Spoilers for late-game story points in GreedFall

Butch:

Let me get this straight…..

I had to free a torture victim.  Ok. Good. Torture is bad.  However, I then had to get her to let us into a sacred temple for our own reasons, chase her, KILL her when all she was trying to do was protect her culture and her HUSBAND who we then ALSO had to kill?

Uh…..I'm not down with that. 

Now, maybe it's going for the whole "point your finger at the player for their actions" deal that games do, but that only works when the player chooses the action. "You killed those doctors in TLOU? Why? You didn't have to…."   When a game forced you to do something icky and then says "ha! You did something icky! What does that say about you?" the answer is "it says I'm playing an icky game."  

I hope they do something with this, because all they accomplished this far is to make me think my character is a tone deaf bitch.  Not that I think I am, but she is, and that disconnect is not good in games. 

Feminina:

Wait, who did you kill? Who had a husband? 

I probably did exactly the same thing and will agree with you, but apparently we've reached the point where things start to run together in my head. I'm trying to remember killing someone in a temple.

And dude, there were so many of them... (Just kidding, mostly.)

Butch:

Cera, the wife of the high king, who was being tortured by the bridge alliance guys we freed, and the high king himself.   

Didn't kill people IN a temple.  We went to the Great and Sacred Temple of Plot Dump and then she locked us in, ran, yadda yadda yadda, you know.  

Feminina:

Oh, yeah, Cera. Right. Agreed. Didn't feel awesome about that. 

I mean, she tried to kill us, and we fought back, but...we definitely started it. We started the whole damn thing. 

I did feel like it was kind of a "look, this is just the crappy stuff you wind up doing when you're colonizing a territory" kind of message, like there wasn't a choice about it because so often the crappy stuff that happens isn't really ABOUT an individual person's choice, it's about that whole entity of an entire state deciding to claim 'uncharted' land, etc. etc. 
Like, no, we didn't have a choice here, and we NEVER really had a choice about whether we were going to do crappy things, we started to play the game and when you play the game you're stuck in the system the game has established, just like when you belong to a society, you're stuck in the systems your society has established, and guess what, you're going to do crappy stuff. If you want to live a moral and virtuous life, stay the hell out of politics, kind of thing. 

I don't know, that's a bit meta and perhaps giving them more credit than is due (as is my wont), but I choose to read it that way because it was somewhat less irritating than figuring there was no sense to the writing at all.

Butch:

Well, a criticism of the game when it was reviewed was some reviewers feeling it either was tone deaf towards, or even out rightly endorsed, colonialism.  The game did not think taking the island was a bad thing.  "Yay congregation for doing it all without torture" isn't that great a message.  

You say the options are to either get meta or accept there's no sense to the writing, but option three is "there is sense if the writers didn't get that this was 'crappy stuff.'"   It could be a writer of the game could read this and say "what's your problem? You killed the boss! You got a trophy! Yay you!"  

If you take at face value that de Sardet is Good and everything she does is Good and saving her cousin is Good no matter what, then it does make sense.   It's icky and offensive, but it makes sense.  

I really hope that's not where we end up here.  

Feminina:

Hm. Yeah, I can see that.

Probably because I'm just that much of a liberal pinko hippie commie, it never really occurred to me to read it as an outright endorsement because that's just too WRONG, but...yeah...you could say that. 

I mean...I don't know, I don't think you can REALLY say that fairly, I think they showed enough respect for the native culture and enough 'hey, this is definitely bad stuff' moments about the colonial actions that you definitely can't say it WHOLEHEARTEDLY endorsed the colonists. You can say that it comes down more in favor of the colonists than not in the end, though. 

Like, you could totally say it's applying the "sure, bad things were done, but it was all part of the inevitable, perhaps even necessary, march of progress" argument. I would still say you're not meant to view all of de Sardet's actions as 'good', but perhaps you're meant to see them as in some sense inevitable and, in the long run of history, no more wrong than anyone else's actions.

It absolves de Sardet (and therefore us) of moral responsibility, basically. Which is entirely a part of my "we didn't have a choice because we never had a choice, we're compelled by our society" read. 

If we don't have a choice, by definition it's not our fault.

And in fact we always did have a choice, just as we always DO have a choice not to participate in moral injustice: we can refuse to play the game. We can refuse to participate in the systems established by our society. 

It's just really, really hard to do that. And may not have any measurable impact. 

But we have that option.

Butch:

True...yes....but I think going down that road lacks the kind of punch that a video game could make. 

If the game, say, forced the player to have to choose between saving a native culture vs. saving a loved one (one we actually liked and trusted), then we'd have some of that "reflect on why you chose that" stuff that games do so well.  By saying "Well, you have no choice," then...well, what, exactly?

I have no problem with linear games, games where you really don't have a choice as to what to do next, but those games often don't deal with weighty moral things.  Uncharted.  Tomb Raider.  Great fun, but hardly weighty.  Even a game like Horizon, which was pretty linear and did deal with weighty stuff, didn't present with much that was "right" or "wrong" that wasn't obvious (wanting to end all life: wrong).   If a game is going to take place in moral grey areas, then the linearity of it bugs me.  

Note, I say "game."  Art is full of stories of characters of questionable morals, and that's great.  I just think there's something inherently different about a game where you control a character, especially a game where your character has OTHER choices.  To compare to TR or UC, you really didn't have much of a choice about anything, past minor skill tweaks or "do I kill this guy with a bow or a knife?"  In Greedfall, you can skip whole quests, decide who to romance, decide if you're going to be diplomatic or guns blazin'.....until you can't.   By giving the character so much choice, the idea that "Well, nothing you can do...system, don't it suck?" rings hollow. 

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