“X is acting like Voldemort. Voldemort level evil. Literally 1984.” What are you a child?
If someone brags about reading for status but only reads fiction, their knowledge is useless in practice. Fiction can be great, but treat it like junk food, enjoyable but not real world wisdom
I’m a similar boat of this, I hate… Fucking HATE, when ppl want to play “evil” campaigns in games like dnd and shit. Cause it’s one of two fucking things.
OR the more likely scenario
I once had a group of ppl I know what to play an evil campaign and it was 100% #2. So I trolled them so hard and all I had to do was constantly suggest shit from the US Feds handbook. lol. They eventually stopped talking to me about that game. I was like "we need to set up an ever expanding pedophilia ring that we use to blackmail and control the elites of ever nation "
It pisses me off. The naivety. Grown ass ppl that live with this fairy tale mentality.
Yeah, I’d stop talking to my friend too if they decided to ruin everybody’s fun by being this petty, toxic, and immature.
You seem to have trouble distinguishing between reality & fiction if you think wanting to play evil in a table top RPG is the same as being a psychopath or edgelord or that it means they don’t understand how real life evil works.
You’re operating with the same mentality as claiming video games cause violence.
We are currently in a “media consumption = my values” and frequently “depiction = endorsement” moral frenzy. Not more than 5 years ago it was perfectly understandable by all, that supporting the “villain” faction/character in fictional media doesn’t instantly mean you endorse those values in real life.
Unironically the Dark Lord Sauron is one of my favorite fictional villains, to the point I will ironically pretend to support him and claim he’s the real good guy.
Obviously I don’t actually believe that because I’m not utterly insane. It’s just good fun.
There is like a cool russian novel where is actually the good guy and gondor the bad faction preventing mordor form industrializating.
I’m honestly split. On one hand, it’s only a game. On the other, wanting to ruin the lives of characters for fun actually is being immature, even if there are no real-world consequences. Really, it’s hard to distinguish the impulse to be “the bad guy” and the impulse to be an edgelord. They do purposefully transgressive activities that most teenagers find thrilling and glamorous, along with some adults. Like this Playstation commercial!
Really, as the world gets worse and worse, playing as the edgelord who conquers a whole town gets less and less appealing. It doesn’t seem so transgressive anymore when the news reports on more and more taboos being broken. The question becomes less “How can I have fun?” and more “How can I mentally heal myself?”. Of course, with someone still playing Lex Luthor, it would seem that they are being unearnest and purposeless, or lack the desire to help others to the point where they’d scoff at at least emulating helping others.
I do understand the worry that these people are just emulating Joe Lieberman in regards to Mortal Kombat. But these are entirely different people. They aren’t going to someday go “and now you can’t show real firearms!”, or worry more about a gamer’s individual habits than the economic system they live in.
For me I enjoy playing evil because it’s something different. Not because I unironically think it’s cool, or because I don’t “get it”, or because I’m secretly a psychopath or whatever. But because the experience of playing an evil character is different than that of a good character fundamentally. Sometimes I want that different experience just to mix things up and keep things interesting. Otherwise I’ll get bored doing the same heroic shtick every time.
I’d probably be too self-conscious to play a bad character with other players in a DnD type of thing, but I’ve definitely done stuff like dark side runs in Knights of the Old Republic and see no harm in it. For the most part, in those type of games, the evil is so over the top that it almost loops around to being comedic. Like “rah you looked at me wrong, I’m going to be evil to you!” Though to some extent, life experience colors it too. Like I most played that stuff when I was less informed on the world and knew less about how it works.
Nowadays when I play a video game where violence is the norm, it doesn’t matter much whether it’s an “evil” playthrough or an (allegedly) “heroic” playthrough, I can’t help noticing just how many games rely on this implicit design where it’s fine to murder hordes of enemies, while sometimes having stories with moral qualms about whether you should kill a significant named character. It’s the same superhero logic that Pete Holmes makes fun of in his “Badman” (parody of Batman) sketch, the one called Batman vs. The Penguin. “My one rule is I don’t kill,” then he takes out henchmen without a second thought.
I find the inconsistency of it to be impossible to unsee and that more than fictional good/evil character choices is the part that stands out to me. Typically in games with a hero or villain playthrough option, the heroic path also involves murdering lots of enemies along the way. The net kill count isn’t actually that different. The main difference is whether you do the story-based good/evil cinematic choices, which often involves an impact to the game world that you don’t even visibly see. So you’re largely playing as a hypothetical hero or villain, removed even from much of a simulation of consequences.
I mean, it is only a game. There are video games like Postal 2 and Carmageddon that don’t necessarily make people more inclined to violence. That was probably what they were trying to get out of D&D.