Well, the opening mission sequence has you deciding whether to help the exploitative boss who’s withholding healthcare from the people of this factory town where everyone works at a fish cannery. Only the best employees get treatment for the plague! It’s implied that the plague deaths are in part caused by the people literally being worked to death.
Oh, also a group of workers fled to start their own colony, and the boss wants to starve them out by shutting off their power so they can’t grow food.
This all sounds like a great set up to tell a story with good politics, but no, instead this is pitched as a “complicated” and morally gray scenario. Actually, the boss is right to withhold medical care from people who don’t meet their quotas. He’s really a good guy doing the best situation.
In the end, they create a situation that reads like a metaphor for the real problems of our world, but they sabotage it by creating reasons in the game that the bosses/capitalists in the game world are right that just don’t exist IRL. In the US, healthcare isn’t expensive because of shortages or lack of infrastructure, it’s literally caused by parasites enriching themselves at the expense of people’s lives. By whitewashing the actions of characters in their allegorical game, they’re effectively papering over/making excuses for real world villainy.
Gotcha. Thanks for the summary without any obvious spoilers!! Ethics in gaming journalism done right.
That's one way moral grayness can be done wrong in media. It's more realistic and engrossing when shit isn't black and white, but when it becomes "the evil villain actually has a point and the goody two shoes criticizing him are just dirty hippies who can't accept reality" then it's worse than complete moral certainty.
There is a certain genre of RPG writing that has two options and a hidden third option, which Outer Worlds suffered from immensely. Now, there isn't anything wrong with having a hidden option sometime, but the problem comes in when that is always portrayed as the "best" option. They tend to be based on compromise, so it reinforces a very lib worldview when it comes to allegories for capitalism; "unfettered" capitalism bad, communism also bad but less so, compromise good.
It’s not pushed by the game per se, it is left ambiguous. The problem is they are crafting an ambiguous video game moral choice from something that happens in the real world, and in the real world is not ambiguous at all.
Care to share? I wanted to play it (once I get a computer that wasn't made a decade ago) because it's Obsidian.
Well, the opening mission sequence has you deciding whether to help the exploitative boss who’s withholding healthcare from the people of this factory town where everyone works at a fish cannery. Only the best employees get treatment for the plague! It’s implied that the plague deaths are in part caused by the people literally being worked to death.
Oh, also a group of workers fled to start their own colony, and the boss wants to starve them out by shutting off their power so they can’t grow food.
This all sounds like a great set up to tell a story with good politics, but no, instead this is pitched as a “complicated” and morally gray scenario. Actually, the boss is right to withhold medical care from people who don’t meet their quotas. He’s really a good guy doing the best situation.
In the end, they create a situation that reads like a metaphor for the real problems of our world, but they sabotage it by creating reasons in the game that the bosses/capitalists in the game world are right that just don’t exist IRL. In the US, healthcare isn’t expensive because of shortages or lack of infrastructure, it’s literally caused by parasites enriching themselves at the expense of people’s lives. By whitewashing the actions of characters in their allegorical game, they’re effectively papering over/making excuses for real world villainy.
TL;DR: :LIB:
Gotcha. Thanks for the summary without any obvious spoilers!! Ethics in gaming journalism done right.
That's one way moral grayness can be done wrong in media. It's more realistic and engrossing when shit isn't black and white, but when it becomes "the evil villain actually has a point and the goody two shoes criticizing him are just dirty hippies who can't accept reality" then it's worse than complete moral certainty.
There is a certain genre of RPG writing that has two options and a hidden third option, which Outer Worlds suffered from immensely. Now, there isn't anything wrong with having a hidden option sometime, but the problem comes in when that is always portrayed as the "best" option. They tend to be based on compromise, so it reinforces a very lib worldview when it comes to allegories for capitalism; "unfettered" capitalism bad, communism also bad but less so, compromise good.
Is the "boss good actually" narrative pushed by the game itself, or just the characters?
It’s not pushed by the game per se, it is left ambiguous. The problem is they are crafting an ambiguous video game moral choice from something that happens in the real world, and in the real world is not ambiguous at all.