Genocide simulator
Is it ever morally acceptable to play as the Nazi in a game? Or commit acts of mass murder, act cruelly, or otherwise act as one of the “bad guys”. As Zangief put it, if you are a bad guy does that make you a bad guy? Dungeons and Dragons has long had a morality system, which many games co-opted in some fashion, allowing players to decide which path to take. Wolfenstein explicitly has you whaling on Nazis, while Dishonored gives the player the best outcome if they use non-lethal methods. Yet, more abstract games such as Stellaris, Hearts of Iron, and Victoria all rely on a players own sensibilities to guide a particular moral path. When does a bad guy pay playing evil for fun morph into a genocide simulator, and more pertinently is it ever good to play the bad?
Murder hobo is a meme turn floating round the gamersphere for folk who enjoy being their own mass casualty event. Indeed, this concept was co-opted for the newer meme of a gamer walking up to the Pearly Gates all clear conscience, St Peter asks them if they have ever killed someone, they state no, and the final frame is a pull back to the thousands of digital kills they have racked up. In the Stellaris subreddit a user jokingly added that for them it would like be trillions if not higher. The abstraction of digital deaths allows all gamers to play out killing things of various shapes and forms without having the moral ambiguity of having to do it in…
