this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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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.

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[–] mindbleach 1 points 1 year ago

That game and Deus Ex both have you enter your name at the beginning and then quietly avoid using it for the save file. In Deus Ex it only appears in an e-mail when you're hacking around on a military base, and it's a text-based jump scare. Same deal as an e-mail that just reads "Icarus has found you" over and over. It feels like something just reached through the screen at your character, or at you, but it's just a static dialog string. MGS2 goes the extra mile by printing it on dog tags - showing off the PS2's fancy new bump-mapping! - and having the character reject them, as a final middle finger to you, the player. But there was a Let's Play (back when that was in vogue) with a jokey beginning, such that in the final shots of the longwinded Kojima cutscenes about memetics and free will, after fighting the cyborg president on a rooftop, Jack looks down at the words Suck My Dick and grimaces as he throws them into the street.