Coming back to rewatch this after playing a ton of the game, myself, and of course I had to check if there's any new comments... So, interestingly enough, I have a perfect example of the "doing horrible things in video games" philosophizing that was going on before.
I'm a completionist when it comes to open world games, because being able to go anywhere and do anything is both empowering and very relaxing to me, so I've spent many more hours in the world of Sleeping Dogs than I suspect most people will when they get to this point. I was doing a mission to collect money from people. I met this one guy who needed harassment, so I did what was required and got his money. Then I took a tire iron, whacked him, then pulled out a gun and shot him in the face, laughing as I walked away from the scene. Clearly I am an awful person.
What actually happened is that, having spent as much time as I had with the game, the story and world had become much less immersive to me over time and I started seeing the game more as a pile of discreet mechanics to play around with. A sandbox. So upon completing the mission, I realized the NPC was now completely useless to the mechanics of the game. Even though, obviously, a person has to be alive if you want to continue collecting money from them, our interaction in the actual game was over, so whatever happened next would have no consequences. The tire iron, I had accidentally picked up when trying to harass him earlier, just by virtue of being too close to the tire iron and too far away from him. One of those "things you accidentally do in games that would never happen in real life" moments. I noticed his AI seemed to have shut off after the mission ended, because instead of walking away or reacting at all, he was just standing there. I hit him with the tire iron just to see if he would react or if he, indeed, was 100% scripted and wasn't programmed to respond like other pedestrians do. He didn't move at all. At that point, what my avatar had in front of him was, indeed, a completely soulless, functionless puppet. It played out its role in the game, and had no purpose once done. Not even as window dressing, like the other citizens of Hong Kong. He was just standing there.
I still haven't used guns much in the game, since they're very, very rare early on, and I happened to have a pistol in my pocket from an earlier mission, so I decided to see what would happen if I used it on a civilian. Plus, the idea that one would shoot someone in the face after carefully harassing them to pay up is so nonsensical that it's amusing to me. It's one of those problems where the freedom of an open world game can let you do things that make no sense at all to the intended story, but I love coming across those and exploiting them for fun. This particular case was made even better by an event later in the same storyline. If you've played it, you know what I'm talking about. Imagine the reaction to that, after I'd done what I just described. It's so inconsistent that I feel I've almost created a parody of the storyline I was supposed to be playing a part in. And that's one of the best things about games; The freedom to rewrite things in ways you're not supposed to because they make no sense. Just like when Vinny smashes a helpless nurse's head against a glass door until she passes out.
