Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

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That might have also to do with how movies are made usually. If you really think about it, most detectives in detective stories abuse power and do things that cops really really should not. But, we are supposed to suspend reality and root for them.

Same with action movies - main character does a lot of damage to everyone around, steal cars, hurt innocent people and we are supposed to ignore that. Happy end involves massive fight in the middle of city that would displace thousands of families. And so on and so forth.

People take the usual expected reading of movies and apply them to these too.

It is possible to make movies differently. I have seen movies that made me feel bad about violence and events and that made it clear that "this is not a cool thing". But the movies mentioned here are not like that - they sort of criticise it but are still made so that we feel happy about them. They show events from the point of view of perpetrator, but not much from point of view of their victims.

It's not just movies. Real life attitudes toward war are similar. Hawks advocate for fighting, especially fighting on foreign shores, with little regard for collateral damage. And that attitude is far older than movies, so movies didn't create that attitude, though they may reinforce it.

To your point its possible to make movies differently, there is a game called spec ops that is very subversive of the military shooter genre. Where other games want you to feel cool shooting and killing people spec ops constantly wants you to feel bad about your actions, at one point asking "do you feel like a hero yet? "

Very good game.

People like the idea of it when they read about it online, but it sold poorly and the few people who played it didn't enjoy it.

I one of these few people who played it, I really enjoyed it. Thought on hardest difficulty it was a really good challenge.

The subversive games that teach a moral lesson to a player can be great, but they work best as short one-time plays, which isn't great for commerce.

There's not a lot of replayability in subverting your own expectations.

I liked the game as a shooter but I thought all the moralizing was ham fisted nonsense. It was incredibly obvious what it was doing and it didn't affect me the way it seemed to affect a lot of other people.

I heard that "this war of mine" is similar in that regard. You don't kill people tho, you manage survivors.

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