Thread 717609475

Why do so many game stories nowadays just focus around "gray morality" as opposed to just portraying good as being good and evil as being evil?

Your characters always just sort of have to be this weird amalgamation of beliefs that when you try to put together, they don't even make sense cause the character's entire personality then just boils down to "lel, i don't care, i'm a fence sitter or something like that." since the devs want to please everyone with their main character instead of just making them their own person with specific sets of beliefs and standards.

>>717609475 (OP)
Wolfenstein has a pretty black and white morality, but /v/ bitches about it endlessly

>>717609553
>being slave to jews is totally great bro!
>killing innocent germans forcefully conscripted into the rich and made to serve under fear of having their whole family be raped and destitute if they don't comply with the state is totally cool fr fr!!

>>717609553
yea the nazis were the good guys

>>717609772
>>717609735
See what I mean?

>>717609553
this, there are plenty of games with black and white morality

chuds just want their chuds to be the good guys, but they never will be. every conservative is inherently selfish, unlikeable, and cruel

>>717609475 (OP)
Good and evil literally don't exist in any moral system outside a Christian or Zoroastrian one (Christianity got it from Zoroastrianism)
Not in Buddhism, not in Daoism, not in Judaism, not in Egypt, not in Japan, not in Aztecism, not in Roman-ism, not in Norse ism, not in anything, certainly not in secularism
>but there are antagonists and vices n shit
those are not 'evil'
evil has a strict meaning
otherwise 'grey morality' wouldn't even be theoretically conceivable

>>717609475 (OP)
>Why do so many game stories nowadays just focus around "gray morality" as opposed to just portraying good as being good and evil as being evil?

i have no fucking idea what the fuck you're talking about, 99% of game stories 2020+ have been the most clear "good vs evil" possible.

Also how do you have the balls to say Witcher 3 was "morally grey" and worst of all, "nowadays" when it came out in 2015? You old fuck.

>>717611381
You living under a rock or something?
Witcher 3 got a recent update for an enhanced edition with new content additions and will soon have a new DLC released for it to bridge the gaps between it and Witcher 4. It's as relevant to today as any other AAA game.

>>717611612
>No no you see it got uhh an enhanced edition so it qualifies as a 2025 game despite being released a decade ago

Please kill yourself.

>>717609475 (OP)
>Why do so many game stories nowadays just focus around "gray morality"
Because evil is dumb. If it's pragmatic and Macchiavellian, it automatically becomes gray.
>ense cause the character's entire personality then just boils down to "lel,
If the game allows you to make choices, you can't have the character take extreme stances without player input because that'd upset the players who wouldn't take that action. And if it gives you no choices, it's not really an rpg.

>>717611773
Shit man who did what to you for you to be so angry today you telling others to kill themselves over replying to you with information?

>>717609475 (OP)
because you are an adult now and realize things are more complex than just black and white

>>717611970

You made a retarded thread about how "GAMES NOWADAYS ARE MORALLY GREY" despite not being able to name a single modern game with a morally grey story and instead referring to a 2015 videogame.

You're a retard. You should kill yourself.

>>717612169
calm down. not everyone that says something you disagree with should kill themselves. you're clearly very bitter and seems to have issues with your own self that you try to quench by insulting others.

>>717612169
>toxoplasmosis zombie is a violent manchild
wow.... totally unexpected...

>>717612316
>>717612406

Kill yourself you old fucks, 2015 was a decade ago.

>>717612610
you're not that guy, lil bro.
you need to grow up.

>>717609475 (OP)
Because most stories are based on real life and real life is rather gray
You rarely find black and white things like a father shooting the pedo but that's not that common
Stories of neglect or having issues with your father is a lot more common

>>717609475 (OP)
it's the consequences of having a slave morality from judeo-christianity

>>717615159
>slave morality
nigger why do you think Beyond Good and Evil is called "Beyond Good and Evil"

>>717609475 (OP)
define good or evil

>>717615251
hard mode: define good and evil WITHOUT using examples

>>717609475 (OP)
pic unrelated? geralt is a huge moralfag

>>717615284
>define good and evil WITHOUT using examples
Good can be broadly defined as actions, intentions, or qualities that are considered morally right, beneficial, or virtuous, promoting well-being and positive outcomes. Evil, conversely, can be understood as actions, intentions, or qualities that are considered morally wrong, harmful, or malicious, causing suffering or negative consequences.

>>717609475 (OP)
It's called "elevated fantasy" and it's just what's in these days.

Didnt you post this shit last week?

>>717609993
Jews are proving the Nazis right in Palestine now.

You contrarian retards will complain about grey morality but then complain that a Superman movie is dumb and childish, you don't know what you want and exist to be a runtish subhuman whining about a world that doesn't care about him

>evil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil#European_philosophy
first result about "evil" discussed by European philosophy is... WW2...
do good-tards really believe this?

>>717609475 (OP)
Witcher isn't gray. In pretty much every case there's an intended good decision.

People who think Witcher is gray are probably dumb enough to think Game of Thrones is gray.

>>717610431
>evil has a strict meaning
Expound, please

>>717618501
evil is anything i don't like and that disagrees with my own personal opinions

>>717616125
By treating the modern Nazis the way our grandfathers treated the original Nazis?

>>717618501
Basically the term "evil", with the way that it was coined to be used, is to proselytize. In essence, you were meant to call things of other religions 'evil' BEFORE the other person is converted. In other words, the word EVIL is meant to connotate 'Christian immorality' but "before" the Christian framework is revealed/understood. In other words, it's more of an 'artistic' or creative word
The reason it was so successful is because no one did this strategy back then, not even Zoroastrians who invented 'metaphysical evil' (which is just Gods who are always exclusively bad. Before that, everything was Good or Grey, but not evil). It was basically Zoroastrian metaphysics tied to Jewish style rhetoric and thinking.

A binary (or trinary if the game includes neutral) moral system is boring mechanically.

Just look at the Infamous series; the developers talk about all the decisions you get to make through the story but in reality you're only making ONE choice at the beginning of the game to be good or evil and then every other choice is beholden to that because you need to farm goodboy or badboy points to get the strongest abilities. There's no chance for nuance or the ability to craft your characters morality.

>>717609475 (OP)
Something is wrong with his face here. He's been given Botox or something

>>717609475 (OP)
Your entire argument boils down to you wanting to be told what's good and what's evil. As to the quality of writing: the only objectively good writing is that which competently portrays moral ambiguity. Humans aren't absolute. You could make a case for plain evil in non-human antagonists (that is, again, competently justified), but even archetypal evil comes in shades: it always is and should be a conflict between motivations, intentions and actions.

>>717619171
It WAS boring but decades of subverting expectations has made it novel again.

>>717610171
every leftist is hilariously naive, unlikable, and a giant pussy.

>>717619075
So in other words
>almost every religion, European American North-African or Asian
There is 'grey' and there is 'good', and sometimes there is 'perfect' or 'enlightenment'
>Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Islam
There is 'good' and there is 'everything else' that is either bad, impure or evil.

Judaism is the only one that has 'good, grey and evil' and if you include Kabbalah, it has a form of 'enlightenment'. This is because Judaism was the most 'changing' of religions that was throughout it's entire history constantly copying other religions but trying to make them all about YHWH, up until Christianity, and even then they made Kabbalah afterwards.

In spite phrases like 'bad karma' or yin yang, religions like Hinduism, Daoism and Buddhism fall into the first. In general, what differentiates the East from Western polytheists in this topic is that westerners like Greeks and Romans are far more likely to play fiddle to the Grey in their religion and have them as part of religious texts, while almost the entirety of the texts and teachings in the East are about enlightenment and not compromising with the Grey no matter what

thank you for reading my essay

>>717610171
>unlikeable
Trump won the popular vote and it mind broke every leftist on earth.

>>717609475 (OP)
>Why do so many game stories nowadays just focus around "gray morality" as opposed to just portraying good as being good and evil as being evil?
Because it's more interesting where you're presented with complex moral scenarios. You have your own values, you figure out how they should be applied to a given situation. It makes you stop for a minute and think. It's like a logic puzzle, where different people might get different answers. It's not that complicated. Having stories where all moral choices are extremely simple isn't interesting on its own (there are games with interesting takes on it), and characters being perfectly good or perfectly bad is boring, because it's inhuman. When you read Crime and Punishment, the protagonist is an evil monster, but he has moments where he engages in acts of selfless goodness. It makes the character more compelling, but also scary, because it can hit a bit too close to home.
>Your characters always just sort of have to be this weird amalgamation of beliefs that when you try to put together, they don't even make sense cause the character's entire personality then just boils down to "lel, i don't care, i'm a fence sitter or something like that."
Don't you make the moral choices in The Witcher 3? In that case you only have yourself to blame for the character acting inconsistent.

>>717619075
Ah, I think I see. So when you say that there's no 'evil' in Judaism, you don't mean that there are no sins or human evil, but rather that the Satan isn't an evil being, but the angelic equivalent of a District Attorney put in that position by the Almighty.

>>717616240
>you don't know what you want

That's not true at all. I know exactly what I want: to see people running back and forth and jumping through hoops in desperate yet futile efforts to achieve an goal that is, always has been, and always will be intentionally unachievable, simply because watching people try to reach a deliberately unreachable goal makes me feel very powerful and important. It's the only thing that gets me hard anymore. And it's hardly my fault that no one can ever meet my deliberately impossible standards. I expect them to keep trying even when they figure out that the game is unwinnable for design. My constant need for control and validation demands it.

>>717621283
Yeah, Judaism doesn't have 'evil' but it heavily antagonizes everything non Jewish like foreign Gods or non-Jews (like Samaritans, hence the term 'good Samaritan') which it rolls under the concept of 'impure' and includes stuff like non-kosher animals, or the Qliphoth in Kabbalah.

Europeans mostly used the concept of Order vs Chaos, with the goal being achieving some order of super immortality or other.
Persians came up with evil, some Jews and Gnostics copied them which is why you often get conflicting sources on both accounts (but before Persian Zoroastrianism there was no such thing as evil anywhere), then Christianity normalized it to the point that most history can't actually differentiate pre-Good and Evil history vs post. Then there were extremist sects like Manichaeism and Islam.

If you want to understand the psychology of 'pre Good and Evil' as well as how it came about, why it matters not to fall under such pretenses etc read the funny German Mustache Guy (Nietzsche)

>>717610171
Capitalist corpos poison natural waters and turn the fish and frogs gay. Leftist freaks want to engage in cultlike thinking where poisoning your body doesn't happen through a well poisoner trying to assassinate you, but by willingly doing it to yourself. You people aren't the powerful villains but you are the weird cultist faction from any RPG ever. I just want to side with the normal peasants who are neither guilty of using power because they don't have any, but they don't have any strong convictions to do weird and mentally disturbing shit either.

>>717621732
technically, Judaism tried and failed to integrate (read: copy paste) Zoroastrian evil into it's religion (it tried to do this with everything Zoroastrian, but failed most of it - 'first Christians' were actually a bunch of Judeo-Zoroastrian-Syncretic extrimists (that also copied some Greek thought as well, like the symbolic Wine is 'obviously' a reference to Dionysus/Bacchus. Religion making is tough work))

due to language issues, Judaism also adopted some uses of the general idea of evil like JETZER HARA because Christianity was a thing
but overall there isn't any, even thought they originally WANTED to copy Zoroastrianism, and failed, Kabbalah takes a very hyper-no-dualism approach instead as an attempt to separate Jewish identity further into isolation (it's pretty much guaranteed Kabbalah was more recent simply because the desire to syncretize dualism was a Jewish goal during Persian capture that didn't pan out)

>>717619791
Idealistic and naive are entirely different things.

>>717609475 (OP)
Witcher 3 has better writing than most games.

>>717610431
You are full of shit. Good and evil are universal concepts. Not every culture has a concrete list of things that are objectively evil and must be avoided, but that's because not every culture was founded by Jews who kept trying to find loopholes in the rules. In any case, if there was no concept of good in a given culture, there would be no imperative to BE good to other people, but there is one in all but the most undeveloped mudholes in the world.

>but anon a lot of world religions don't have a bad guy that they center their threat narratives around
Irrelevant. It doesn't matter what the basis of the moral system of the society is. It is almost universally concerned with harmony with those around you above all else, and whether there's a holy book or not explicitly declaring some things to be evil, there are some things that are held as beyond forgiveness anywhere that there are stable enough institutions to regulate the moral character of the community. Don't harm children, don't hurt pregnant women, don't steal from your neighbors. Don't do things which disrupt the harmony of the community or the harmony within yourself.

>but antagonists aren't evil
You're right, but that is also irrelevant. If you study the folklore of any society you will see depictions of good and evil in all of them, it's just the character of the evil in question that changes. Look at Final Fantasy VII, which wholesale rejected Western spiritual traditions in favor of home-grown Japanese Shinto, and it still features a good versus evil narrative. So do most Studio Ghibli films, despite Miyazaki being a pathological crybaby who whined about the "Western" concept of evil.

>>717622651
>Good and evil are universal concepts
no they are not. Evil was made up by Zoroaster the Persian. Before then, nothing resembling evil was ever conceived in written form throughout history.
If you think there is, please cite it and flip the entirety of human history upside down. Just one single example would make you 21st centuries most important historian.

Jews were the second that adopted evil - those became Christians.

>>717622651
>good versus evil narrative
not every
>conflict
is
>a conflict about good vs evil
you nonce

>>717622651
>So do most Studio Ghibli films,
no, most studio Ghibli films are about
>nature, tradition, purity, shintoism
vs
>modernity, industrialization, society, ambiguity, filth

>whether there's a holy book or not explicitly declaring some things to be evil, there are some things that are held as beyond forgiveness anywhere that there are stable enough institutions to regulate the moral character of the community. Don't harm children, don't hurt pregnant women, don't steal from your neighbors.
this is bullshit, slaughtering children is one of the more common things mankind has done, especially if it is for religious reasons. Judaism and Christianity wholesale accept and affirm the 'dash the little ones onto the stones' statement, that was canonically ordered by Yahweh. Even the funny bandaged guy from New Vegas says this quote.
No religion was ever against raiding either, and pregnant women just weren't interesting enough to write about so no one wrote anything about them.

>>717622651
You're arguing with j*ws, there's no arguing with j*ws. They'll worm their way out no matter what.

>>717622905
>You need to prove that morality as a concept existed before one of the oldest religions in the world
Yeah, no, it is the extraordinary claim which requires evidence.
>the idea that the concept of morality was invented by a single person is less extraordinary than that good and evil are universal concepts
OK, well, instead of attempting to surmise the philosophical character of peoples who existed when written language was still emerging, which you know damn well is a fool's errand, I will instead present counter-examples and challenge you to explain them. Without invoking any moral concepts, what are seimei and seichoku, why is misogi necessary in order to cleanse impurity, and why is impurity positively correlated with certain behaviors? And can you demonstrate that none of these concepts existed in Japan prior to Christian influence? For bonus points, explain why they preexist the presence Buddhism in the region.

>>717622983
>not every conflict is a conflict about good vs evil you nonce
Yeah you're right, it's a good thing I didn't fuckin' say that, you delusional sophist.

>>717623340
>no, most studio Ghibli films are about nature, tradition, purity, shintoism vs modernity, industrialization, society, ambiguity, filth
Dude please learn how to fucking format your posts, I'm too lazy to keep fixing them for you.

Counter-point: Most Western films are about nobility, self-sacrifice, and justice vs selfishness, callousness, and misanthropy.

Yeah, I'm able to pick out specific examples in order to separate them from a broader concept as well, but you know exactly what I just did there: I described good guys and bad guys. And what do you know, in most Studio Ghibli movies, certain characters are portrayed as noble, upstanding, and of good moral character and values, and others are not. Just like everywhere else in the world.

>>717624345
>one of the oldest religions in the world
Zoroastrianism is one of the last religions invented in the world if we ignore small sects

>>717623340
>this is bullshit, slaughtering children is one of the more common things mankind has done, especially if it is for religious reasons.
Yeah, they had to invoke the authority of an infallible deific adjudicator in order to justify the slaughter of their fellow man. Why is that? What was stopping them from doing it without the say-so of their spiritual leaders? One would think that, in a society in which human life has no intrinsic value, the slaughter of one's own wouldn't be seen as unusual in any way, let alone the slaughter of other tribes during a time of war.

>>717624345
>Without invoking any moral concepts, what are seimei and seichoku, why is misogi necessary in order to cleanse impurity, and why is impurity positively correlated with certain behaviors? And can you demonstrate that none of these concepts existed in Japan prior to Christian influence? For bonus points, explain why they preexist the presence Buddhism in the region.
easy
they are not evil
>>717624478
The reason the example was given?
The only religion to still justify that in the 21st century that hard? Is the second to adopt good vs evil

>EVIL is real guys! The bible says so
>the bible is the only text that believes in evil
>it also promotes slaughtering small children
zamn...

>>717624546
>they are not evil
You lazy mother fucker, I had to flip through a book to remember those names and you couldn't even be assed to Google a couple of words. And you want me to conduct a scholarly search of a bunch of historical documents that predate monotheism in order to demonstrate that good and evil are things that everyone understands? You're a joke.

I'm not even going to give you the benefit of the doubt anymore. If you're going to argue this lazily then I can only assume that you're one of those people who rebels against the concept of morality because you can't be fucked to introspect and correct your own behavior and instead want everyone else to stop giving you shit for it. But they're not going to. Even if Christianity is fundamentally scrubbed from Western culture, people are still going to look at you and see a worthless, lazy piece of shit who would rather expend energy coming up with justifications for not improving than actually improving.

>uhhhh anon "good" and "evil" are, like, English words, and other cultures don't use them, so clearly they don't have those concepts
Yeah, and the Japanese can't see green because they call it ao just like blue. Kindly fuck off. Christ, I've spoken to some dense mother fuckers on this website but you rival /lit/ for wasting my fucking time. I'm done with you.

Because it gives writers much more space to incorporate twists and turns into their stories.
Also, whoreson junior did nothing wrong.

>>717625002
>>>uhhhh anon "good" and "evil" are, like, English words, and other cultures don't use them, so clearly they don't have those concepts
no, zoroastrian

literally cite one example from anywhere, Egypt, Greece, Hindpoo, anywhere that is by any historian or philosopher or anyone accepted as being 'good vs evil' before Zoroastrianism

here, tell me what I should ask ChatGPT so it can find a contradiction in it's assessment of your arguement

>>717609475 (OP)
>just portraying good as being good and evil as being evil?
midwit take. don't you know satanism is good because it upsets religious chuds?

>>717625002
Heres a simple answer
A "Christian" trying to be "good" and not "evil" would contradict Seimei and Seichoku

>>717609475 (OP)
How many times are you gonna post this?

>>717625275
>here, tell me what I should ask ChatGPT
Ask it how to think for yourself like a grown independent individual. And while you're at it, ask it how to develop literacy skills so you don't make yourself look like a twat by issuing a challenge that was already met in a previous post.

>>717609475 (OP)
fuck off OP WHO CARES

>>717624637
>i have no idea what i'm talking about because i'm a retard taking verses out of context and reading things not to understand them but to just form my own madeup view on what i read

>>717609475 (OP)
I disagree with your presupposition.