Asklemmy

43397 readers

1112 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

What was a profound moment that a video game caused you to experience, and why? (reddthat.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

62 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The moment that inspired this question:

A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.

The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.

One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”

I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.

… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.

I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura still remains my favourite to this day.

The world's setting is centred around how capitalism and industry affects society, how it pushed aside feudalism, how racism remains endemic and easily seen as normal, how history is swept away to hide attitudes, all sorts of complex things. Early on in the story, you get involved with a strike by exploited half-orcs and the wealthy factory owner who would rather they all died. Thinking back, it was a big part of how young me started to realise industrial relations are fucked up in capitalism.

One moment (of the many cool things) that really hit me, is that there's an entire sub-plot across the whole continent that's never explicitly mentioned, but is entirely noticeable if you actually pay attention and listen, not to the quest-givers or the industrial leaders, but to the servants of the powerful men you meet. If you're lucky, near the end, you suddenly realise you just.. swept all these weird characters and remarks under the rug as you had 'important' people to talk to. I had relegated servants and whole in-game races to an 'unimportant' role, when actually their stories are key to a whole second sub-plot of their own that affects everything in the world.

I know a lot of that behaviour is because I'm playing to typical game design, but, I dunno, having a real moment where you think back and realise you've been ignoring what should have been an obvious pattern of so many exploited people, and I just glossed over it 'til that moment, it affected me.