In March we discussedhow video games teach us compassion. Among other things, developers sometimes specifically encourage users to commit negative acts, although in reality they expect the opposite from them. In this note, we recall five truly monstrous decisions that the games pushed us to.
Fallout 3 – Post-Apocalyptic Apocalypse
The Fallout series requires the user to constantly make decisions that have a big impact on the game world, and sometimes not the most obvious. A decision made in the first hours can only come around at the end of the passage. But sometimes the consequences of a difficult moral choice have to be faced almost immediately – for example, in the third part, a player can blow up an entire city.
Megatonne is the first major settlement that the protagonist of Fallout 3 can visit. The city is named after an unexploded nuclear bomb whose crater sheltered the first settlers from sandstorms. It is hard to imagine a less successful place to live, but the locals were still able to build a prosperous community with their own apocalyptic religious cult – the Church of the Children of the Atom.
The children of the atom, as the name implies, worship everything radioactive and dream of drowning the world in the rays of their deity. For this reason, they ask the hero to detonate the same bomb for access to his personal apartment and a decent amount. Whether a whole city is worth a handful of covers (you can get a house with a different choice of passage), everyone must decide for himself … Except for the Japanese – in their version the mission “Power of Atom” has only one option for completion.
Fallout 2 – business and nothing personal
In Fallout 3, many more terrible things could be done, but she could not surpass the original dilogy in terms of immorality. Indeed, in Fallout 2, the protagonist, for example, can become a real slaver – kidnap people and trade them like cattle.
If this does not seem immoral to you, then keep in mind that you can even sell satellites on the black market, among which will be your friends, lovers and spouses. In other games, we could seduce partners, push them to the dark side, chase, kill and betray in many different ways. But selling is almost the bottom.
“Why not the bottom?” – you ask. Because one of the deals available to the player is even more disgusting. She is associated with Miriya – a girl whom the main character can unexpectedly marry. After the wedding, she will become a constant and rather mediocre companion. It can, of course, be sold or … leased to trappers – not even for money, but for skins of geckos.
Dishonored – fire or flame
A similar situation suddenly appears in Dishonored. Typically, a game offers a choice between killing and some kind of saving option that allows you to get rid of your target, saving her life. But in an attack on Lady Boyle, the alternative is not so harmless: it might even seem to someone that death would be more humane.
To eliminate Lady Boyle without blood, you need to grab her and put at the disposal of Lord Brisbee, who is in love with her, who promises to take her out of the city and keep her away from the yard. It’s not a fact that he is going to do something really terrible with her, and Boyle herself is far from an angel and certainly deserves a conclusion. But the fact of the abduction and Brisby’s motives leave an unpleasant aftertaste after the completion of the mission.
On the other hand, there is always a kill, which in the Dishonored world is slightly different from the same action in other games. Here, each life taken is a separate choice, affecting not only the current situation, but also the state of the world and the ending. Players who deliberately kill enemies for the sake of convenience or interest, along with this, doom the whole country to a sad fate.