Video Games That Made People Question Their Beliefs

"I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? "No," says the man in Washington, "it belongs to the poor." "No," says the man in the Vatican, "it belongs to God." "No," says the man in Moscow, "it belongs to everyone." I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture. A city where the artist would not fear the censor; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well."

It really got me thinking about who makes demands on whom about what in society.

https://papersplea.se/

You can exploit a few glitches in the first Splinter Cell and play the entire game by killing exactly one person; Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a pacifist achievement, etc.

I recently tried a D&D campaign after a long time away from tabletop RPGs and found it fairly difficult to drop into the "kill orcs, get gold" mentality. Playing an elven ranger, and knowing full well that kobolds are lawful evil, ganking one on the road still felt ... weird.

Another belief-altering moment from the same game came after reflecting on the gameplay as a whole – I had developed an affinity for the main characters in a way I hadn't in any other RPG. I realized that this was due to the characters initially not liking me, and me having chosen to do things which didn't benefit me at all in order to help the characters achieve their goals, which resulted in their friendship. The option was always there to simply kill them and move on. But the act of investing energy doing things solely for the benefit of these characters built a relationship – and I realized that this is ultimately the basis of all human relationships.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_CBF318nBY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxWlJ_muK0I

I've always found it curious how anti-corporate sentiment disappeared from the Deus Ex sequels.

The game also explores various philosophical topics without shoving (political) opinions down your throat better than any recently released (western) game I've come across.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJxNhJ8fjFk

I played it with headphones on, and the volume loud enough to hear the crunching of gravel under my feet. The first time I found one of the "second kind" of puzzle, I nearly jumped out of my skin, and searching for them made me see things I hadn't seen before in ordinary places I visited.

Considering it came out in 2005, that paragraph is pretty interesting in and of itself.

A more recent example for me was when I played and finished Dark Souls 3 and then Bloodborne.

I had been reading the discussions on a fixed vs growth mindset, and grit, but it hadn't really clicked for me. I realized that my default state was a fixed mindset. I remember my mother praising me for always being better and smarter than other kids, not based on any real results or me having spent a lot of effort doing something, so I just assumed it was something built into me. In school, I had an easy time with some subjects, but a harder time with others. This didn't encourage me to work more on the hard ones, but avoid them. I valued people that displayed seemingly effortless genius rather than people who worked hard, because I thought the hard workers were stupid or less skilled and just had to make up for their lack of talent.

I finally had a tough time with math as a master of science student at the university, because I didn't have any study habits and expected math to be effortless like before. When I did pass the exams after multiple attempts, having finally sat down to study, I wasn't proud, I was just relieved and hated the whole experience. I was annoyed that math seemed to be based on making mistakes: You reach a problem you don't immediately know how to solve, you attempt it and fail, and study the rest of the material until you can figure it out. But the whole point is to be challenged! If you could breeze through all math problems without failing, the level of math is too easy for you. But I hated failing or feeling stupid.

Back to Dark Souls 3! The game is very hard, but it's also very fair. When you die it's because you made a mistake, but the game will throw the same thing at you again and now you can avoid it. Enemies are placed behind corners that surprise you the first time, but the second time you know they're there. Bosses telegraph their attacks. The first time you fight them, you're supposed to die and have to fight them again and again, learning their moveset. If you could beat all bosses in a Dark Souls game at the first attempt, same as with math, the game would be too easy. It's supposed to challenge you and, same as math, force you to be precise and focused, forcing you to accept that you will have to adapt your playstyle to the bosses to beat them.

In Dark Souls there's a a feedback loop where you die, but get infinite lives and can retry the same section of a map or a boss over and over. You know that other players can beat the boss, so why shouldn't you? The game definitely taught me grit and perseverance, where I before would quit a difficult game, this time I attempted again and again until I had figured out the map or boss.

A lot of people view playing the souls games as masochism, and I can see that in the same way that I considered studying math to be masochistic. Now I've learned to appreciate the process and take joy in learning to incrementally overcome an obstacle. I'm no longer afraid of not knowing enough when I start a task at work, but instead know that by just spending time and incrementally attacking a problem I will be able to figure it out. Dark Souls and Bloodborne helped me move from a fixed to a growth mindset, something I try to instill in my kids today.