Achievement Hunter. Console to Closet. The Drunken Moogle. Fangamer. Horror Stories: A Maddening Lack Of Imagination. By Adam Smith on September 27th, 2013 at 9:00 pm. Looking through the recent releases on Steam, a casual observer might believe that there’s a horror game renaissance underway. In the last few weeks, several games have appeared, with titles like Paranormal and The Orphanage. I’ve installed a few of them, heard them go bump in the night, and then moved on. Despite some quality releases, horror is in a rut. Earlier today, I had a peculiar reaction to the footage of The Evil Within that oozed through the clogged pipes of the interweb from the Eurogamer Expo and directly onto my screen. Oh, that’s the other thing. In games, people with mental illnesses are often monsters or victims, sometimes both, and they are intended to inspire feelings of disgust, fear and repulsion.
“Once leprosy had gone, and the figure of the leper was no more than a distant memory, these structures still remained. A man enters a creepy institution and everything about the place tells us that something is wrong. Towards a More Complex Form of Moral Choice in Video Games: 'The Wolf Among Us' Despite how it may look on the surface, The Wolf Among Us doesn't follow standard approach to morality in games exactly, but instead builds on the idea of options not being built on a binary system at all. Up until very recently, one of the ideas that was getting all the buzz in video games was the concept of offering “moral choices” to players.
Games built around such offerings nearly always boiled down to whether you wanted to play a good, traditionally heroic character or one who was a bit of a prick. Those who tried to play as a character with some amount of complexity were summarily punished because the game system required the player to maximize one side or the other in order to get access to the best items, abilities, or what have you.
In fact, most games boiled down to a single choice that the player was forced to make over and over. These weren’t moral choices at all, but mathematical problems hidden behind a thin veil of fiction. J!NX. Pwn Love. ThinkGeek.
Elder Scrolls. Final Fantasy. Gears of War. League of Legends. Pathfinder. Pokémon. StarCraft. WoW.