Thursday 15 February, 2018

I had an epiphany while romping through Mordor this fine afternoon. The game is amazingly fun and I have really enjoyed my experience as a medieval terrorist but the game has a terribly contradictory idea. Throughout my experience, I have been freeing slaves and trying to better the Mordor world through freedom. There is constantly an underlying tone that I am helping my bring freedom to those who are oppressed. However, I see a huge problem as I have also become the oppressor through my doing of “good”. As I use my magical mind abilities to manipulate the nemesis system and take control of orc captains and chieftains I have basically been constructing a slave army to fight for me. Upon his realization, I was like s**t that is actually brilliant game design in the sense of doing good you become evil. It occurred to me though that the game developers may not have done this on purpose. In that case, the game is horribly contradictory. And now thinking about it more the game really is horrible contradictory. From my experience so far the game has not addressed that I am enslaving a race of persons. What is also interesting is I am basically changing the orcs from Sauron's slaves to my own. What is also unfortunate is I only have the choice to enslave the orcs or kill them. Both suck for them and make me seem like an awful person. Basically, Shadow of Mordor makes the player into a magical serial killer terrorist who is trying to enslave for their own personal gain an already enslaved and oppressed minority. My guess is the developers did not think of the game this way. I think it would help a lot if there were other options to negotiate with orcs or to be able to free them, options other than enslavement or death. Don’t get me wrong, orcs are inherently evil. Some of the stuff the nemesis system comes up with is brilliant and definitely bad but who knows how they would function if they were not at Sauron’s mercy. Orcs should still be given a chance. Overall, I think this was a pretty interesting realization and I feel it is a substantial moral flaw to the game.

Awesome job on these game logs Logan! You do a great job of letting your thoughts flow while also addressing some ethical questions such as how the game’s perspective shapes morality or if the game is purposely creating commentary with its contradiction. For your OPA, try diving into the larger moral implications of how the game approaches violence and terrorism. Again, great job here! Keep it up!