What if someone did a takedown of Pokemon that fully explores the implications, but the thing is that a takedown of Pokemon cannot be fun. If its fun then its just grimdark Pokemon. Its "do not do this cool thing" ludonarrative dissonance. Youre not getting anything truly cool out of that.
We it would need to be a pain to play. Like Spec Ops: The Line, but Pokemon. Or maybe Undertale: Genocide Run but Pokemon specifically instead of JRPGs generally?
Palworld is definitly not that lol. It revels in the fucked upness as far as i can tell. It doesnt even shame you so you dont even get the "do not do this cool thing" aspect. And it endevors to be fun (ymmv on success).
But Im wondering if a game that says to Pokemon what Spec Ops: The Line said to military FPSes is possible?
Pokemon isn't about dogfighting. Pokemon is about six year olds finding a cool bug in the woods and making up a whole story about how it's a cool magic bug that can fly and shoot fire and stuff. Like someone said "all the descriptions of pokemon as having all these magic abilities or being cosmic gods is how small children make up imaginative stories about their dolls and toys." The correct frame isn't brutal dog fights. It children engaged in imaginative play.
Who would this speculative brutal dog-fighting game intended to make people feel bad about playing pokemon be for?
Spec ops has a clear audience. It's speaking to fps players for whom actual warfare has been completely abstracted out of the games they play. It's goal, more or less, is to tell players that the games they play are representations of real conflicts where real people suffer and die horribly.
The direct equivalent would be to make a children's game for children about catching bugs and frogs and then having all the bugs and frogs they catch die in an awful, emotionaly scaring fashion to, idk, convince kids that catching bugs is bad?
Fps games are an abstraction of warfare. Pokemon is an abstraction of walking through the woods picking up grasshoppers and putting them in a jar to show to your family members.
Personally, i don't think pokemon needs to be deconstructed or problematized, or that the idea even makes sense. Afaik pokemon doesn't desensitive people to the idea of putting frogs in your pocket to take home to show to your parents.
Yeah I'm just tuning out of any discussions of this sort involving Pokemon, they just feel kinda... pointless and ridiculous?
welcome to hexbear.net
As six year olds me and my friends made the cool bugs we found fight each other to the death and pretended it was pokemon
Okay, good counter-point.
I guess I should clarify I'm not saying Pokemon made us do it, I'm sure kids have always tortured innocent creatures for funsies
I think there's a large element where kids haven't fully developed theory of mind and empathy, and don't really grasp that the animals have goals and sensations beyond what the kid imagines them having. Most kids stop hurting animals by, like, what, 8? 9? Idk, it's been a while since I was a kids.
Kids are pretty fucked up to be honest they do not have fully developed brains that process things in the same way adults do. Empathy is one of the things that definitely develops later in some kids rather than sooner.
Ok i broadly agre with this, even though we just had a whole thread of people yelling otherwise, but I will point out
Doesnt Undertale's Genocide run "problematize" being a completionist and JRPGs? And people love that shit.
Tbh as an ND completionist I kinda always didnt like that tbh. Felt like I was being scolded for my playstyle. But people always told me I was wrong! So.
Ok now im just taking out my bitterness. But seriously. What about Undertale?
I would say that it subverts the general jRPG game loop, not problematizes it. It turns the concept on it's head and asks people to actually examine what they're doing, why, and what kind of narrative it creates. It doesn't mean there's anything problematic about jRPGs as a concept.
I have the same criticism as I do of Spec Ops - All player choice in games is fake and severely constrained. You can only do what the devs let you do, and in almost all cases that's means doing whatever the most obvious thing is. Often to the point where interactive objects are painted red or yellow to highlight them in the game environment and make it clear what action you must take to advance the story. Games that try to gotcha the player with "Ooh look at you, you did a bad thing! You're a bad person!" generally fall flat bc the bad thing is the only action the player can take to advance the story. It creates a situation where the player is being scolded for advancing the plot in an entertainment product where they have no agency. Having no agency, they are as such not culpable for their actions. In fact they are not acting. They're the audience in a performance with superficially interactive elements. They are entirely at the mercy of the developers.
When Spec Ops says "Actually you're a bad baddy because you did the murder thing" they're putting the player in a position where they're being scolded for trying to enjoy the product. What, exactly, is the player expected to do? What is the "Good" or "right" choice. The game doesn't have a "Go AWOL" button or a "refuse to fight" button or a "frag your officers" button. If you want to continue to play the game you have to go forward and do the atrocities. You don't have a choice.
I think undertale is more effective because you actually can choose not to fight, there is a plot where the player doesn't kill everything. Because the player has a choice they can actually look back on their decision to fight everybody and say "oh, I had (very limited) agency here. I decided to fight because I thought that is what was expected of me and I didn't consider having other options."
But it's only somewhat effective because again; Players can only do what devs allow them to do, and for the most part the only thing you're allowed to do is the most obvious thing. Moreover, as an entertainment product, as a game in which you are supposed to engage in play, the player can and should expect to be rewarded with at least interesting outcomes for exploring all options provided by the developers. Once you've done the "good" run a lot of people like to go see what the alternative outcomes were and how the story changes if they turned left instead of right at a critical juncture. Since this is all, by definition, play, assigning it some kind of moral weight is rather assinine. In play people assume roles they might not otherwise explicitly because play isn't real. It provides an imaginative chance to consider options you wouldn't necessarily consider in real life, to perform ideals and beliefs, to screw around, to experiment and explore.
When Devs put the player in a situation where the Devs are asserting that the player has done something wrong, rather than the character, they're essentially scolding the player for following the script or turning the page. "If you just closed the book and put it down none of these bad things would have happened. You're an immoral person because you take pleasure in the trials and hardships of these explicitly fictional characters".
I would say the people telling you that you're bad because you explored all the options in the game have a very immature understanding of morality and a very bad understanding of the underlying rules and theory of game design. it's a game. None of the characters in it are real. They don't have thoughts or feelings. They can't experience pain or suffering, nor can they experience joy and love. If the character talks about being harmed or upset, if they scream when the player attacks them, it's because the devs intended them to, intended for the player to do these things to see what would happen.
This has been a constant source of social strife for, as far as I can tell, all of human existence. Whenever a new medium for story telling is developed moral scolds scream from the rooftops that it will destroy society, ruin the sexual morality of women, and turn men in to murderous beasts. It really doesn't matter what it is; Tik-tok, video games, television, radio, movies, rap music, opera, stage plays, novels; A certain faction of society always claims that fiction will somehow destroy the morality of the people and turn everyone in to debased hedonistic monsters who know neither right nor wrong. And they're always wrong. It always turns out to be an unfounded combination of a reactionary hatred of youth and the accusing party projecting it's own inability to distinguish between fiction and reality on others. My observation is that the people who condemn play and imagination most loudly are themselves incapable of either. To them any interest in or enjoyment of a story demonstrates real and enthusiastic support of the concepts in the story and the actions of the characters. They don't seem to be able to grasp the idea that people could read about (or play) a character doing something bad and recognize that the story is fictitious. Whether it's moral watchdogs screaming that FPS games will turn kids in to school shooters or religious freaks screaming that D&D players will sell their souls to satan they're very consistently wrong.
It's basically people screaming "THE CURTAINS ARE BLUE" at the top of their lungs, but instead of being unable or unwilling to see nuance and metaphor in storytelling, they're unable or unwilling to accept the idea that when people play games they are aware of the distinction between fiction and reality.
Your entire rant is something that I've written in /r/truegaming almost a decade ago. And I've always hated that "you could always just quit the game" copout horseshit because that is easily countered by, "Well, these are just pixels on a screen. None of this shit is real." And I'm glad someone else made the "MGS2 did what Spec Ops did but better over a decade ago" observation, which I've also made unhinged rants about in /r/truegaming back when I was still on Reddit.
MGS 2 did it well case it acknowledges you had no choices at all.
Yeah, it was a pretty good implementation of the idea, especially as it was directly tied in to modern media and control of information which gave it relevancy beyond just a commentary on video games.
Wtf are you talking about, literally no one is saying you’re a bad person for playing Pokémon or that Pokémon is harming the youth or something, it’s just a funny and somewhat insightful conversation. The fact we made a game about monster cockfighting SAYS something about our own culture even if no one intended it to
These two paragraphs go together. And it's discussing how people viewed and discussed Undertale, not pokemans.
Oh
Well, that makes a lot of sense. Only thing I can add is that I highly doubt Toby Fox (someone who literally made earthbound rom hacks) actually thinks RPG’s are some sort of morally inferior art form
Oh yeah I don't want to put any of this on the designers. Whatever it's flaws, Undertale is a very clever and well made game that got people to sit down and think about gaming in a critical way. That's pretty cool however you look at it.
Undertale is overrated and the bit of "you did the rpg thing oooooohh what a bad person you are" is dumb
Honestly? Thank you for saying it lol. (I also feel that theres ableist implications, not that Toby Fox intended them but yuknow).
Actually it’s a really solid critique of how we are constantly instilled with the instinct to obtain and develop power from all the media we consume in the West, intentional or not
Love too consume my western media, like jrpgs
Yes but it got very popular in Western countries, and for some reason I doubt the original bug catching context was the reason why
Edit: thought this was in the Pokémon threads, nvm