Thread: Social issues in gaming

Originally Posted by Glock

A lot of games use metaphors as a means of talking about real-world issues without risking legal action against themselves. Sometimes they're obvious, sometimes they're not.

I was reading an article written about BioShock a few months prior to its release, and it was talking about BioShock more as like a book or essay that happens to be a game, too. I haven't played it yet, but I'm considering renting an Xbox 360 to do so, since I doubt I'll have the time or money to get a BigDog box for a while yet

The Fallout series of games are related to real-world issues; the war that went nuclear and eradicated most life on Earth was started over humanity running out of resources. Fallout 2 explains this better, especially when you're talking to President Richardson in the Enclave base (right before you kill him, anyway) - apparently the Chinese were the ones who ended up launching first.

As for giving large-scale multiplayer games a compelling story... I don't really know if that's going to be possible. I don't see it being possible to give games like Battlefield and Counter-Strike meaningful plots to every map and mission, simply because you're going to be playing those same maps and missions repeatedly, and neither game really has much use for AI-controlled teammates when you can have human teammates instead.

To have a driving storyline in a multiplayer game, it'd have to be a cooperative setting, not a competitive one. While I didn't like Guild Wars, I do like the way it's presented, and believe it has a lot of potential - you have individual missions, each with a solid plot behind it, and you accomplish them with the assistance of human teammates (or AI teammates if no human ones are available), and because you aren't going to be doing them over and over (like you might with a raid in World of Warcraft or a game of Camp Gibraltar in 2142), you can afford to have in-depth, meaningful plots. You could also easily take this a step farther and add cutscenes and even rendered movie sequences - I didn't go too far into Guild Wars, but at least two of the missions I completed did just this.

I believe that the best two video game mediums for telling this type of socio-political-economic story are single player and MMORPG.

In both of those, major plot turns are scripted out by the developers and players are free to make decisions within these plots. Imagine in WoW, for example, if the devs created a shortage of gold where no new gold entered the in-game economy for a month, how that would affect the cost of every day items...

I dont think multi-player FPS are good for making political statements because of the nature of the arena in which they are played. The author made a comment about them being pure escapist activities is right on, I think.

If the developers stopped the influx of gold for a month on WoW you'd have mass suicides on a global scale ::

I think there is more of this than you are giving credit for.
Here are a few off the top of my head.
Doom Half-Life both address the dangers of the pursuit of science without any regard for the consequences.
Aquanox and Fallout address life after a nuclear war.
Jade Empire is a story about absolute power corrupting in an absolute way.
Halo is a story about how religious fanaticism can be very destructive. (The Covenant is a religious organization on a crusade)
Star Wars: Galaxies addresses just how tough life can be for a stripper.

Ok, well the last one was just a joke. But you get the idea. There is more of this than you may think.