My own anecdote related to this idea was on a playthrough of Skyrim.

I was between objectives and wandering through the map. I came across one of the ubiquitous caves which I decided to enter. I was attacked by some generic low-level bandits and I cleared the cave.

After dispatching the enemies I was looting through the cave and came across some letters. They detailed a tale of a family that came on hard times in a nearby town and were forced homeless by circumstance, how they were trying to rebuild their lives, etc. I looked around the cave and could tell the individuals mentioned in the letter were accounted for in the cave. I mean, they were generic bandit models but the designer had matched them to the narrative.

I thought about the situation. I was this extremely high level wizardy kind of build trekking though the wilderness and I came across an encampment. When I barged into their makeshift home they rightly were like "get out". And then I slaughtered them all with no reason and was now deciding if the clutter was worth packing and re-selling.

I more or less stopped playing Skyrim after that.

> Before the encounter with the first Troll, the dumbfounded mythical character, Atreus, asks: “We’re going to fight that?!?” Kratos, the main character, answers: “We have no choice,” in a matter-of-fact, almost resigned way, as if shruggingly accepting the design conventions of the game itself.

I didn't see it like that. Atreus thinks he and his father are normal humans, even if he saw his father perform incredible feats of strength such as carrying a huge tree trunk. Atreus has no idea what his father is capable of, and he himself has been mostly sick and frail. The boy is scared. Nowhere does that scene read as "That looks humanoid, I don't think we should kill it". Draugrs are more humanoid and they've been killing some on the way. The troll is incredibly fierce and the largest opponent they faced until now. That's a completely natural reaction from the boy with no moral implications.

It's actually a little later in the game when they're assaulted by Reavers (actual living humans talking about eating them) that Atreus kills one in self defense and remains shocked by the experience. Kratos shows empathy and care when he comforts him and says "Close your heart to it". [1]

There's a deep thread about humanity and the right or need to kill in self defense in the game, and Atreus goes through a rebellious phase where he thinks godhood gives him the right to do anything. But the troll scene? That's reading too much into it.

1. https://youtu.be/_oOZG5-tqpA?si=w6-PyJXjTZ-qSv2q&t=4173

Perhaps not a monster, but in "It takes two", there is a particular scene where you have to murder a friendly stuffed elephant to get your in-game daughter to cry.

I have been playing video games for decades at this point but that one really shook me up. You pretty much execute a toy begging for its life. As soon as that scene was over it genuinely took me a few days to come back to it.

That was a hard rewatch: https://youtu.be/12FNU8bNEbE?si=BKZCynsHhoz5GN2m&t=65

> As a result, the game offers no easy satisfaction of hacking and slashing through weaker opponents.

Besides the questionable morality of kill=experience=progress in typical hack'n'slash or roguelike, what started to irritate me in there as I grew older as well, was the stupid mechanics where crowds of enemies described as intelligent humanoids (i.e. not animals or robots) facing clearly overpowered high-level PC (famous, even) never surrendered, almost never tried to flee, attacked one-by-one, and shoved no sign of tactical thinking or self-preservation instinct. Despite being armed and (by description) organised, PC could enter a narrow corridor, defeat dozen of them without taking any damage, yet there will be a waiting line eager for demise by a single hit -- even actively advancing towards it. No attempt to regroup, to take advantage of the number superiority, wait in open space, ambush from all directions, or anything like that. Same applies to most FPS: there is a Doomguy running around at unprecedented pace, slaughtering everything that moves, but we will all keep our scattered positions. (This led me to a thought, whether it would be possible to rearrange enemies in canonical Doom map so that all would attack at once at some appropriate spot and whether it would guarantee their victory or not.)

The first game I thought of upon reading the title of the article was 'Shadow of the Colossus'. There's a particular boss about half-way through the game who resides in a small secluded garden and the process of defeating them involves tricking them in to ramming over columns etc. until they are trapped.

I have a strong memory of being 12 years old, lying awake at night with the melancholic feeling this article describes, with the realisation that those beasts never did anything to me and I was essentially going out of my way to trick and slaughter them.

No other game has invoked that feeling in me since. It's a very special game. It remains one of my favourites and a stellar example of what the medium can achieve.

Well, Ebrietas and Rom in Bloodborne are the only two monsters that aren't actively hostile, and both have lore backstories (including their genetic relationship) explaining that. Killing Ebrietas is optional, which works against the idea that the game is setting you up to question the ethics of monster-killing; many players don't even realize they can walk away from Ebrietas, because the game absolutely primes you to just get in and start whacking.

I love how the game SOMA deals with taking (or not taking) someone's, or something's, life. It is never an easy moment. And with no commentary (with some haunting exceptions, https://youtu.be/pmC6naegRgo?t=161), no external reward or punishment, you need to carry the burden of your own decisions.

Some people says they will be judged (only) by God and history. In SOMA, there is neither.

The Fallout games often exemplify this: nearly every decision you make is morally ambiguous, and often has far-reaching repercussions in the story and world.

That reminds me of the Bhagavad Gita, where Arjuna and Krishna have a long conversation before a battle where the former is supposed to perform his duties towards the people he's sworn to protect, but which would mean most likely killing close relatives that he cares about.

There is no honor in killing, only in exercising your duty towards serving and protecting others.

I've just finished playing Metro Exodus, which is another example.

The "good ending" depends on your behavior in the three open areas of the game.

You can still kill "monsters" (mutated humans, animals, cannibals, bandits) without impact, but you should minimize killing other humans, such as slaves, or even hostile but "misguided" NPCs (people that just want you to stay out of their settlement, that you are required to traverse, and who will shoot you on sight).

This is something you can actually achieve pretty easily, just by using stealth.

But reading older posts on this game, many people found this difficult, as the game made easy and satisfying to kill from the shadows.

I can agree with the other examples, but including Dark Souls feels like a stretch. In Dark Souls, the primary currency for progression—'souls'—is fundamentally earned by killing enemies. No matter how tragic a monster's lore might be, the moment it drops the exact resource the player needs to level up, can we really call that a genuine moral dilemma? I agree with applying this to Undertale, but using Dark Souls severely dilutes your argument. If Dark Souls counts, then countless text-heavy JRPGs with sad villain backstories would also fit the bill. Ultimately, for a true moral dilemma to exist in game design, there has to be a scenario where the player doesn't strictly need to kill mechanically, yet they are forced to confront the choice of doing so

Odd that it doesn’t mention Metal Gear Solid, which was casting doubt on the morality of the player character’s actions and painting boss fights as tragic affairs back in 1998, even though it does mention MGS love letter Spec Ops: The Line (and even though MGS is a media darling and probably significantly overdiscussed in general).

The Cogwork Dancers in Hollow Knight: Silksong are a recent example of this

https://hollowknight.wiki/w/Cogwork_Dancers

If you are young "shadow of the collosus" is a game I highly recommend you dig up and play, it set a special unique tone for the 2000-2010 era

Well I'm no gaming enthusiast so I have a very limited range that I can fully enjoy at my low accomplishment level.

Must be quite the opposite of a real gamer, so I naturally like the simpler and less complex approach.

More or less the easy stuff, and I'm not completely alone.

I think first and foremost, a particular game should be fun from quite early on before you have developed much deep experience, and then any progress through different levels should be logical and straightforward.

In both respects from my simple-minded starting point I guess I enjoy it most when it's about as rewarding as finishing off an order of french fries :)

Talk about excitement rising to melancholy amounts . . .

One game that really annoyed me was Assassin's Creed Odyssey. It was an amazing game. Beautiful scenery, great story. And then I played the fate of Atlantis expansion. In order to progress the story, you have to weaken Persephone's hold on the realm, which I did. However even if you reduce her influence to zero (which I did), you still can't progress unless you betray a friend (even though there's no utility in that anymore).

For a mainstream boss example I nominate the Lonely Giant in Elder Scrolls Online.

There also are plenty of cute-animal mobs that weren't going to bother you unless you started something. An example that still stands out for me is the first set of sleeping bears in LOTRO.

Another interesting example are hunting games such as Hunter Call of the Wild. I played that for countless hours. While some people simply go for reckless trophy hunting, I thought about most of the shots I took; there's a flock of deer with a single stag, surrounded by does. I knew I would feel awful taking out that single stag, leaving the does behind alone. Could taking it out now be considered "crowd control", how rangers call it? Maybe, under specific circumstances. Or is that just a lie I tell to myself to justify the trophy?

Taking shots on animals living their life in the forest and on the fields imposes a moral/ethical question, especially if you are not being attacked or would otherwise starve to death.

Makes me think of that dragon that you can sneak up to near the beginning of Elden Ring and take it out with chip damage over about half an hour without waking it up.

I wonder how they arrived at the name "Ebrietas"? Does it have something to do with being inebriated?

EDIT: it does, I just had to google "Ebrietas latin" (and got https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ebrietas), otherwise it only returned references to the monster.

On a similar theme, The old knight and the dragon: https://www.instagram.com/p/DY0YtdtHdLb/?img_index=1

No mention of the Witcher? The whole franchise is based on moral dilemmas like that.

The Shadow of the Colossus video essay meme has transferred into text, we are devolving!

These are their kitchens and living rooms. You leap in swinging your broadsword.

This article had me until it said the pacifist run in Undertale was more difficult. Anyone that has attempted a “genocide” route where you kill everyone will probably tell you that that boss is probably one of the hardest things they ever done in a videogame - if they can beat it at all.

I mean this has been a this has been a theme going back further than "Shadow of the Colossus" or "Undertale".

Both "Chrono Trigger" and "Crono Cross" make you question your actions and whether or not it was worth on a monster genocide.

> Contrary to Flowey’s advice, the game can be finished without a single kill, leading to a special ending, but this pacifist route is markedly more difficult.

...huh? This is very much not true. The most difficult[0] encounters happen on the Genocide route, in which you powerlevel like it's a normal JRPG until the encounters run out. Pacifist is only slightly harder than a "No Mercy" neutral run[1].

For the first two thirds of this article I was screaming "BUT WHAT ABOUT UNDERTALE". Toby Fox basically wrote the book on the moral quandries of killing monsters in video games, and this article does not do his work justice. It feels like the author wanted to briefly mention it at the end as a way to cap off the essay. And, while I haven't played Shadow of the Colossus, I suspect the inspection of that is about as surface-level as the tacked-on mention of UNDERTALE at the end.

I feel like I just read a high school English essay.

[0] Mechanically and emotionally.

[1] As in, a run in which you kill everything you see, but do not exhaust the kill limit.

> This non-battle turned out to be a powerful experience, but its power stemmed mostly from the contrast between this and my other monster encounters.

This is more correlated with modern games. Modern games, at the least non-Indie games, dumbed down the gameplay. I am not saying such games are awful per se, but they are often very simplified to the 1990s era in many ways.

Many old RPG games are quite complex; or told as a story. The old Betrayal at Krondor was kind of like a novel - unsurprisingly since Feist wrote most of the content (save various adjustments made to the gameplay itself). Yes, graphics are bad, options are too few, but storyline-wise this was my favourite RPG. Another example would be "Realms of Arcania" (in german the three DSA games). Again, graphics today are not great, and playing it in english versus german is actually worse (one of the few games where german was better than english, by the way), but the gameplay options in the second part were nice. Part 3 was a bit different, and people critisized it, but I still liked that you would explore a "real" city while still having tons of options available. Other RPGs such as Baldur's Gate 2 are a bit different - DnD itself is IMO a very bad system for RPGs (takes too long to explain now, but just look at static alignment systems - that makes zero sense) and most of it was focused on hack-and-slay for power and items, so it has the same problems. But with mods you can kind of extend the story and add more storylines, thus having more options. So BG2 is not the best example here, compared to the other two; even before that, if you remember the old Ultima series, the NPCs kind of had a regular life, worked at specific times, went to work leaving their homes (and you could then pillage that) and so forth. A lot of the "why do I want to slay the cute monster", is driven by the underlying design. These games often try to dumb down everything. I noticed this first with World of Warcraft. To me these games never were interesting, as it seems to have been deliberately dumbed down. Many of those games today are more like a movie with a bit interaction in between. That's imo not quite a game anymore. There are some exceptions though; I liked little nightmares, but this is also a simplified, mostly linear gameplay. This problem keeps on coming back again and again. For some reason modern games hate complexity. Either humans became dumber, or designers wanted to simplify things.

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