring someone more qualified? I think the idea that every time you boot up a game you manage to inherit the body of the Chosen One at least as preposterous as the notion that there can be Good without Evil. You're Agent Smith, Ray. You think people need to be a little unhappy. You're willing to define their truth - thoughtfully, compassionately - as something that will satisfy their needs as you perceive them. I'm not like Neo, I'm the Hand Of God, telling everyone that they can take what I give them. And if that's Nothing But Good, they are just going to have to deal with the internal conflict that causes in them. [quote]And that's why I play Quake, role-playing an angry man with a gun. Ray![/quote] That's reassuring in a control freak. [/quote]