I read these comments made by the gears of war: judgement writer:

Gears of War: Judgment co-writer Tom Bissell called this scene "a blithe, shrugging presentation of the very definition of human evil, all in the name of 'entertainment.'"

"We've arrived in a strange emotional clime when our popular entertainment frequently depicts torture as briskly effective rather than literally the worst thing one human being can do to another - yea verily, worse even than killing."

"I spent a couple days feeling ashamed of being a gamer, of playing or liking military games, of being interested in any of this disgusting bulls*** at all," he added.

He's talking about a scene where the player is stabbing an enemy slowly and excruciatingly painfully and then has the choice to kill or not kill the character.

I'm absolutely fed up with these military games that offer you these meaningless choices that are supposedly "moral choice" but afterword you just go back to shooting a hundred dudes per level anyway so what does it matter?

But it got me interested in thinking about the way a stealth game could use choices to kill or not kill to affect the player.

What if a stealth game changed its design and the way enemies behaved based on how stealthy you were? Like say if you complete missions with only killing a designated target and avoid killing, there are fewer enemies, and they just go about their patrol routes and are laid back.

But if you start killing everything you see, the enemy soldiers start increasing in number and aggressiveness, the game gives you increasingly disturbing ways of killing them, and more gruesome, gory scenes of their deaths in an effort to see how much of these repulsive visuals, sounds, and actions it takes for the player to stop killing. The game could start with your standard FPS "puff of red blood smoke" and progress all the way to enemy soldiers screaming in pain and losing limbs, begging for their life, crying, being mutilated by your actions, taking more shots to actually die, etc.

Having recently played spec ops the line, and the way it used grotesque horrors of war to make the player disgusted by their own actions, I think a stealth based game would be a better way to accomplish what those guys were trying to do. Of course none of this would work unless they could hide this from the player until they played the game. you would need to be subverted and of course every game is about advertising every feature they have these days.

But i'm sure ubisoft will just make another game where sam shoots 6 guys in the face when you push the win button, so none of this matters.

There's something to be said for playing through games like Deus Ex: HR doing a non-lethal playthrough, it makes it interesting to say the least. I had fun with Conviction and I'll more than likely play Blacklist but yeah I echo your sentiments about wanting to make a purported stealth game try to make the stealth matter.

Personally, I was pretty disgusted when the narrator claimed that the decision of whether or not to kill a guard was a moral choice. For christ sakes you are torturing a man. At this point, they've completely discarded any pretense of a moral justification for the torture. It's not like you're holding him in isolation and slowly pumping him for information. You're just stabbing him. All he's going to do is lie to you to stop the pain, and you'll basically be torturing people because the developers want the game to feel "brutal". Sam Fisher is a huge asshole.

I know of no game that could put me off like that. I don't think it's possible in an age where young people are so desensitised to gore and violence. One of the Tenchu's did a decent job of upping the NPC count and aggressiveness after killing sprees.

Didn't Hitman Blood Money do this? When you become more popular and careless in the newspapers, enemy difficulty ramps up?

@AssInAss said:

Didn't Hitman Blood Money do this? When you become more popular and careless in the newspapers, enemy difficulty ramps up?

yep.