I really like Shadow of Mordor. It gives personality and purpose to evolutions of great game mechanics and systems. It progresses games.

And it's really fucked up. Outside of the usual white male power fantasy family fridged to motivate revenge narrative thing, the essential contradiction of humanizing Uruks, giving them emotions and back stories and motivations and personalities, so that killing them is more interesting--that contradication is disturbing at its core. I haven't started enslaving them yet, but that's probably worse.

But this is a good thing for the industry. Violence in games is usually out of context and anti-humanistic. It's the military philosophy of the dehumanized combatant--in order to kill something, killing must be justified. Positive justifications include seeing killing as defense, seeing it as serving the common good, seeing it as necessary. Negative justifications include making enemies inhuman monsters, even when they are human. Putting them in the same uniform, associating them with utter evil, covering their faces in helmets and rags--all of this is used, and has been used for millennia, to make killing an enemy easier.

Shadow of Mordor refuses this easy tack. What its designers have done, perhaps accidentally, is made each enemy a recognizable agent. When I kill them, sometimes I feel accomplishment, having overcome some jerk who has openly mocked me as he murdered me before. Sometimes I feel more empty, especially when I'd never seen this dude before and now he's dead. And sometimes I feel confused, because didn't I just kill you?

It's an important system. And of course we're seeing it first (or at least in its first pop-cultural incarnation; I know Dwarf Fortress exists) as a way to make killing and enslaving more interesting.

That's fucked up, but I'm glad it's happening. Here's the moment, as many developers and users on here have said, here's the moment to steal something and make it matter. Give players a greater playspace for social skill development by turning the Nemesis system into the Friendship system (or something way cooler sounding).

I like this game. I'm glad it exists. Now I want the next gen to be about making AI like this into something that builds rather than just destroys. I'm excited.

(Other cool totally stolen but better shit in this game: batman combat with a slow-mo range attack that makes the flow feel far more manageable (and great perks), assassin's creed dive from high places with no stupid hay required cuz wraiths, skyrim rotating objects with hidden spoken stories and character dialogue associated with each making collectibles feel meaningful, weapon-specific skill tests to improve those weapons, finally an awareness mechanic where escape feels hard enough to be challenging but not so frustrating that death feels like a better alternative to running, a combo-based running mechanic so you don't need a car to traverse in cool ways, a huge awareness radius in wraith mode so seeing enemies through walls is eminently tactical, and probably more. It's a good game)