The moment that inspired this question:
A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.
The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.
One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”
I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.
… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.
I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.
0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov fucked him over personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.I had to stare at the window for an hour afterwards.
When i first killed someone in DayZ back in the day, when it was just the ArmA 2 mod and all the hype.
I finally found a gun and started to learn my way around the zombies, when i heard a player in a bush nearby the hospital in Elektrozavodsk. I thought he was probably out to get me, so i emptied my Makarov clip at the bush and shortly after heard the fly noise they had put to mark dead players.
As i searched his body with my heart pumping like crazy i found him to have nothing but a can of beans. I felt profoundly shitty in that moment because he was just like me at the time. Some new guy playing a tough sandbox multiplayer-game, where everything and everyone can kill you. He probably didnt even hear or see, where he got killed from, just like it happened half a dozen times to me before.
I showed cruelty to someone in whose shoes i’d had demanded mercy.
Fuck everyone pitching people to fight each other
Kind of feels disparate from it being a video game, but it’s difficult to really make this experience another way:
I wanted to play a healer in an MMO. It was a shitty MMO, so healers could only be female characters wearing skimpy armor.
Well, it took about half a minute until I had people walk up to me, to then just stop 3 meters away. From the way they were moving, I have to assume, they were working their cameras to look underneath my skirt, and probably doing so with only one hand.
Some of them were sending me “hello :)” messages, which I guess is basic decency, if you’re going to use my body, but it felt weird, too, since we had nothing to talk about.
All in all, it felt uncomfortable. And I did not even have to fear for them to start touching or even raping me. Plus, I was able to log out, delete my account and basically just leave all of that behind.
Well, except for one thing I did not leave behind: I do not want to be the other side in that experience either.
When sexist objectification accidentally teaches a point against sexist objectification
This was a smaller moment, but similar to yours, OP, in that it revealed some unconscious thinking in my head.
But I was playing Crusader Kings II quite a few years back. And I basically had a King with the Genius trait and some other stuff I could pass down to his kids. I think I had somehow lucked into the Byzantine Empire or something, so I was basically seducing and inviting a bunch of lovers with other traits from all around the world (north and south, east and west) so I could spread Genius around. I wanted a smart council full of my bastards, heh.
So my genius slut-king has a bunch of kids. I’m naming them after my absolute favorite characters from books and such, because they’re part of my family and dynasty–so I’m giving them names that have a lot of personal “worth” to me.
Then I get to the kid in my dynasty who isn’t white, and I couldn’t figure out what name to give her. I had all these awesome names that I was using over and over through the generations in my dynasty, but somehow none that felt “right” for her. I tried and tried to choose a name, and none “fit”.
And after a while, it suddenly hit me in the face how SUBTLE racism can be. This was just a video game, but I had something that was “high worth” to me to give out, these favorite character names, and I was handing them out like candy until I got to the one kid and struggled, making all sorts of excuses why this not-white video game kid couldn’t get the name of this other character I really liked.
Now, if I was doing that in a frickin’ video game, imagine what people are doing with REAL LIFE things that are “high worth” to them. Hiring at jobs, giving gifts and presents, selling a house, etc.
And it wasn’t like I was going around in the game consciously picking which kids to screw over. (I mean, moreso than you usually do in Crusader Kings, the game where people glitch themselves into marrying their horses and creating witch covens with devil-babies so they can spread satanism across the world.) I ended up screwing this virtual kid over because I was going on this “gut feeling” that my really cool favorite-character names just somehow “weren’t right” for her, even though that frickin’ inbred cousin over there with a family tree like a wreath was proudly wearing it already.
So yeah. Learned a big lesson on how internal gut feelings influence you to do racist shit really subtly sometimes.
Wow, such a cool revelation. I think the devs of CK2 would be proud that you engaged with their game like this.
Great story!
Disco Elysium was full of such moments for me. Here’s one:
You spend a lot of time in the game basically talking to yourself and your inner voices, and one of these voices is volition. If you put enough points into it, it’ll chime in when you’re having an identity crisis or struggling to keep yourself together and it’ll try to cheer you up and keep you going. At the end of Day 1 in the game you, an amnesiac cop, stand on a balcony in an impoverished district reflecting on the day’s events and trying to make sense of the reality you’ve woken up into with barely any of your memories intact. If you pass a volition check, it’ll say the following line:
“No. This is somewhere to be. This is all you have, but it’s still something. Streets and sodium lights. The sky, the world. You’re still alive.”
This line in combination with the somewhat retro Euro setting, the faint lighting, and the sombre-yet-somewhat-upbeat music was very powerful. The image it painted was quite relatable for me. I just sat there for a minute staring at the scene and soaking it all in. Even though this is a predominantly text-based game with barely any cinematics/animations, I felt a level of immersion I had rarely, if ever, experienced before.
Oh, look at that. Someone actually made a volition compilation. 😀 This video will give you a better idea of what I’m describing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENSAbyGlij0 Minor spoilers alert!
It’s kinda cheating but The Beginners Guide is a game I think about all the time. As someone who makes things, the themes it explores about validation and the purpose for creating art really hit home.
For just a profound moment, the sun station in Outer Wilds.
HUGE spoilers
It really marks a turning point in the game when you find that out. I assumed like most people that it was a classic tale of science gone wrong, and now I have to fix it. As a video game it’s also really easy to assume that your goal is to fix everything - to save the solar system. But there is no villan, and no solution. You and everyone in the solar system will die and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s a really powerful subversion of expectations that works well with the games themes.
Outer Wilds. The universe is, and we are.
One of those games where it’s better to play absolutely blind. For the experience of discovery is the gameplay. You can never play it for the first time again.
I literally tried that game a month ago, and after a couple hours of flying blind in space, with a not great flight control system, having no idea where to go, it completely lost me.
Maybe I missed the point, or maybe it’s an issue with me not having enough free time, but if didn’t grab me at all.
A few hours? Something about your post tells me that you didn’t play past 22 minutes.
Call it a hunch.
sorry I offended your game, oh fragile one. I even blamed myself for missing something or not having enough time. I ran around the starting area talking to everyone for about an hour, just wandering, and then finally went up into space, struggling with the controls. Landed somewhere with just a guy and a radio, ran all around there, again maybe a total of an hour after my first launch. Crashed a few times at first, of course.
He says that because the main mechanic of the game is that the entire game resets every 22 minutes.
So you couldn’t have ran around for hours without noticing that, which is kind of the first clue as to what kind of game it is.
Notably, 22 minutes from when you see the nomai statue. So the commenter could have spend over an hour in the tutorial area, and then quit before experiencing much of the actual game
I could never get into it either. People are so so obsessed with this game. They tell you to never look anything up, etc. I’ve tried it on mouse and keyboard, I’ve tried it on controller and the gameplay does not feel right, so I’ve never left the ground tutorial area.
You basically haven’t played any of the game then lol. It’s a long slow burn but it’s absolutely beautiful. Make your way through that tutorial section and get your ship, from there it really opens up.
It’s interesting you bring up the controls, because that is one of the things that instantly grabbed me about the game. Before I even knew what was going on, I knew I absolutely loved moving around in the world. I used to spin up the game just to zip about for a half hour.
But of course everyone is different. Not every game is for everyone. I really grew to love Outer Wilds more and more over the days.
Disco Elysium is so fucking wild. It’s the most empathetic game I’ve ever played. I am someone who has an easy time putting myself in other people’s shoes. The character is an alcoholic mess, on the brink of a depression so deep he has totally fractured his own memory and sense of self. He’s a genius. He’s also an idiot. And he’s a cop/detective in a world that really despises cops. It’s what I would call the idealistic cop: the one that would put themself between a group of armed men and a group of innocent people with nothing but a dinky pistol and say stand down.
Anyway, I love how it makes me feel about everything in its place. The ideologies that drive us. The youth we waste on fooling around. The insanity and, somehow, the humor of racism. The mistakes that make us who we are. The idealistic pursuits that are so high they can never be achieved. How heartbreak never goes away.
Most importantly, I played a game with an internal monologue built-in as the RPG system, and it nearly exactly matches how I think and feel. My mind is also fractured as identifiable pieces of myself. I gave some parts of them names because it made it easier to separate the thoughts from how I truly felt. I have nearly all the same psyches just with different names from Volition, Half-light, etc. And it floored me. I have never played a game that was as introspective as I was. Right down to the simultaneously protective and self destructive thoughts clashing within and one winning out. It gave me a third person perspective of my own self destructive and unhealthy thought processes. And it helped me love myself a little bit more. I feel like I’ll never be able to play anything like it again for the rest of my life.
Outer Wilds, like all of it. Falling into the black hole made me actually scream in terror, then shiver for how small being away from the solar system makes you feel. Also the quantum moon, and that ending holy fuck
Echoes of the Eye expansion to Outer Wilds. I managed to avoid all the spoilers, watched some playthroughs but thankfully didn’t study them too closely. Importantly, the streamers never looked “up” during the parts of the gameplay that I’ve seen, so to me it appeared just like another normal environment (well, normal at least by Outer Wilds standards). I already loved the original game, and decided I must play this for myself.
So when I entered through that doorway for the first time I was genuinely stunned. “You fuckers, you really did it this time. You actually went ahead and did it!” I mean…
spoiler
Space habitats have always been a staple of science fiction novels, and they have appeared a couple times in video games already, like in Mass Effect and Halo, but there they were only used as background - the actual playable area was limited. Never before this had anyone successfully implemented a life-size Bishop Ring with the full “You see that mountain? You can walk there!” boastfulness. And sometimes that mountain is on the ceiling. And when the water breaks, oh boy…
That moment in Papers, Please where they say they’re reassigning the guards, and issue you a rifle with three shots in a locked drawer in your desk. And you’re doing your paperwork, and there’s a siren, you look up and a guy is hopping the fence. You scramble to get the gun out and shoot him but he already threw the bomb.
It’s kind of amazing how immersive that moment was. The panicked scramble to take in what was going on, know what to do, scramble for the key, line up and shoot someone.
Look I’ve shot a lot of people in video games. Mowing down nazis, taking the gluon gun to HECU marines, I’ve probably shot Heavy Weapons Guy in the face 900,000 times over the decades, just him.
But that one got me. In that deliberately low res game about border crossing paperwork, that one made me feel like I actually just killed someone.
Subnautica; at the beginning your pod drops into the surface of the ocean, then you open the hatch and you climb out… to see an infinite expanse of blue sea under a blue sky.
That triggered so many memories for me, I had to take a minute. The color grading on that scene was on point.
One of the Quake games has a section where you get captured, then put on a conveyor belt where you see other people in front of you get mutilated, then that happens to you. That scene almost triggered a dissociative episode.
The original ending of Mass Effect 3 brought me to tears because the Clint Mansell music meshed so well with the on-screen segments, it really moved me. That said I also like the remastered ending; the latter is like the last few chapters of Lord Of The Rings, the former is like an American movie ending.
Doki Doki literature club. The first play through when you visit Sayori at home. If you know you know.
That moment hits very hard. I knew what the game was about and it still destroyed me.
For me, it was the surprise song in Dragon Age Inquisition, when they performed “The Dawn Will Come.”
You’d just had a huge battle, the hero was a low point, and they break out into this… thing. It’s stunning and so well done.
I have a lot of these moments but I’ll pick my top ones.
Crystalis on the NES. When the town of Shyron gets destroyed and characters you know and care about are killed. Left me in shock as a 10 year old kid. And the temple music when you enter the pyramid is hauntingly beautiful too. I hum that tune to my kids as a lullaby.
Mass Effect 1. Exploring the planets left me in awe. For the time, the atmosphere and lore was detailed, rich, and very well thought out. Then facing down a reaper in the third game, it all made me feel so small.
FF7. Aerith getting killed took me by complete surprise. My brother and I were stunned for a while. Just sat there pondering wether it was real or not.
Minecraft back in beta. The world was just so impossibly huge and you’re all alone with your creations. Left me feeling very small. The more I built, the emptier it felt.
Finally, Mad Max on the PS4. The first time I got hit by a storm I was in awe. The world is just so well built and detailed. The whole game/movie universe is filled with amazing culture that’s just done really, really well.
