Sometimes I feel like a bad person because I see posts like these of people given the freedom from consequence to be good or bad yet still choose to be good. Meanwhile when I play these games I love the fact that I can murder, steal and commit all manner of moral crimes.
I’d still be a bit concerned if your default mode in a ROLEPLAYING game is murder-hobo, but I’d let you explain it at least.
My playthroughs usually start with me being nice, then as I learn which characters I care about, what things I want and how people react to me being evil I become more and more of a “murder hobo” as you so eloquently put.
As an example, in baldurs gate three I usually gaslight wyll into believing karlach is a devil so that he’ll kill her and I get a sweet piece of armour. My whole reason for doing this is that I find karlach annoying and the armour is pretty cool looking (and can be sold if I’m not using it)
Same with astarion, killed off immediately because hes annoying, I like him best when he’s comically evil lol
I’d say that’s a bit more frugal than murder-hobo. Most people kill Gale though cause he won’t shutup.
Edit: almost forgot he blows up. He stayed at camp then I guess. God he’s annoying.
I need gale. Him respecting into alchemy nerd is a cannon event
I was thinking that the other day I can do literally anything and I always end up doing what I would hope I’d do if I had my characters power.
And then you pick what you thought was a harmless dialogue option, but instead it sets off a cutscene where you’ve insulted the Emperor and now must murder everyone in order to survive.
Video game be teaching you about the “no gods no masters”
If you ever killed a Little Sister for more Adam, you are a bad person and you should feel bad.
When that game came out my kid was about the age of the Little Sisters… I couldn’t make myself kill one.
It’s actually funny, I could never play Fallout & Fallout 2 as an evil character because it made me feel bad. At the same time, I’d fire up Carmageddon & Carmageddon 2 and just mow down everything that walked or drove with utter glee. I’m sure there’s a psychological explanation for this dichotomy, but I sure don’t know what it is, and I’m in no mood to make guesses.
Carmageddon is a respawnable, resetable, impermanent world.
Its a toy.
Fallout 1 and 2 are not, or at least not as much or not as easily… they are deterministic, event driven, complex, and permanent.
Its a story.
You don’t tend to care too much about if some random team mate of yours dies in a team based shooter like Battlefield or COD.
Generally, they’re all randos you’ll never see again, despite being actual human beings on the other end of a screen.
You tend to care a lot if its one of your soldiers in XCOM or Xenonauts or one of your crew from ShadowRun Returns or Fire Emblem.
They’re literally fictional characters, sometimes barely even actually characterized, but, you have history with them, shared struggles.
Your brain tends to care more about things that are harder to replace, decisions with irreversible results… morality kicks in when we realize permanence is at play, that consequences actually exist.
… thats a long way of saying I do not know if there is a specific psychological term for all this, lol.
EDIT: Loss Aversion?
It might be something to do with the emotional attachment. We humans will bond with and empathise with basically anything, and we get rewarded with happy brain chemicals when we cooperate and build trust, so we tend to try and do it when the option arises.
In carmageddon they dont register to us as real people, they’re just fun shaped targets that spit out points, and we like it when we’re told “well done”
I’ve never played carmageddon but I’m guessing you can’t benefit or “form relationships” with fun shaped targets.
Not really, but maybe. Humans are properly weird. Theres always one
Maybe premise of the game + suspension of disbelief?
Me when starting my third playthrough of BG3: This time I’ll choose the evil options!
Also me defending the grove: FUCK
They do try to entice you with drow ass for being evil, which was a pretty bold move.
You know… you’re making a convincing argument. Maybe Zevlor indeed needs to die.
It’s not that I don’t want to hurt their feelings. In fact I really want to give the smartass sarcastic answer. But I’m worried I’m gonna fuck up my quest. Or make things unnecessarily difficult for myself.
