Wednesday 17 January, 2018

For my second play session, I delved into some of the side quests available in the game. Those I ended up playing revolved around freeing slaves and captives, both orcs and humans. This reminded of John Brown and his actions as an abolitionist. I found it really cool to have the ability to free slaves and fight alongside them for a greater cause. The developers even went farther than just freeing slaves, and having arcs built around this.
I hope to see this in future games as it gave a sense of pride. This pride came slightly from freeing the slaves, but more when I realized it was similar to the history of the United States. These actions also illustrated a mental picture on what might have happened during the events leading up to the civil war. By this, I mean missions could have paralleled those encountered in the game. An example would be freeing slaves, then overthrowing a war chief. This could have been similar to freeing slaves and overthrowing the plantation owner or something of the like.

Awesome job Will! Your passion politics and history allow for you to make profound analyses of the game because it allows you to view the ethical questions of the game with an informed lens that takes real world implications into account. There are some ethical issues you could dive even further into such as the camera perspective and graphic fidelity’s effect on the player’s emotional response or the impact of naming the groups “rebels” vs. “insurgents.”

Clay