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Pirate Santa's journal
The Easter Bunny made me do it.
You may have noticed a trope that pops up in games sometimes when you do something bad and the game makes fun of you for it. Sometimes it works, like in Spec Ops The Line, where you've got plenty of chances to screw up and realize just how badly you've screwed up, but often it doesn't work... also Spec Ops The Line, where you realize you don't have a choice and have to use the white phosphorus and so then when the game is like 'you just murdered a bunch of civilians!' I'm like 'shut up game, you made me do that, that's on you.' You don't really share moral culpability in the story if you are just completing the story rather than having a chance to make a choice and becoming a co-author in that story.

Noah Caldwel Gerveis touched on this topic in his Last of Us video about how the game tries to make you feel bad about what you're doing. But because the actions are presented in the game's story, it's Elie's story, not yours, so it's her decisions, not yours... so you should feel a little bit bad, but not because you're doing anything wrong, but because Elie has taken a dark path.

Some movies have kinda tried it before too, briefly being like 'what kind of sicko would watch this sort of thing for entertainment' but it's always a brief aside.

And they aren't REALLY asking you to stop watching or playing. They still want you to complete the story, so generally introspective messages tend to seem internal toward the character you're playing, not the player themselves...

But Undertale makes the gameplay of playing the game part of the world in it's timestream stuff, and so when Sans says you shouldn't play again, it's already the end of the story and it's a real choice and it's all on you to do the right thing and let them live in peace. I felt like Sans would be sad at me if I were to put them through it again.

I said that it's 'always a brief aside' and that they 'Don't REALLY' want you to stop watching... it's because a movie or game that truely thinks that it's awful is actually awful, or at least incredibly hateful of it's audience. (in this sense, I'm acting as if 'the game' thinks anything, it's because it's the work of writers and authors who imbue their own thoughts into it)

If a movie or game spent it's entire runtime decrying the audience for the audacity of watching and enjoying, and was truely a work that hated that it's audience demanded it of it... wouldn't that be a painful experience?

I know of only one such experience, it lasts for 4 minues and 50 seconds, and it is glorious and terrifying. It is wonderfully cheerful, but under that, it hates how cheerful it is and is really an anguished denouncement of itself, recrimination of the audience's love for it, and self loathing by the creator for feeding this beast. I can't help but enjoy it, and I wonder if I'm the audience ... or if my appreciation for the artist's truth and not the 'hook', makes me a different audience that shares in the disdain for the cheerful dancing crowd.





 
 
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