As a result of continued budget restraints I find myself talking more and more about older game titles (the ones you can find in the budget bin at GameStop).  At the same time, though, I have been finding a lot of games that have offered strikingly profound experiences.  The most resent of these has been with the game “Silent Hill 2″ on the Playstation 2.

Silent Hill 2 is a horror-survival game that takes place in the small, American town of Silent Hill.  The moment you enter this town you know immediately that something is a little off.  For one, the town is almost completely devoid of life and covered in a thick fog that never seems to lift.  The atmosphere of the game swiftly covers the player in a blanket of isolation and dread that pervades the entire game.  Even when you do occasionally encounter the few other human beings in the town they do little to abate these feelings.  In fact, after a while their unreliability and clear indications of mental unbalance begin to make the player’s character might be insane himself.

This is what Silent Hill 2 does so well.  With nothing more that atmosphere, symbolism, and subtle suggestion the game can influence the player to think in certain ways.  As Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw put it, it tells a story without words.

As the player progresses through the game they begin to understand that this town seems to attract those who carry with them great guilt over their past actions and incarnate for them a hell of their own creation.  It is the most subtle of choices the player makes while progressing through the game that determines whether the character will find forgiveness and acceptance for his past sins or whether he will embrace his damnation and be forever lost.

It is this theme of choosing between forgiveness and damnation that I found so profound in the games story.  I found it especially had parallels to real life given the context of my own Christian faith.  Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, salvation in Christianity has very little to do with leading a “good life”.  Instead, Christianity acknowledges that every one of us has done wrong and gives us the choice to either accept our damnation or embrace the opportunity for forgiveness and redemption that is offered to us.  It is a choice that we all have and it is a choice that we all must make whether we want to or not.

Alright, we’ve all heard this before, “Video games lead to violence.”  There have been so many lawsuits, studies, and research done on the subject.  But how do we as gamers respond?  I was watching Law and Order:SVU and they have a case where 3 people kill a woman and try to blame it on the game, claiming it “gave them the idea” and they “they didn’t know it was real.”  Well, that’s bogus.  Even though it is proven that video games release dopamine into the brain which makes it addictive and give the desire for more, it is no different then any other enjoyable act.  The main difference is that a game puts you in the shoes of the “killer.”  The game that was in LaO:SVU was call NtenCity, a sort for GTA game.  However, this game seemed to be a two-bit no name producer, like a game on Newgrounds.  If you remember from my post Blood and Gore, I mentioned that I did not want to play the GTA games, however, I did play Vice City a little, and I found it campy and a parody on Miami crime in the 80s.  I only played for a bit, but I found it more a story game then a “beat up hookers” game.  So here is what I say, if you are so influenced by video games that you want to act them out, stop!  Keep in mind that these games are fantasy worlds, were the normal rules of cause and effect do not work.  In games, no one dies or even hurts.  Yet in real life, they do.

There is a bit of a moral gray that I have been wondering about lately.  It concerns that confusing case of intellectual rights and the emulation of old video games.  You see, the long standing argument in favor of using emulated versions of old console games is that most of these games cannot be bought from the publishers anymore.  In other words, the only way to experience all those classic games from past generations is to either track down (sometimes at great expense) a working console and game cartridge from a private seller or use a downloadable emulation.  Either way the original publisher doesn’t get a cent.

The games market is changing, though.  With the rise of downloadable games and hand-held re-makes of old console games many classics are now available directly from the publisher.  So does this nullify the previous argument?  Honestly, I don’t know.  Thanks to an increasingly tight budget and a lack of any current generation console those options are not open to me.  I will say, though, that if given the option between downloading an emulation and buying the published download it would be morally preferable to buy from the publisher.  It’s good to give financial credit where credit is due even if it is for something made 20 years ago.

Final Fantasy VII is often sited by many gamers as the first game to actually draw out tears as a reaction to the on-screen story.  I was an important achievement in video game story telling when when the loss of a character whom the player had grown emotionally attached to provoked such a response.

While I have never played Final Fantasy VII I think I may have found it’s equivalent in the relationship driven story-telling of Persona 4.

After about 73 hours of play time I have finally reached the conclusion of Persona 4’s story arc and can now look back and examine the experience.  Through the many twists and turns that the main story took there is one moment that stands out as the most emotionally thought provoking to me.  Towards the climax of these story the player is faced with the unexpected loss of a character whom they had not only spent much of the game drawing closer to but is also the most innocent of bystanders in Persona’s conflict.  This loss moved me emotionally but it did not end there.

Immediately after this loss occurred the player was quickly drawn into a dire situation where they, as the leader, must make the decision whether to hastily take revenge or to calm down for a moment and reassess what exactly should be done.  I found this very compelling.  With the wounds of loss as fresh as they possibly could be, the player’s character is pushed to it’s limits and their true colors are set to be revealed.

It is rare for me to find a game these emotionally compelling (I think that Chrono Trigger was the last game I found as such) but it gives me great confidence in the medium as an art form.  Going in I knew little about Persona 4 but coming out it has established itself as one of the best RPG’s that I have played.

Another take:  Persona 4: Reflecting The Self

This is a follow-up to my previous post about Persona 4.

As I continue to play my way through the story of Persona 4 (it is a surprisingly long game) I find myself discovering more things about myself reflected in this little, on screen avatar.

One of the things that makes the Persona series slightly unconventional in the realms of JRPG’s is that is splits it’s time between the traditional RPG dungeon crawling and a social simulator akin to Japanese style dating sims (a bizarre genre in it’s own right).  Through these scripted interactions with a vast cast of game characters I find that the decisions I make are not simply me carting around an empty avatar from one interaction to the next.  Instead I find that I have been projecting different aspects of my own personality onto the way An Reuzakis (my avatar’s accidental name) behaves.  Not only that but I also discover that I have shaped An into the person I would like myself to become.  Strong-willed, persistent, knowledgeable, and kind.  These are not only characteristics that have assigned to my avatar but also characteristic that I work to cultivate in my own life.

They are a bit harder to develop in the real world but but playing them out in a fictional role helps in realizing how they may be played out in real society.