Friday 16 February, 2018

So, today I ran into my first issue of cognitive dissonance with the game, and that was when my character decided to go along with Delilah in her plan to scare off the teenage girls suspected of vandalism and cutting the wire. Just...no. I thought it was a contrived course of action that I didn't want to go along with, but that I ended up having to go along with for the sake of the story. It's funny, because my casual interactions with Delilah outside of that encounter felt really natural and casual, like they were both real people who had their own issues and baggage to deal with. I felt like I was able to make the choices that I would make if I were in that exact scenario. Anyways, my main objectives outside of the story were the cache boxes left by the other lookouts and rangers. I find them fascinating, because they completely subvert expectations as to what a "loot drop" in a video game is supposed to be. Most of the time you don't get anything useful, they aren't much of a challenge to find, and the code for all of them is the same so there isn't really any point to looking for them all, and yet, in the words of Edmund Hillary, they were there. Perhaps that speaks to my own obsessive playstyle or the ingrained, or it's the learned nature of dozens of past gaming experiences wreaking havoc on me, but nevertheless it's an appreciated subversion in a game unlike many others I have played, including other story based games and "walking simulators". Definitely something I'm glad to have picked up.

Really great job on these gamelogs James! It is interesting how you relate your current life with how that affected the difficulty of the games intro choices. Additionally, you have some good observations in how the player’s ability to alter the personality of the player character allows them to identify more with that character. You have a lot of good stuff here to use to formulate an ethical question for your OPA! Keep it up!