The Escapist Issue #114 Now Available

The latest issue of Escapist Magazine features five new articles that focus on role-playing, morality in video games, and female gamers. A snippet from “Are You Evil?”:

In the search for true evil, I discovered a man known as Mordred. Taking his name from the traditional Arthurian villain, Mordred told me he only played villainous characters. To him, it wasn’t a challenge or a task, he merely chose the dialogue or actions he felt he would say or do. “The first time [playing through] is always how I, personally, would react in that situation, and I always end up evil at the end. No surprise to me, though,” he said. He was the only gamer who admitted to having sadistic tendencies outside of the game. “I like to torture and manipulate in real life as well as in videogames. If I lived during the middle ages, I would have definitely been busy as an interrogator for some despot king. I’m a sadist by nature, and I enjoy inflicting pain. Luckily, my wife is a masochist.” Yikes.

Still, there are gamers who think the evil options written into games like Knights of the Old Republic aren’t diabolic enough. The complaint is the dialogue for evil characters is actually more like being an annoying prick rather than a truly wicked individual. Finishing a quest to save someone’s daughter only to demand outrageous payment from the father isn’t really that evil. As Mordred puts it, “I seriously doubt Vader ever ripped off a plate from a widow, and I can’t imagine that Palpatine would have bothered threatening a group of hunters inside a Tattooine hunting lodge.” Playing a scheming and truly threatening villain within the framework of one story is nearly impossible.