Dialogue
Edge readers share their opinions; one wins an 8BitDo controller
Before the flood
Right, you lot. I’m on to you.
Normally I write to you with some sort of thought about how or what I play, but it’s only now I realise you’ve been playing your own cheeky game. I’m now dreading going back through old issues and realising this has all been under my nose all along.
I’m a huge Depeche Mode fan, you see, and reading through the letters page, noted that one particular letter, from Kyle Charetter bore the same title as my favourite of their songs. And then I looked at my letter.
“Oh, it’s Aerosmith,” I initially thought (Exciter not being one of my most-played albums of theirs.) And then it all twigged, like a Kobayashi mug falling out of the sky.
Now, since then, I’ve gone through page for page and I’ve got: Curtis Mayfield, Blur, Muse, technically The Cardigans but that’s every month, LCD Soundsystem, and Seduction all referenced. Was it Sayonara Wild Heartsrelated madness, or have I just opened a door that I’m not going to close unless I start looking through old issues? Martin Hollis
Pretty much every issue since the early 300s, yes. If you ever spot something that strikes – sorry – a chord with you, do get in touch. We like to know we’re not just doing this stuff to please ourselves.
Metallic KO
When I put down my controller last night and settled in to read E337 I was struck by Hype’s introduction about the pleasure of games where you get to play as bad guys, thwarting super-spies as an evil genius or hunting down soldiers as a safari alien. Games do often give us a chance to be outrageously malevolent, but I realised that no xenomorphic flesh harvest, mafia bank heist or spree of vehicular carnage had delivered the sort of delightful malevolence I’d just been enjoying in the new immersive sim-slash-stealth adventure, Untitled Goose Game.
Getting a gardener to smash his own thumb with a hammer or igniting a neighbourly row satisfies the imp of the perverse in a way that no amount of supercrime really can, through the simple familiarity of the rules being broken. Yes, it’s illegal to rob a bank, but that’s not reinforced in our day to day lives in the same way as “don’t trip someone up by their shoelaces”, or “don’t throw someone’s radio in the lake”. These ideas are so deeply imbued in our society that it’s a genuine, hilarious, empowering surprise to ignore them with the utter brazenness of the bad goose.
Many games have embraced this idea to great effect, of course. Dishonored is a game full of daring, stealthy assassinations and infiltrations into spaces that are explicitly off-limits, but it was Lady Boyle’s Last Party, where you slipped constantly between the roles of innocent partygoer and cupboard-exploring snoop, that felt truly transgressive. Metal Gear Solid’s arsenal of silenced pistols and claymore mines created an enormous variety of opportunities to outdo the guards, but it was hiding in a cardboard box and pretending to be an inanimate object, like a child playing hide-and-seek, that really made you feel like you were rubbing their faces in it. It’s rarer to find a game that makes its entire structure out of entering mundane situations and turning them to carnage. Perhaps this is the real key to The Sims’ appeal.
Letting us trample over social norms in a simulated world is a great source of catharsis for the shadow self, but it’s also a good way to convey meaning. Not all rules
“Letting us trample over social norms in a simulated world is a great source of catharsis”
are just, and breaking them isn’t always purposeful, or avoidable. I’ve no doubt that games playing with these ideas already exist, but I’m a little too busy to go looking for them at the moment. I’ve just had a terrific idea involving some slippers and a water fountain…
Alex Whiteside
We have to say we are extremely on board with any bid to intellectualise a game whose founding concept was, if you’ll forgive us the paraphrase, ‘geese are pricks’. Long may it continue, whether in these pages or not.
If you want blood
You’re riding through some war-ravaged countryside when you come across three men roasting a pig, and a fourth man wailing that they’ve stolen and slaughtered it against his wishes. The men gladly offer to share with any passer-by. Do you do nothing, take a share, or avenge the pig on behalf of the man? What about if the three men have the label ‘bandit’ floating above their heads while the wailer is a named NPC?
I decide to ignore the labels and roleplay this scenario like real life (if I were a beefed up, white-haired, cat-eyed monster slayer, that is). I choose to take a share of the pig. I reason that the animal has already been slaughtered and nothing would be gained from starting a fight; that this is a hungry and desperate time, so the health of three men must outweigh the welfare of the pig.
I am immediately punished for my decision when the ‘bandits’ set upon the named NPC for continuing to complain about his pig, kill him, cheer and resume their feast like nothing had happened.
As I sat back to feel guilty and ashamed for not protecting a man obsessed with his pig, it struck me that this encounter in The Witcher III: Wild Hunt exemplifies two golden rules of RPGs.
First, no matter how deep, complex or well written a scenario is, usually the surest way to navigate it is to rely on Kantian ethics.
Avoid doing certain things no matter what – don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t murder, and so on – and you’ll come out okay. Or, put another way, most RPGs reward honour above utility or pragmatism, unless a scenario is specifically set up as a utilitarian or pragmatic one.
Second, the labelling theory – the idea that someone’s behaviour is influenced by the label attached to them – works with deterministic certainty in videogames. If something says it’s a bandit, it’s been coded to be a bandit, and don’t you try to be clever and roleplay otherwise.
Leo Tarasov
Entirely fair comment on one of our least favourite things in games, whether they’re set in open worlds or not: the choice that isn’t. It’s even worse in games that claim to put morality on centre stage. Enjoy your new controller.
The last waltz
Brave New World features a totalitarian state, which stays in power by making the masses love their oppressors. I’ve always felt this was closer to home than 1984. The way I see it, television and drugs work better than surveillance and police.
Let’s imagine a world where a handful of corporations own as much wealth as the rest of the world. Let’s say they’re hard to control because their money, lobbyists and career opportunities have a huge influence on government. And being the competitive entities they are, they tend to avoid taxes, pollute the environment, and create bad working conditions. Naturally, the masses would detest such companies and resent buying their products.
Okay, enough beating around the bush. Three of the largest companies in the world are part of the current console war. E338’ s cover was revealed on Facebook, showing a harrowing picture of Stadia’s mainframes, asking, ‘Is this your next console?’ The remarks under the picture were mostly negative. So was mine. Let me tell you why.
Stadia’s possibilities will likely be the next step in gaming evolution. Great article. Great technology. I get it. But I’m typing this on Gmail, while listening to music on YouTube. In an hour I will be using Maps to get to my next appointment. With Google Stadia, I would be playing a game on their device while travelling there. It’s all so convenient. But as every entity in the past has shown, the bigger they get, the more likely they are to abuse their power.
Panem et circenses, they say. Bread and games, what they’ve always said. I’m not afraid of how easy it is to love the big corporations. Rather, what I’m afraid of is how difficult it will be to stop loving them. Ceterum censeo capitalismum esse delendam.
Robert August de Meijer
Point taken, but if none of Gmail, YouTube or Google Maps were the tipping point for you, why must Stadia be? And as for being able to stop loving them, well, there are plenty of EAs out there that prove it’s still easy enough to do. Anyway, this is all getting a bit highbrow, isn’t it. Would someone please bring us back down to typical Dispatches terra firma?
Stop making scents
I‘d like to extend my sincerest thanks to Neil Sewell-Rutter for his letter in E338. Spurred on by his observation regarding the aroma of the previous issue, I dug out E337 to see if it really did smell like Turkish Delight. I also cast my nose over the present issue to see if it had a distinguishable scent. Sadly, on both counts, I smelt only paper. However, my wife caught me smelling my back issues and is now convinced I have some sordid magazine-based fetish. So “thanks”, Neil.
Chewbaccasdad
That’s better. Part of us wants to draw a line under this. Part of us, however, would like to see just how deep the rabbit hole goes. If you’ve detected a certain aroma from an issue of Edge, do please drop us a line. And remember: there’s nothing sordid about a deep huff of delicious magazine. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.