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The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

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Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#101

Post by underlipton »

rybosome wrote: post #86
LandR wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Uncharted games are weird like this. They get lauded for their storyline, yet Drake is out their killing hordes of guys for what ? Some treasure ?

I believe that exact framing of Uncharted is the origin of the term “ludonarrative dissonance”, where the character’s motivations and morals are in contrast to the extreme violence they are committing because of the nature of it being a video game. Definitely one of those things I didn’t question when I was younger, but as I get older it’s hard not to see it. EDIT: I was wrong, the term originated from an analysis of…

I know that it was originally coined for BS1, but I think its application to BS:I is an interesting case. That was a game about American violence, and featured gratuitous amounts of violence... though it only works from that birds-eye view, right? In terms of the ground-level story, it feels distinctly weird - maybe even grody - to be mowing down hundreds of people, literally tearing their faces open with a mechanical device, in the process of trying to save the Disney Princess deuteragonist (who actually calls you out on your actions early in the game).

Except... the game is ALSO about how time, and the shifting (lost) priorities and understandings of an ideology, are often at the source of violence disconnected from reason. The game is full of people doing things divorced from the original rationale, a veil of manufactured righteousness thrown over it all (patriotism, revolution, a debt that must be repaid), and taking their behavior to an extreme because they don't really understand the true core of why they're doing what they're doing. Kind of like... playing a game that attempts to say something meaningful and sophisticated about society, but that's built on the bones of a gameplay loop that originated with full-throttle demon-slaying action. (Well, actually, Nazi-slaying. Hmm...)

...I don't know how clear I'm being, but the gist of it is that I think Infinite knew what it was doing a lot more than people give it credit for. It's kind of a jumble on purpose.

Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#102

Post by gainda »

rob74 wrote: post #18

I wonder how they arrived at the name "Ebrietas"? Does it have something to do with being inebriated? EDIT: it does, I just had to google "Ebrietas latin" (and got https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ebrietas ), otherwise it only returned references to the monster.

From what I recall there is a relationship in the game of how much blood you take from an outer being like her & how crazy (drunk?) the user then becomes, before becoming a crazed beast.

There is one key item in the game called “Eyes of a blood-drunk hunter”

Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#103

Post by gainda »

belval wrote: post #89

Perhaps not a monster, but in "It takes two", there is a particular scene where you have to murder a friendly stuffed elephant to get your in-game daughter to cry. I have been playing video games for decades at this point but that one really shook me up. You pretty much execute a toy begging for its life. As soon as that scene was over it genuinely took me a few days to come back to it. That was a hard rewatch: https…

Long time gamer here too and this also really got me. I'm not sure exactly what it was; perhaps a turn to a darker tone where I wasn't expecting it. For all the interpersonal disagreements the game is generally 'whimsical.' It was the desperation of the elephant that really got me ... the bargaining, the confusion.

I find that as I get older I respond more to media like this. I'm not sure if it's emotional intelligence, being more present, or something else.

Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#104

Post by bee_rider »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #20
myfonj wrote: post #12

> As a result, the game offers no easy satisfaction of hacking and slashing through weaker opponents. Besides the questionable morality of kill=experience=progress in typical hack'n'slash or roguelike, what started to irritate me in there as I grew older as well, was the stupid mechanics where crowds of enemies described as intelligent humanoids (i.e. not animals or robots) facing clearly overpowered high-level PC (f…

This is, IMO something that has infected modern mainstream TTRPG: Monsters hardly run away, even if a fireball just killed half of you. One thing B/X AD&D got right were the heavy use of Moral Checks, e.g. Check their morale on first death in enemy party, when half have died, etc. In fact, fighting is deadly and scary. And these morale checks differentiated undead as that enemy that knows no fear and had no morale ch…

I wonder, could Morale checks have been inherited from Chainmail? I could see them coming from a wargame…

Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#105

Post by alex_c »

jdw64 wrote: post #40
probably_wrong wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vouched for your comment because, while (IMO) dead wrong, I didn't think it was "this should be flagged" wrong. The article uses the word "dilemma" exactly once in the introduction, mostly because that's not really what the article is about. Instead it's a reflection of the melancholy of playing a game where, justified as your actions may be, the entire act of killing is surrounded in sadness. In Dark Souls specifi…

While I agree to some extent, realistically, if we follow that logic, wouldn't we have to feel a sense of melancholy every time we kill an enemy in almost any game? It's highly debatable whether players actually feel melancholy when fighting monsters in Dark Souls. Putting aside the fact that the story is notoriously cryptic and reliant on player speculation, yes, the lore of Dark Souls is tragic. However, this is th…

>Does the game actually communicate this naturally during play? Not really. The player is simply thrown into a brutally hostile world and left to suffer. In reality, players hunt these monsters to buy gear or level up, not out of melancholy.

It's more nuanced than that, and "in Dark Souls, every monster is inherently hostile toward you" is not true.

Most games have a clear division between hostile mobs you kill for XP and loot, and story NPCs which you cannot / are not supposed to attack.

That line doesn't really exist in Dark Souls. Most (all?) story NPCs can be killed, which has specific consequences if the player chooses to do so. And there are monsters throughout the game world that are functionally identical to hostile monsters - they look the same, drop the same resources if you attack and kill them - but are simply not hostile to you and are just minding their own business.

It IS more subtle than in other games, and might not even be obvious to the player at first. This gradual realization was actually one of my favorite parts of playing Dark Souls.

But there are definitely intentional gameplay elements that support this, it is not strictly text lore.

Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#106

Post by bee_rider »

myfonj wrote: post #12

> As a result, the game offers no easy satisfaction of hacking and slashing through weaker opponents. Besides the questionable morality of kill=experience=progress in typical hack'n'slash or roguelike, what started to irritate me in there as I grew older as well, was the stupid mechanics where crowds of enemies described as intelligent humanoids (i.e. not animals or robots) facing clearly overpowered high-level PC (f…

IIRC the “Fallen” in Diablo 2 would sometimes run away. This is sort of funny because they actually did have a type of guy that could revive them.

I think the Grunts in Halo would run too.

Mostly it seems to be treated as a gimmick or joke in FPS and RPG. Individual enemy AI is usually pretty bad in these genres, so they probably just don’t have the capacity to act smart enough to act scared.

Of course, it’s a main feature in some tactical games, like the Total War series. That’s more of an explicit mechanic though.

Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#107

Post by nwsm »

jjhfarmer wrote: post #10

The first game I thought of upon reading the title of the article was 'Shadow of the Colossus'. There's a particular boss about half-way through the game who resides in a small secluded garden and the process of defeating them involves tricking them in to ramming over columns etc. until they are trapped. I have a strong memory of being 12 years old, lying awake at night with the melancholic feeling this article descr…

Going through the effort of creating a HN account to comment on an article you didn't even open..

Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#108

Post by gchamonlive »

Tanoc wrote: post #90
gchamonlive wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he does that out of necessity and would have loved for that necessity not to arise Which I believe is in contrast with the older games. Haven't played them but from what I've heard he'd pursue conflicts because he enjoyed them. I think this change is because of his ongoing process of coming to terms with being a father which takes the act of killing and twists it inside out.

Kratos in God Of War Chains Of Olympus through to God Of War III (if we're speaking Chronologically) didn't enjoy conflict. He was originally a soldier fighting the Persians that was then cursed to be a representation of war. He had a family that Ares took them away, and so he willingly took on the curse in order to kill every god and free humanity from their helplessness under the gods. A huge thread of the sequel s…

So basically a nietzschean prometheus

Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#109

Post by kibwen »

alex_c wrote: post #105
jdw64 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree to some extent, realistically, if we follow that logic, wouldn't we have to feel a sense of melancholy every time we kill an enemy in almost any game? It's highly debatable whether players actually feel melancholy when fighting monsters in Dark Souls. Putting aside the fact that the story is notoriously cryptic and reliant on player speculation, yes, the lore of Dark Souls is tragic. However, this is th…

>Does the game actually communicate this naturally during play? Not really. The player is simply thrown into a brutally hostile world and left to suffer. In reality, players hunt these monsters to buy gear or level up, not out of melancholy. It's more nuanced than that, and "in Dark Souls, every monster is inherently hostile toward you" is not true. Most games have a clear division between hostile mobs you kill for X…

> and story NPCs which you cannot / are not supposed to attack

It's even more complex than that, because a small number of NPCs, if not attacked and killed without provocation, will go on to kill certain other NPCs.

Re: The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters

#110

Post by tptacek »

rob74 wrote: post #18

I wonder how they arrived at the name "Ebrietas"? Does it have something to do with being inebriated? EDIT: it does, I just had to google "Ebrietas latin" (and got https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ebrietas ), otherwise it only returned references to the monster.

It's designed after a moth species.
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