the word "artgames" makes me want to vomit.

Testing comments system from video system

Couldn't the same argument you make on here be made against Shadow of the Colossus? I mean I understand that there are obvious differences between the feelings that SotC and Edmund are respectively trying to provoke, but the argument you seem to be making here is that it's silly for a game to create consequences for something that you pretty much have to do (or in Silent Hill's case: are bound to do) in order to advance the game. And to an extent I agree, but I also have to look at a game like Shadow of the Colossus and say that if the morality issue is presented in a subtle manner, and if the player has an inherent desire to do what the game is asking of him/her, then it can work.


@psycho terror2
Cool story, bro.

With respect to the argument against Silent Hill 2, isn't that what a lot of modern interpretation is about? Finding out our "actual" intentions behind the choices we make? Finding the disconnect between consciousness and our desires caused by cognitive dissonance?For example, an argument against Freud saying "Well...you're wrong because I actually don't want to have sex with my mother," isn't strong enough to make your point because, by definition, we are unaware of our latent desires. This is the route that Silent Hill 2 takes the player; it attempts to reveal a latent desire through our actions. We may think we look at the knife a lot because we are just solving a puzzle, but the developers have created an interpretation in which our choice to look at the knife means something more. However, an analysis of actions as simple as this may not hold up intellectually, but it is interesting that the developers attempted to play with the concept.

And let's think about why we play games in general? The gamer says, "because it's relaxing, it's fun, it's an escape." The sociologist (hypothetically) comes in and says that it's a symbolic outlet of dissatisfactions in our everyday interactions. Whose opinion is more valid?

Ugh, my comment was a grammatical fail, but hopefully my point gets across.

king kong five:
There's definitely a degree of that in SOTC -- the game would have been greatly improved, in my mind, if you had the option to just leave the forbidden lands at any time and decide to let the colossi be -- but I still felt compelled, as the player, to save the girl and kill the monsters for my own reasons beyond just wanting to finish the game. I wanted to bring whatsherface back to life, and I liked the feeling of power I experienced when I brought down the colossi, moral ambiguity be damned.

In Edmund, I had literally no desire to rape the girl whatsoever and only did so out of curiosity, I guess. I know there's a way to get back in the taxi and leave without harming her further, but it's such a hidden option (I tried to leave by running to the borders of the screen, but that didn't work) that it becomes kind of meaningless.

Somehow I knew you would be talking about Edmund sooner or later in one of your rants.

Like AKK, I was aware that the X button was to make Edmund punch. As I played through in the beginning there's nothing else you can do but walk from left to right, jump, and do the punching motion, so when the woman came up and you couldn't progress any further I just decided to see if punching would work, which it did, then she starts crying and crawling away so I just went after her and punched her some more until the Rape sequence came up and I was pretty damn shocked at what was going on. I didn't expect to see her get raped by me the player.

So I guess it depends how you go about it. AKK raped her by "accident" on his second playthrough, but for me it was presented to me because I felt the need to keep attacking her.

great rant. good points made

Over the last 40 years or so, post modernist preaching diguised as intellectual analysis of the human condition helped kill super hero comic books back to a silly niche market mostly enjoyed by early middle aged man-children who think it might make a good storyline if Spider-Woman got raped and hooked on drugs for a while.

Maybe video games will make the same mistake.

I generally agree, and I think the points you raised in this are completely valid. In a way, this has taught me something if I were ever to make a game myself, so that's good. But... well, here's my point of view if you care.

In Edmund for instance, you're not necessarily "the player". You're controlling a person, but that doesn't mean you are that person. You're possibly a part of their psyche, and your reason for doing something might be different to theirs.

For example, your motivation is to explore the space and the gameplay and the narrative. The character's motivation is to satisfy some traumatised part of their mind. Maybe the character's mental state is damaged, and whereas you mean to perform a simple interaction (talking to the woman at the bus stop), Eddie interprets this differently (raping and killing her instead).

I also think the nature of people to assume guilt for something they were indirectly responsible for ties into it. If you for instance were to wave someone across the road only for them to be run over by a truck coming in the other direction, you'd feel guilty for letting them go even though it wasn't your fault and your actions were of good intention. If you can convey that feeling through gameplay mechanics, this is something that interests me.

The week Anthony stops doing these is the week I cry myself to sleep.

I think Kaspar might be on to something -- Edmund might just be looking at where the proverbial "line" is. When are you socially, civically, or morally responsible for someone else's wellbeing?

Is the line when you rape the girl? When you punch the girl? When you let her get shitfaced at a bar? When you refuse to walk her home and she walks alone? When you buy her the first drink? When you let someone else buy her drinks?

There was an indie game that came out last year, where there was a man against a wall and the only options were to shoot the man or manually exit the game, and this pisses me off for the same reason.

I know shooting the man is wrong, but i have no other option, since i was PLAYING A GAME i wasn't thinking i had the option to exit the program to win, since that is not traditionally a function of winning a game, so i tried to shoot him in a non-vital spot, it killed the guy, it said i was stupid and evil.

Thanks game for giving me only one actual gameplay option then playing it off like it's a reflection of myself because it's not since there was no way in game to quit or spare the man, same crap.


I dissagree with the SH2 reference though because there was a deep emotional journey that went into james' realization of what he had done, and it wasn't just oh you kill yourself, you could honestly see why james would kill himself and really hardely anyone gets that ending without knowing by virtue that it's not someone's instinct to run around mostly dead in games.

Is it just me, or did I hear "f' you next week" at the end of the rant?

@Anthony
If there had been an option in SotC to leave at any moment, I can't imagine that anyone would have taken it--not permanently anyways. Perhaps to see whatever cutscene the game had to offer, but once it ended I'm sure most players would have just reloaded the game and continued slaying the colossi.
Yeah, the option to leave in Edmund could have been made more clear, and I wish it had been, because in a game that lasts five minutes, taking that option doesn't make me feel like I've been robbed of gameplay (especially when that "gameplay" involves raping a girl).

Curse the lack of an edit button. Curse it to the deepest depths of hell.

Anyways, I think we can agree, that Edmund is a psycho, you get that from the opening dialog. So the transition from beating to raping is a path splitting between the character and the player (which turns into the line point that Joseph Leray continued on).
The player decides to continue beating the woman and Edmund decides to rape her, and you are supposed (?) to go "WTF, thats not what I had in mind" but what DID you have in mind when you continued to beat her?

I think I've figured out what I wanted to say originally. It's pretty late over here, so it took a while, sorry bout that.

fuckin shit video page doesn't work.

Well, just as good as usual. I always enjoy watching these, thanks for putting them up!

I think if any game can get people talking about how it made them feel as much as this one has, then it's a success in the 'video games as art' category.

Unfortunately, a lot of people are now going to experience the game just to see what the fuss is about, fully knowing what it entails and any shock value that it would have had, any feelings that it might have evoked will be far less because of that.

So I just played Edmund, and I gotta say, I understand what the developer is trying to do. I know that that rape is unexplored territory (For the most part) in games, and i think that rape is extremely serious, but I don't think that just because you decided to rape the girl that it automatically makes you a sick person. I guess I wanted to find out "Where does it go from here?", and it ends. I mean you commit the act, then were is the lesson? Most people aren't even aware that there was a way out, so does that make them sick individuals? Everything from the atmosphere to the music makes it clear that you are committing a crime, but it doesn't let you know what you need to do in advance. I think if you are given the exact controls, then the choice would be much more clear, but then nobody would purpose try to rape the girl because they don't want to feel bad. There has to be a way where a developer can somehow find middle ground and establish these lessons without confusing the player as to what they are actually supposed to do, while still making the choice clear. Edmund has tackled a difficult subject, and it wasn't bad, just maybe not clarifying that you indeed had the choice wasn't the best way to present the game.

i havent played Edmund (and i likely wont) - but, from what people are saying...

it might not be fair (as a number of people have very well stated) to write it off as the typical sort of shock "oops, you pressed the rape button, you're evil!" when you were just curious and wanted to see what would happen next or somesuch.

but another point is that it may be exhibiting the passive tendency towards inflicting violence that we exhibit when playing many games. Bioshock, of course, also dealt with this with the "would you kindly" scene (though the rest of the game didnt really acknowledge this in any gameplay-terms). a lot of people went and committed the violence, and the rape, and sometimes even just continued on for some honestly pretty shallow reasons - "i didnt know what to do," "i wanted to see what would happen next," etc. not that i'm trying to say that people who did that and said that are bad people, of course, but it's the sort of passive acceptance of the infliction of violence (in this case, some very disturbing violence) which most gamers barely ever second-guess.

it vaguely reminds me of the Milgram experiment ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment ) - except that, instead of people killing just because some supposed authority figure told them to, they rape just because they wanted to progress, or were confused.

there was a little-remembered game for the original playstation called "Tail of the Sun," which was basically an exploration game with only a slight objective of building a tower of elephant tusks to reach the "tail" of the sun. throughout most of the world, you'll not find any other humans besides who you're controlling, but occasionally you'll bump into the odd vagabond roaming around aimlessly (sometimes one of these people will fall in love with you, signified by a heart appearing over their head and how they'll persistently follow you anywhere after that, until you or they die). the thing is... you cant actually interact with these people. when i was playing, i just figured "oh well" and left them alone. my brother, however, got annoyed, trying to find some way he could interact, and when he found no peaceful way, he would kill them (at first accidentally - "oops, didnt mean to press that button!" - but progressively, as he continued through the game, he would just as a matter of course kill any human he stumbled across because there was nothing else he could do with them). there are a number of endings you can get after you build the tower (most are determined by very simple factors, such as which of your peoples' physical traits has been boosted into prominence - if you boost their libido, humanity turns into a ton of cocks-with-feet, no joke). my brother stumbled across a semi-secret ending - because he persistently killed all those people (because that was the only thing he could do to interact with them), *his* ending showed humanity turn into a sociopathic, blood-thirsty species (which rather embarassed him). again, that wasnt his intention, but why should we, as gamers, necessarily just accept the need to inflict violence just "to progress," "because i didnt know what else to do, "i was bored"?

Sorry to hear you guys are having trouble with our new video player. It's kind of important since getting that thing to work as directly affects how much video Dtoid can produce!

If you cannot see the video, please comment with our OS/Browser/Version of Flash Player or email me at niero -at- destructoid -dot- com and I'll look into this asap!

This is the first Rev rant I think is off the mark. The idea that a player's interpretative goals and the game's thematic ideas have to coincide with each is ridiculous. How pretentious would a game creator have to be in assuming they can ever understand a player's interpretative goals, let alone manipulate them? What a game creator can do is make their thematic ideas clearer. Sell the themes that need to be sold to create empathy, and sneak in ideas that cause a player to think about those themes in different ways.

Edmund did that amazingly. Like you said, Edmund wants you to experience a horrible thing and feel whatever you may afterwards. It bluntly takes your curiosity, your confusion, your whatever reason you've got for playing the game, throws it out the window and makes you rape something. Personally, I abhor the game and the disgusting way it forces the player to act out the scene, but that's probably the point.

And adding a way to leave the Forbidden Lands in SotC? No, just no. Wander would never leave. The guy would never stop until he saved his lady. Thematically, even the option of leaving would destroy everything we believe about Wander. Hell, I even think the fruit scattered around the world is too much of a distraction from killing the Collosi.

games are many things, but they're certainly not Art.

thanks Niero, at least you are trying to make this work, i know a few other sites that wouldn't even want to know a problem existed and wouldn't try to fix it. sorry for being an ass about it, that's just me at times. thanks.