Monday, March 21, 2011

"I proved I will do absolutely anything if an NPC asks me to"

Man, I knew buying land here was a con...
Interesting post over at Tippa's blog - kind of two topics blurred into one, but the second topic is interesting - a quest where you bring an enemy NPC in for...torturing. And the NPC kills himself rather than divulge the information.

The problem I'd see is that this is presented in the gamist format which doesn't give a crud about your morality, it instead demands the most efficient choice from you. In a narrativist format...we'll, I'll quote what I wrote in the comments...

I think the only bad thing about the torture quest is that if you bail on it, you get no XP. I think a game that actually grasps problematic issues in a narrativist vein will give you an equal reward for either torturing him, or bailing on the whole thing. Because for narrativism, it’s about what your character would do and not about choosing an optimal path.
Frankly it sounds like you could do with more quests like that – albiet in a narrativist framework, instead of the psuedo gamist one where you did it because that was the shortest path to advancement.

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