Balkans and Latin America today are more peaceful than 20 or 30 years ago.
And sure, the great powers still do a lot of dubious stuff, I'm well aware of that (e.g. the support of Western powers for Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen). But compared to the standard behaviour of empires and great powers for much of history, it's still pretty tame.

Why do you assert something that you have no way of knowing?


"Pretty tame"?

I think you'd characterize it much differently if you had to personally endure the sort of conditions that underlie the refugee issue.

Touché! lol

But by historical standards it is. Just look at the American experience in Afghanistan, after almost 20 years they still can't control the place. Many previous imperial powers would by now have resorted to drastic measures up to and including genocide to pacify the region. But such methods aren't regarded as acceptable anymore today.

I don't think your criteria really work. Often, doing the right thing is hard, and many games reflect that.
(spoilers for Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Spec Ops: The Line ahead)

In Bioshock, theoretically, killing the innocent little girls provides you with more raw material to upgrade your abilities than saving them. So you could do the nice thing and not kill them, but then you'd be weaker.

In Dishonored, everyone calls you an assassin and you are celebrated for it. One of your keybindings (the left mouse button) is attached to a brutal dagger stab. You can level up and get all these cool powers that involve brutal ways to kill people, including nonviolent characters. So playing a pacifist run or an unseen run is much harder, and much more satisfying.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution (and to a lesser extent the first game, but I'm talking about DX:HR here) involves a relevant situation. Your pilot lands you and then gets unescapably trapped. She instructs you to make a run for it, and distracts the attackers who begin attacking her aircraft. At this poin there is no indication that there's anything else you can do but run away, and defeating the attackers and rescuing your pilot is almost prohibitively hard (even more incredibly so if you choose to do a pacifist run). But you can do that!

Finally, there's Spec Ops: The Line. A game about the brutality of war, and the brutality of FPS players who trivialise it with games :D. It wouldn't work if you were able to succeed at "nice" solutions.

Perhaps I phrased that wrong, the problem is, I think faster then I type and never review what I say before hitting post, anyways, I meant to say that its something I have observed that humanity as a whole seems to act pretty bankrupt in one way or another.

But its just a observation not hard fact, I know there are exceptions to every case, and there are times when bad people do something good, and when good people do something bad.
Just some thinking from an amateur philosopher.

should not have added the "you and I" statement, but you cannot seriously claim you act moral 100 percent of the time.

Sure, but that's only due to appreciating that the consequences of such methods outweigh their value, which has given rise to such things as "low intensity conflict", which is a permanent feature at this point in time. And economic warfare is also extremely violent, and ruthlessly efficient. So no, it isn't getting better. And if you factor in population growth, you see that human misery has expanded greatly, interspersed with pockets of extreme wealth. The magnitude of the disparity is so great, in fact, that I think it's fair to say that more than a third of the people in this world would give their right hand to be poor in a First World nation -- which is absolutely appalling.

I agree with the observation, but I see no reason that it has to be this way. And you should not equate expressing an appreciation for the significance of ethics as a claim of superiority. As far as I am concerned, it matters not whether one is great or small.

its not meant as a claim of superiority, I do apologize if it came off as such. I am just a blunt person, I lack subtlety and as you can see, it can come off wrong.

I don't view myself as a superior, unless mad or otherwise not myself. I am usually pretty humble, sorry if I am coming across as confrontational with you, I actually like talking to you.

There is a difference between a hard (but intended) path and a path that is impossible because the developers did not intend it io be possible. In your Bioshack example, yes you'd be weaker if you take the good route, but as long as clearing the game is still realistically possible while doing so, it doesn't seem as if you *must* follow this path.

Perhaps a better example of the difficulty of the "good" path could be in Ninja Gaiden for the NES. You are intended to use your sword or ninja techniques to kill enemies that get in your way, and the developers, of course, expect you to do this (and there doesn't seem to be any moral issue present here). However, if you restrict your killing to bosses and don't kill any normal enemies, it is still possible to complete the game. You will die a lot (especially with all the damage boosting you need to do; sometimes not getting hit isn't an option, or getting hit strategically is a better option than trying not to get hit) and probably need to use a lot of continues, but it is still possible to beat the game; it is not, however, how the developers intended you to play.

An interesting example to look at here is Undertale, which, as most people who've heard of the game, has 3 main routes.
* The neutral route, where you kill some enemies, but don't seek out every single one. This is the path of least resistance; it is the easiest route, and the path that players will likely end up on on their first playthrough.
* The pacifist route, where you don't kill anything. Since you can only level up by killing enemies, you will have to beat the game at level 1. It turns out, however, that the game is specifically designed to allow this; you never need to kill anyone, and because of a mechanic where having high current HP makes you take more damage, levels don't make as much of a difference as you might expect.
* The genocide route, where you kill everything. While this is an intended path through the game, the game does push back if you try to take this route. For one thing, when you kill most of the enemies in an area, the encounter rate drops, making it more tedious to find those last few enemies.. For another, while most of the bosses are trivial on this route, there are two bosses that are incredibly difficult. (Interestingly, the game provides an out befire the first of these bosses; in-between the save point and the boss, there is a trivial battle; if you choose to spare the enemy, you will leave the genocide route.) In this way, the devloper is providing this option without condoning it, in a sense.

I also prefer bluntness, so not to worry. I'd make a terrible diplomat. ;p

I frequently make reference to ethics because I'm convinced that it's the only thing that can save us from ourselves. But I'm also well-acquainted with my own shortcomings, and work fairly hard to improve myself.

Cheers.

Close thread, ban OP.

no argument here

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideoGameCrueltyPotential

Incidentally, during the days of Minecraft beta where creative multiplayer servers were the norm, I'd create underground Nazi bunkers and see how long it took to get banned. There's a definite disconnect between what is possible through gameplay - especially emergent gameplay - and what is delivered through the actual story and characters.

Lawful good. Law and "good" are social constructs. If slavery is the social norm and legal, why couldn't a lawful good character own slaves, or rather why is that a conflict? Most of what we consider to be "good" is based on what some moldy people said in a book. For that matter, so is law.