[ARTICLE] Can Video Games Be Our Friend (Part of it refers to Fable II

[hobbes_pwn]

[ARTICLE] Can Video Games Be Our Friend (Part of it refers to Fable II

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2009/11/can-video-games-be-our-friends/​

This has happened to me every time I play one of these modern games with a “morality” system or whatever. Like, in Fable II, a man is dying by the side of the road, and it’s the same number of button presses to save the guy’s life as it is to kill him and then make your on-screen avatar laugh about it. Why should I bother to, you know, be a jerk in a video game, given the choice? Why was Peter Molyneux actually surprised that people more often than not play the part of the good guy? As Matt Damon said in The Talented Mr. Ripley, no one ever considers himself a bad person. You have to actually try to be “bad” in a game. You have to try pretty hard, sometimes. You have to willingly detach yourself from the game. In a way, maybe this makes you and the game best buddies. Or maybe it makes you worst enemies. It’s a coin toss.

We’ve got Fable II, right? I might have mentioned before how I’m that guy who’s really good at making a game look stupid within seconds of picking it up. In Stranglehold I ignored the on-screen navigation and slid back and forth over a tabletop for maybe two straight minutes. It was hilarious. In Fable II, I stood in town square immediately after they let you go to the town the first time, and I just started spamming the “thumbs-up” gesture for, like, a minute. I had a crowd of people gathered around. Curious, I kept spamming the gesture. I knew there was a computer program trained to recognise “thumbs up” with a positive reaction. However, what I didn’t realise was precisely how bone-headed the game was about to be. It turns out that “favorable reaction” stacks up over time, giving no priority to the size or impact of events. After 30 minutes of thumbs-upping in town square, I had no less than half a dozen girls repeating “I bet you’ll be giving me a ring, then?” Is that all it takes to get a girl to want to marry you — just prove to her that you are capable of repeating the same tiny task over and over again for a half an hour at a time? (I wonder if one of those shops that airbrushes a photograph of your kitten onto a sweatshirt would do a sweatshirt with a picture of my Dragon Quest IX party on it.)

Now, I’m all for a thumbs-up button in games. I’ve said before that Grand Theft Auto games are all about violence because there isn’t a “hug button”. Can you make a whole game where there’s only a hug button? What about this Milo thing that Fable II developers Lionhead are working on? It’s a whole game built around the idea of interacting with a little boy. That better be really clever.

Maybe playing Love Plus and thinking about Fable II again has allowed me time to think about the nature of violence as an interaction in a game: When you get a girlfriend in Love Plus, you begin a complicated relationship — which is even more complicated for the game designers than it is for you. In Grand Theft Auto, when you shoot a pedestrian, you end a shallow relationship which began only milliseconds earlier, when you pulled out your gun.

Even though there aint muc on fable II i thought this article was interesting