Quote Originally Posted by Mordar View Post
Certainly not sufficiently familiar myself, so I will ask - what is the possibility or proportion thereof that the affection for the "fascist, oppressive theocracy" falls with gamers being more anti-establishment, or significantly more "tired" of good guy stories than the mass market?

In short, how would you guys allocate actual quality vs gamer edge?

- M
Approximately zero. Games, particularly those where you control a discrete avatar, are overwhelmingly stories of heroic violence. There's something the character wants, and ah shucks wouldn't ya know it, they just have no choice but to kill seven thousand people to do it. You'll meet some people along the way, they'll tell you how cool and amazing you are, and a couple hundred fights later, you get everything they ever wanted. It's Homer with the rough edges sanded off, just looted corpses and buddy hijinks forever.

Nowhere does this structure require the character to be morally right - there's a fairly short list of (mostly sexual) crimes they can't commit - but as long as they keep it zipped up, they can kill and steal from here till judgment day without any problem. Just so long as they look cool doing it - gotta get those one liners in -, and the targets are sufficiently dehumanized. The anti-hero is a hero sans moral justification, which makes them very slightly subversive of that morality (although very frequently they are framed as a return to traditional morality unimpeded by the effeminate norms of the degenerate and deluded present), but they are not subversive of the arc of heroism. If anything it's heroism in pure form, uncut by such weeny concerns as right and wrong, boiled down solely to the protagonist's capability for cathartic violence.

The only game I've ever played that is actually against heroism is Spec Ops The Line. It does this by having the protagonist do all the hero things, one liners, badass moments, going rogue because it's the only choice, lots of cool violence. It's an entirely normal hero game, except that the result of every single thing he has done is awful and he's a delusional maniac driven insane by the collision of reality with his heroic self image. Literally the protagonist of the game cannot handle not being rewarded for being the hero and invents an increasingly fragmented delusion where he is the hero, he has no choice, only he could do the necessary thing. Which works, up until reality catches up and his mind completely snaps.The final choices pretty much boil down to how his delusions literally kill him, dies he remain at war with reality, or is he actually capable of surrender to it. Which is window dressing anyway, because he's already dead.

Needless to say it was not a commercial success.