I am part way through this fascinating analysis :

IT combines two of my favorite things, video games and ethics, and is even about one of my favorite game series, Dishonored.

It asks questions I never consciously asked when playing the game, but that did start to get to me after playing though the game once.

See, the first time I played it, I was extremely moved by the horrifying opening scenes of the game and my subsequent imprisonment and torture, and so I went into the game with an unquenchable thirst for vengeance and dealt brutal, bloody death to any and all who got in my way.

That meant that, via the Chaos^[1] system mentioned in the video essay, that the game got pretty damned dark pretty damned fast and I faced a lot of pushback not just from the agents of the evil new government but people in general.

Man, what a brilliant thing to put into the game.

But as I was about 60 percent of the way through the game, I started having doubts. My rage and thirst for revenge had cooled, and I started to wonder why I was so okay with murdering huge numbers of what were basically just police officers doing their jobs trying to hunt down someone who, by that point, was a mass murderer.

And the thing is, the game gives you a choice. In most cases, there is a non-lethal way to take down an enemy, like just choking them till they fall unconscious. You can totally go through the entire game without killing anyone, even the main villains/bosses.

Of course, like the guy says in the video, some of the nonlethal takedowns of the major baddies are far, far crueler than death.

Like the Ayn Randian superman, a genius inventor and entrepreneur with nothing but contempt for the moronic masses and who is more than happy to sell people a treatment for the rat plague that is expensive and needs to be taken daily when he could easily have come up with a cure.

But where’s the profit in that?

God, he was loathsome.

The nonlethal option for dealing with him is that you strap him into a machine that robs him of his intelligence.

Not completely, oh no. It doesn’t leave him a drooling vegetable or anything.

It takes away just enough to make him no longer a genius. To make him of average intelligence, in other words. And he is keenly aware of what he has lost.

You leave him desperately trying to remember calculus. Mua ha ha.

Anyhow, those questions gnawed at me as I cut a bloody path across the island city-state of Dunwall, and so after I finished my first playthrough, I resolved to do another one where I didn’t kill anybody.

And I almost succeeded. There were a few fights where if I had taken the extra time to choke someone out, the rest of the cops would have killed me in a hail of gunfire, but for the most part, despite it being a lot more hassle, I did not kill anyone.

Even the ones who richly deserved it. Bastards and bitches all of them.

And as a result, the word I traveled through was a lot more calm and relaxed and people weren’t as likely to say, pull a huge knife and try to kill someone over an unpaid overdue butcher’s bill.

Admittedly, messing with someone who is that good at cutting meat was dumb.

As a reward, I got the “good” ending that time, where my name is remembered as a hero who saved Dunwall from a horrible government, and not as the mass murdering, cop killing terrorist I arguable was the first time.

And the fact that the game made me think about things like that is part of what makes it such an amazing series.

So, um…. yeah.

More after the break.

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Don’t fence me in

Of course, one of the reasons I was on such a hot murder streak the first time I went through the game in Dishonored is that those fuckers DARED to lock me up.

I do not react well to that.

In fact, I think that’s one of the reasons I loved another game, Chronicles of Riddick, so much. The game starts with you being locked up in an ultra high tech space prison by utter bastards, and you spend the rest of the game not only killing a whole lot of evil mother fuckers, you blow up or break every single part of that space prison until there is nothing left of it except the office of the corrupt governor who put you in there in the first place and whose baby this prison is (was), and only then do you show up to kill him.

My god, that was satisfying. Lock ME up, motherfuckers? Then I am going to break every little bitty piece of the cage you tried to keep me in and then I am going to kill the warden AND the governor and then I am going to fly away in my sweetass stolen spaceship, smiling into the glare of an exploding space prison.

Essentially, if you lock me up or restrain me or in any other way trap me, you are weaponizing my claustrophobia and when I get free – and I WILL get free – I am going to find you and I am going to kill you.

I won’t claim I have the right to kill you for what you did, or that it’s the right thing to do. It’s not. My need for vengeance doesn’t change the morality of murder one bit.

But I will nevertheless feel driven to do it. Hopefully, somewhere along the path between me escaping and me bashing the brains out of the skull of whoever put me in there, I would find the escape key to my madness and stop myself and recover.

But um, no promises.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.