Poll: Which do you think did Violence in Videogames better? Spec Ops the Line or Undertale?

[F-I-D-O]

I haven't played Undertale yet so I can't vote but I do want to point out that Spec Ops: The Line actually gives you agency most of the time, its just that people use it for violence. The very first violent encounter in the game you're prompted with text to open fire before your foe does, who I should mention opens fire because they think you're going to. Did you do that? A lot of people did. When it comes to that one scene did you even try to use an alternative method to get through? Most people didn't. At the very end of the game there is a choice to be violent, a choice where both choices, to be violent or peaceful both advance the narrative. As can actually be demonstrated by steam achievement statistic most people chose the violent course of action. They didn't even try to resolve it without resorting to violence. This is hours after the "you made a terrible decision' gut punch by the way. There's many more examples in the game than these few I've mentioned, by the way. The game does give you agency most of the time, and even when there isn't an alternative solution that allows you to advance in the game you're still welcome to try anyways. Most people simply never used that agency and chose the violent, or more violent than its alternative, solution. Honestly the WP scene was probably the weakest example of it in the entire game, which is a shame because its also the most obvious. There are a lot more examples in the game, some being downright insidious.

So much this.
As I outlined in mine, the executions are a completely optional thing, that the game still shifts to drive home what the player is forcing Walker to do. One of the ending battles is similar as well, with the option to give up or go out in a blaze of PTSD glory. While the moment to moment gameplay in Ops is blatant shooting, the player has a surprising amount of agency.

Now, I'd argue that the WP scene is dedicated to showing the player that they did cause the horrible event. There's a choice in that scene - stop playing and Walker dies there, or fire and continue. I understand people might not like that an option in a game is to stop playing, but, IMO, it's pretty clear from the scene that exiting out is the alternative.
If you do keep playing, the game shows you the consequence. It doesn't try to guilt trip you. It shows the consequence of your choice. It is not a happy world where deaths get glossed over. Walker made a decision, and it turned out very differently than expected. The game was telling a story. The player chose to keep reading. No one complains that the Red Wedding was stupid. It was brought about due to certain characters making poor decisions, and any other consequence would have been dissension.
Also of note in Spec Ops - it's not the player's story. It's Walker's story, the player just decides how long it is. People bring up "I didn't want to fire the phosphorus." Of course you didn't. Walker, the character you control, made a choice as characters so inconveniently do. IT's just a little more drastic than attacking the nest in Aliens, going in the woods in a horror movie, or any other stupid events through narrative form media. For all the agency Spec Ops gives you under the hood, they know when to take it away for narrative development.

 

[Secondhand Revenant]

As listed in the title, pretty much.

While I have not played spec ops, I'd enjoy hearing discussion, because the two games seem to hit on the same topic in differing manners. From my understanding, Spec Ops removes the act of Agency. Undertale seems to point out the fact that, you know, you're murdering shit, why the hell are you doing that. You don't have to do that.

So, I'd like to see which of the two you think handled the topic better, and I'd enjoy seeing some discussion.

I don't think they really make the same point. I haven't played spec ops but it seems more about being a monster without realizing it from what I've heard.

Undertale seems to kind of play with the absurdity of the mechanics of games. Saving and reloading and grinding for xp.

Honestly, I prefer Spec Ops.
I just prefer the presentation and the characters mental breakdown during the 3rd act was amazing. There were some great touches.

I don't understand how people can critisize Spec Op for taking away choice but not Undertale. I've not finished it yet, but the Genocide run changes a lot yes? To the point where nearly everyone has done it in order to experience the changes. The game is still effectivly taking away your choice by locking an entierly different story behind violence and then critisizing you for wanting to see everything the game has to offer.

It is quite different yeah.

But uh... how exactly is a character getting mad at you in the game taking away your choice? Like... dude... wagging a digital finger at you didn't take away your choice... I mean you just did it. You had the option and you took it.

Hmm, what's better? The game that just pushed you down a path you can't really escape, or the game that blatantly tells you "You're a shit player, don't kill pixels"?

Spec Ops, Hands down, no question.

A character in the game gets mad at you. What were they supposed to have him do, congratulate you? I'm surprised people take something the character says so seriously and personally. It has a lot of kind of 4th wall stuff but it still is grounded in a premise that the game world is real.

 

[Secondhand Revenant]

As listed in the title, pretty much.

While I have not played spec ops, I'd enjoy hearing discussion, because the two games seem to hit on the same topic in differing manners. From my understanding, Spec Ops removes the act of Agency. Undertale seems to point out the fact that, you know, you're murdering shit, why the hell are you doing that. You don't have to do that.

So, I'd like to see which of the two you think handled the topic better, and I'd enjoy seeing some discussion.

I don't think they really make the same point. I haven't played spec ops but it seems more about being a monster without realizing it from what I've heard.

Undertale seems to kind of play with the absurdity of the mechanics of games. Saving and reloading and grinding for xp.

Honestly, I prefer Spec Ops.
I just prefer the presentation and the characters mental breakdown during the 3rd act was amazing. There were some great touches.

I don't understand how people can critisize Spec Op for taking away choice but not Undertale. I've not finished it yet, but the Genocide run changes a lot yes? To the point where nearly everyone has done it in order to experience the changes. The game is still effectivly taking away your choice by locking an entierly different story behind violence and then critisizing you for wanting to see everything the game has to offer.

It is quite different yeah.

But uh... how exactly is a character getting mad at you in the game taking away your choice? Like... dude... wagging a digital finger at you didn't take away your choice... I mean you just did it. You had the option and you took it.

Hmm, what's better? The game that just pushed you down a path you can't really escape, or the game that blatantly tells you "You're a shit player, don't kill pixels"?

Spec Ops, Hands down, no question.

A character in the game gets mad at you. What were they supposed to have him do, congratulate you? I'm surprised people take something the character says so seriously and personally. It has a lot of kind of 4th wall stuff but it still is grounded in a premise that the game world is real.

 

[Nobuoa Schniell]

I like Undertale a lot, but its portrayal of violence is in a purely fantasy setting where the characters don't exactly act... human, I guess? It didn't really make me think about the consequences of violence so much as it just made me want to do a pacifist playthrough. So in that sense, it was more that I didn't want to kill the characters than any particular internal conflict about violence itself. And it doesn't really present a great argument towards a "nonviolent" game. Because there was absolutely combat in that game, the same type of combat that's been seen in other games. It was just dressed up as "you're not hurting this character". But when one of the combat mechanics was a literal shmup where you're actually firing shots at things coming at you, it's hard to really call that "nonviolent". It's just about how it's presented. Whereas Spec Ops presented a far more realistic situation that created some chilling imagery at just how poorly things go when one pulls the trigger. Granted, it's purely narrative in nature. I dunno, I guess Spec Ops was just more thought provoking in that regard.

 

[EternallyBored]

None of them do a particularly good job. Undertale makes you want to kill things just to get them out of the way, or by self defence. Two "friendly" dogs come up to you and attack you and there's nothing you can do besides to kill them, and if you mess around too much playing with them they end up killing me. How the hell does that make me violent?

Self defense is a hollow justification in a game that gives you functional immortality by making the save/load feature an ingame story element, you can't really claim self defense when the story itself tells you that it's impossible to die and you have explicit power over time and space.

In that case, Undertale is no different to any other game. All those Nintendo games where you have multiple lives? Murder, until you're on your last life. But even then you can just put another $1 in the machine or press "start" and play again, so it's still murder, isn't it. Any game where you can save at any point, you're committing genocide because you can just reload no matter how far back it takes you.

What? those aren't even close to the same thing, there is a massive difference between Doylist (out of character) and Watsonian (in character) explanations for events.

Master Chief respawns because the game would be frustrating and pointless if you had permanent death, but the game treats life and death as gameplay mechanics, Master chief respawns, but he doesn't know that, and the story treats that as a gameplay mechanic rather than a story mechanic. If the story acknowledged that the UNSC literally had an unkillable super soldier that could reverse time every time he died it would massively effect the story.

Even for Nintendo games like Mario, the lives system is treated as mostly a gameplay mechanic, the story doesn't acknowledge that mario dies and comes back, and the story is so sparse that there is little weight or separation given to the concept.

Undertale drives the concept even further home by making all the monsters very weak, they flat out tell you in the game that a single human with determination can easily destroy hundreds of monsters, and the fight command can easily destroy anything short of a couple of late game bosses, its meant to strip away self defense justifications, you are basically killing because you were too lazy or frustrated to find another way, and in 99% of battles that other way is pretty easy to find. Undertale attempts to call this behavior out by making the save system an acknowledged in universe ability rather than a gameplay mechanic.

Whether they did this effectively or not is certainly up for debate.

Just because you can doesn't mean everyone will know that. I tried all kinds of combination with the dogs and nothing worked. They attacked me no matter what I did. That is a hostile animal and I'm entitled to defend myself. If I walk past someone's house and try to pet their dog and it bites me in the leg, I'm not going to keep on trying to pet it and roll over for it. Maybe bringing it a bag of ostrich-flavored doggie treats and tickling its tummy right below the left nipple will make it calm down, but I'm not expected to know that am I?

Are you entitled to defend yourself from a barking dog on the other side of a fence that can't do anything to hurt you? Because that is essentially what that fight is, your character is moderately inconvenienced, but like I said, you can solve that fight in three moves, so you basically got mad and defended yourself from an animal that was annoying rather than dangerous, or killed them on purpose for EXP, but that's a whole nother matter.

I have to seriously call into question how hard you tried to solve this fight as a basic grasp of English is all you need to figure it out, reading the text makes it painfully obvious exactly what you have to do, and even if you lacked that, cycling through all the act commands blindly twice would be enough to win the fight nonviolently, so that would be 6 or so turns max you have to take to beat one dog, there were only 3 act commands to chose from.

We are talking about the two axe dogs right? Dogamy and Dogaressa? Seriously, how the hell was the solution to that fight not blatantly obvious? Try to pet them like other dogs, they tell you you smell weird, roll around on the ground and the text box tells you you now smell different, I'm pretty sure the text box even tells you to have them re-sniff you at that point, they sniff you again and think you are another dog, commence trying to pet again, dog freaks out, spare dog. A minimum of three turns for each dog. None of this was hidden or implied, the text boxes literally spell out what is happening.

I could at least understand if you were talking about a late game boss or something, if you suck at bullet hell games those fights can be downright annoying, but the fight you are describing is like right outside the tutorial level, I don't even think they count as minibosses.

 

[Secondhand Revenant]

None of them do a particularly good job. Undertale makes you want to kill things just to get them out of the way, or by self defence. Two "friendly" dogs come up to you and attack you and there's nothing you can do besides to kill them, and if you mess around too much playing with them they end up killing me. How the hell does that make me violent?

Self defense is a hollow justification in a game that gives you functional immortality by making the save/load feature an ingame story element, you can't really claim self defense when the story itself tells you that it's impossible to die and you have explicit power over time and space.

In that case, Undertale is no different to any other game. All those Nintendo games where you have multiple lives? Murder, until you're on your last life. But even then you can just put another $1 in the machine or press "start" and play again, so it's still murder, isn't it. Any game where you can save at any point, you're committing genocide because you can just reload no matter how far back it takes you.

Also, you can nonviolently solve that 2 dogs fight in like 3 moves, so it's barely faster to do it violently, that's hardly even a frustrating fight compared to some later game fights like the mettaton boss battle or trying to do the muffit fight without using the alternate method. Just roll around, smell, spare, pretty much every fight in the game can be done just by cycling through the act commands until their name turns yellow, only a couple fights require spamming the spare command or get tricky with doing things in a certain order or repeating the same act command multiple times.

Just because you can doesn't mean everyone will know that. I tried all kinds of combination with the dogs and nothing worked. They attacked me no matter what I did. That is a hostile animal and I'm entitled to defend myself. If I walk past someone's house and try to pet their dog and it bites me in the leg, I'm not going to keep on trying to pet it and roll over for it. Maybe bringing it a bag of ostrich-flavored doggie treats and tickling its tummy right below the left nipple will make it calm down, but I'm not expected to know that am I?

Did you ever finish the game? Because to get the Genocide route you need to kill everything, not just the pair of dogs.

Also they start by spouting out a thing about smell. It was kind of an obvious clue...

 

[EternallyBored]

None of them do a particularly good job. Undertale makes you want to kill things just to get them out of the way, or by self defence. Two "friendly" dogs come up to you and attack you and there's nothing you can do besides to kill them, and if you mess around too much playing with them they end up killing me. How the hell does that make me violent?

Self defense is a hollow justification in a game that gives you functional immortality by making the save/load feature an ingame story element, you can't really claim self defense when the story itself tells you that it's impossible to die and you have explicit power over time and space.

In that case, Undertale is no different to any other game. All those Nintendo games where you have multiple lives? Murder, until you're on your last life. But even then you can just put another $1 in the machine or press "start" and play again, so it's still murder, isn't it. Any game where you can save at any point, you're committing genocide because you can just reload no matter how far back it takes you.

Also, you can nonviolently solve that 2 dogs fight in like 3 moves, so it's barely faster to do it violently, that's hardly even a frustrating fight compared to some later game fights like the mettaton boss battle or trying to do the muffit fight without using the alternate method. Just roll around, smell, spare, pretty much every fight in the game can be done just by cycling through the act commands until their name turns yellow, only a couple fights require spamming the spare command or get tricky with doing things in a certain order or repeating the same act command multiple times.

Just because you can doesn't mean everyone will know that. I tried all kinds of combination with the dogs and nothing worked. They attacked me no matter what I did. That is a hostile animal and I'm entitled to defend myself. If I walk past someone's house and try to pet their dog and it bites me in the leg, I'm not going to keep on trying to pet it and roll over for it. Maybe bringing it a bag of ostrich-flavored doggie treats and tickling its tummy right below the left nipple will make it calm down, but I'm not expected to know that am I?

Did you ever finish the game? Because to get the Genocide route you need to kill everything, not just the pair of dogs.

Also they start by spouting out a thing about smell. It was kind of an obvious clue...

Clue nothing, the check command text flat out tells you that they operate on smell, and the literal text after using the roll around act command is to tell you to have them re-smell you, after that the only thing you have to figure out is to pet them after they smell you, which considering there's only 3 act commands for both dogs, its a 1 in 3 chance of hitting the right button even if you just guess, and considering all the other dogs were pacified by petting them, it's not exactly a massive leap of logic to think that the last command you need is to pet them.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

Are you entitled to defend yourself from a barking dog on the other side of a fence that can't do anything to hurt you? Because that is essentially what that fight is, your character is moderately inconvenienced, but like I said, you can solve that fight in three moves, so you basically got mad and defended yourself from an animal that was annoying rather than dangerous, or killed them on purpose for EXP, but that's a whole nother matter.

I have to seriously call into question how hard you tried to solve this fight as a basic grasp of English is all you need to figure it out, reading the text makes it painfully obvious exactly what you have to do, and even if you lacked that, cycling through all the act commands blindly twice would be enough to win the fight nonviolently, so that would be 6 or so turns max you have to take to beat one dog, there were only 3 act commands to chose from.

We are talking about the two axe dogs right? Dogamy and Dogaressa? Seriously, how the hell was the solution to that fight not blatantly obvious? Try to pet them like other dogs, they tell you you smell weird, roll around on the ground and the text box tells you you now smell different, I'm pretty sure the text box even tells you to have them re-sniff you at that point, they sniff you again and think you are another dog, commence trying to pet again, dog freaks out, spare dog. A minimum of three turns for each dog. None of this was hidden or implied, the text boxes literally spell out what is happening.

I could at least understand if you were talking about a late game boss or something, if you suck at bullet hell games those fights can be downright annoying, but the fight you are describing is like right outside the tutorial level, I don't even think they count as minibosses.

The point is, when I go to pet them they SWING AXES AT ME. This reduced my hit points to the point where I was almost dead. I didn't want to go back to the last checkpoint so it was only then that I decided to attack them. I didn't attack them first, they attacked me.

This happened with almost every creature I came across. The game had a decent idea about RPG morals, but it is very poorly implemented. If the dogs immediately responded to petting then it would have been so much better. I don't see why every friendly action needs to be followed by the creature attacking. That is really poor design, especially when the text says something like "the creature is pleased" before it happens. It reminds me of 80s Nintendo games, which might be intentional or not, I don't know, but it's not good.