"...It does bring me to an interesting point: What's your motivation when you play a video game that allows you some agency? Are you writing a story and creating a character? Or are you using the medium of interactivity to express your own self -- and see how the environment responds to you?
What determines your harvest-or-rescue decision, for example -- something inside the game, or something inside of you?"Sexyvideogameland...
The above part of the whole post which is sourced above are incredibly interesting questions. It really made me think and certainly this is a interesting way for me to expose my readers to these questions and please read Leigh Alexander's whole article because she is an awesome writer and comes up with wonderful things like this.
So on to the questions. I usually don't play a game in a role. For instance, If I'm playing a game where you can choose good or evil like Fable. I usually try to pick actions that I'm comfortable doing within the confines of the game world. Some times I will make up a role, like my Mass Effect 2 character I chose to be "Jack Bauer in Space." So I tried to make those types of decisions in the game. But in general, I don't do this. I usually simply play the way I feel is right. Unless I purposely want to be evil; I believe the last time I did that was Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2. But I'm going to try that with Mass Effect 2, eventually....
In both Bioshock and Bioshock 2, my feeling was to rescue them. I just couldn't stand hearing the Little Sister's reaction to the harvesting. It seemed just too evil. Too amoral. But as a journalist and someone who reviews video games, I might actually play through Bioshock 2 again harvesting all the way just to see how it changes things. But as I stated above, that isn't how I choose to play.
How about you? Have you played Bioshock? Bioshock 2? Are you a rescuer or a harvester? And why?
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