Honestly, stratigo the more you talk the less convincing your position becomes in my eyes. It is one thing to criticise the game because it isn't true enough to its setting but quite another to seemingly to want it to be little else but a vehicle for your own political agenda.
It's a different response to a different issue.
If the corporate path is easy and stable and requires nothing of you, then it undercuts the setting. The corporate path has to be shitty.
But if the way that shittyness is communicated is through the player being the jackboot on the neck of the poor (in a way the player wouldn't be already, cause I guarentee we're gonna be shooting a lot of gang bangers no matter the path), then how hard they lean into that could fulfill the themes of the setting. But only in such a way that far right wing shit heads will deliberately miss and love the empowering feeling of being the jackboot. And in the modern world, we need to not cater to the far right, as it is literally destroying society right now. So just giving the player a bit of ennui over their actions kicking down poor people will not be sufficient. Also, in general, that's harder to make the theme, corporations and late stage capitalism is bad, stick in general.
If anyone plays a cyberpunk game and comes away feeling good about corporations and empowered by them, then the game has failed for them.
No, this mindset is entirely too uninteresting.
Living doesn't have to be a happy ending, if you live based on crushing innocents and perpetuating an exploitive system then that's by definition the opposite. There's no fundamental reason to mandate this beyond some kind of vacous moralism where characters can't be permitted to ever profit off of immorality.
I'd rather an ending where the PC doesn't get fucked over to really drive in how much of a bastard you've chosen to be.
And I don't want a game that caters to the far right. To whom, being a bastard is the point.
Fuck that shit. I should damn well be allowed to be an evil asshole in the game if I want. Being an evil asshole in games is fun. Why shouldn't I be allowed to have fun in this game?
There are ways to be an evil bastard that aren't becoming a corporate goon. Indeed you can be a corporate goon, as long as the game makes clear that being a corporate goon doesn't, ultimately, benefit you in the end.
If your personal fantasy really is "I want to be able to murder minorities for my corporate masters" or any vague variation of that though, then no, you should not be allowed to have fun. Sorry, media has at least some responsibility to present a baseline of ethics in it.
Whats death when you can have a mind control bomb chip implanted to your head for being such a competent, dilligent, a,bitious and dangerous employee?
I mean, this is fine too. Just something like this.
I think it's more than reasonable to consider somethings to be inappropriate subject matter for a video game because of their real-world plausibility.
So I definitely don't support dying on
@searcher8's hill.
But it's worth pointing out that given the context Stratigo wasn't just talking about that, it was about whether or not we should be permitted a pro-corporate ending that doesn't result in death. And honestly given that context, I would say that "I want to have the option to play a dick" is perfectly reasonable. It's a role-playing game, the devs certainly have the right to not let us role play as anything too sick (I wouldn't want to be a racist murderer or a rapist or something) but I think everything behind that line should be fair game.
As I've argued choosing a corp path should force the player to see that they're supporting a cruel and inhumane entity, but nothing about that requires something as trite as killing them. The whole point of cyberpunk settings is that bad people
don't automatically get fucked over by narrative causality, that's what makes them a dystopia.
I mean, I haven't pointed it out explicitly, but, well, the gameplay we've seen of cyberpunk has involved shooting a lot of minorities so far.
I am willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt, in that in a number of those occasions, shooting them was not the only, or even the optimal path towards success, and you can work with those groups just as easily as you can kill them. But I imagine working for the corpos involves killing them wholesale. And that just... well... yeah. It's gonna be kinda gross if, as a corporate goon, you gotta go kill all the voodoo boys. Get it?
Sure, but the hate crime thing is 1) held by a single person and 2) a strawman created by
@stratigo. There is no hate crime route, the argument is whether or not the Corp route should always fuck the player over.
It's more than possible for one to oppose their argument while fully supporting a narrative that casts a critical eye on the choice to side with a corporation in a cyberpunk game.
Yes, PC's who join a corp should be treated like bastards. But that doesn't mean they must automatically need a bad end, the badness should come from their actions and the effect it has on the world.
And the strawman I am crafting is created out of the gaming community at large. Which is more than just SV. I don't want media that empowers racists and fascists.
