GWJ Conference Call 785

Amoebic, does Among Us make you question your morality because you're so good at lying in the game?

One odd thing that happened to me recently is that I picked up Suzerain and a couple of days after I started playing it the whole fallout in Afghanistan happened. I don't know if it necessarily made me question my morals, but all of the sudden this game about political crises in a middle-eastern-ish country just stopped being fun and I completely lost interest in it even though I like it so far. I guess it got a bit too real for that particular moment and it just didn't feel like the escape videogames typically provide.

Totally relating to Daryl's PS5 not-jealousy

EDIT: And of course the first "humanity-questioning" game that comes to mind for me is Iron Helmet's Neptune's Pride -- back around 2015, I played a game over a number of months with coworkers and a number of a coworker's friends, none of which friends us other coworkers had met. We had about 9 players, total.

The mechanics are quite simple: capturing stars to get resources to build ships. Eventually you run out of neutral, unclaimed stars to capture and will brush up against other players. Most of the game actually happens in all the diplomacy around the game: you have to form alliances to survive and there's a lot of wheeling and dealing going on.

Our in-game chat log was a damning testimony of everyone's slow descent into madness over a number of months: at first players started out in character, RPing their space captains and cracking jokes about their space empires. Then came the trash-talking, proclamations of war, double dealing, betrayal, begging, shifting alliances and wheedling. Us coworkers had formed a defensive alliance to head off another aggressive alliance that started out attacking people, and the counterattack was going strong until one of the allies switched sides. It all deteriorated from there. Eventually everyone was in extended negotiations to just abandon the game, unfinished, because of the toll it was taking on our sanity.

I still hold out hopes of selling the chat log to HBO to make into a prestige miniseries.