What was a profound moment that a video game caused you to experience, and why?
The moment that inspired this question:
A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.
The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.
One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”
I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.
… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.
I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.
Detroit: Become Human.
The demo gives you one level, playing as an android helper to the police, helping to solve a murder.
The full game really took me through the looking glass in terms of empathy. Can't really say more without significant spoilers.
I never played that myself but I recall watching sections of it and it's definitely a bit of a gut punch in places. I remember a place where one streamer just had to interrupt to process something, then went back and redid a whole chunk because a past choice really fucked him up.
It is a well done game and you can usually pick it up for pretty cheap. I think I might play through it again sometime soon to go through the other options. I also want to go through their other games. I tried playing Heavy Rain but for some reason it was not detecting my controller's thumbstick well enough to complete necessary actions. I might try to run it on an emulator and see if that helps.