Where have all the heroes gone?

...saints row 4? maybe?

at the very least, you've got super powers, its a sandbox, and the boss USED to be a kind of super villain, before they got powers. now they're just president of the united states fighting aliens inside the matrix.

very customizable. you can be a clown, an emo, a goth, a hillbilly, the girl next door, the president, a beautiful woman with a nolan norths voice, a wrestler, a superhero, a detective, a steampunk man or woman, etc.

edited 1st Oct '13 4:34:29 AM by Tarsen

The only heroes I know are either dead or in prison. One or the other.

edited 1st Oct '13 5:02:17 AM by unnoun

ive heard there was a ninja patrolling the streets of some place in america..

...The hell?

edited 1st Oct '13 4:36:29 AM by kkhohoho

It's a Metal Gear Solid reference.

Ah.

...Still doesn't make much sense though...

It answers where all the heroes have gone.

@Eldrake: The question is why all current protagonists are either douches or just plain evil...

Just doing my bit.

Yes. This.

The conversation's gone in some weird directions (Not a bad thing by any means) but we haven't really done much more than brush up against the core question.

edited 1st Oct '13 1:00:45 PM by ShirowShirow

Okay, since we're dealing with basic issues of moral philosophy here, time to take out the philosophy-glasses!

There's two words that everyone should learn (and then never, ever use again because they don't come up often except in moral philosophy) and that's consequentialism and deontology. Consequentialism broadly speaking that an act should be judged based on it's consequences, not it's motivations. It can get more or less simple. One of the more common/interesting consequentialist philosophies is called utilitarianism, and basically states The Needs of the Many outweigh the Needs of the Few

Or actually, that you should take the action that leads to the greatest amount of utility. (Utility is a tricky word, which is one of the reasons utilitarianism isn't quite as simple-mindedly monstrous as it might seem if you think about it, it basically means "whatever is of use", it can be happiness, pleasure, really anything that you consider important to maximize)

The point is that you should always take the action that leads to the greatest amount of utility ("good") If killing a baby would save ten people? Do it. Utilitarianism has the advantage that it actually considers the outcome of something. It provides a clear reason for doing small acts of wrong in order to do greater acts of good. (some kinds of deontology can get very weird about that bit)

Now, deontology means that there are some kind of acts that it is your duty to do (or not do) deontologists argue fervently about what those duties are, where they come from, etc. ("Divine Command theory", IE: Basic old testament "Do what God says becuase God says so." is a form of deontology, but it's not the only one) various forms of Natural Law theories tends to have deontological basis too.

The most famous deontologist (and arguably one of the most important moral philosophers ever, and a guy who still gets argued about a lot, namely the incredibly hard-to-read Immanuel Kant.

Kant is hard. I've tried reading Kant. He's hard. He's also german. And 18th century german at that. Don't try to read Kant unless you're REALLY into it. There's dozens of people who have written decent summaries of Kant though.

Kant wrote a lot, a lot of which is epistemology. (Stuff like "I know what the thing is to me, but what is the thing to itself?") but also on moral philosophy. A lot of people are parroting Kant unthinkingly. Especially when talking about selfishness and such.

Kant argues that you can't judge an action based on it's consequences: That would be absurd, since you simply can't know what the consequences are. (even in ordinary cases, say that you donate money to the poor, one of which ends up marrying, and having a kid, who turns out to be the next Hitler. Assigning you responsibility is odd at that point) He argues that since consequences cannot be determined, we need to judge whether or not an action is good based on the only thing that is good in and of itself (Kant uses that phrase, or similar ones, a lot) namely an *intention* to do good.

Now, how do you determine if your intention is good or not? Well, Kant formulates this in what he calles the Categorical Imperative. ("Stuff you should always do.") the exact formulations vary a bit, but he has basically two points:

1. You should always act as if you wishes your action to become universal law
2. You should always act as if other people were an end unto themselves, never a means to an end.

(I couldn't bother finding the exact english formulations because I'm lazy)

What does that mean? Well, the first one is because Kant thinks in terms of contradiction. Take lying, let's say you lie. Now, imagine that EVERYONE lied, all the time. (or even just in the specific circumstance you were in) That would render your lie impossible (it wouldn't even *be* a lie anymore, since everyone would be doing it) this is a contradiction. Lying thus cannot, in some sense, exist if it becomes universal. This makes lying impermissible. You can do a similar test for other acts (murder, theft, what-have you)

The second is that you shouldn't treat people as a means to reach a certain goal, but rather as an end unto themselves. A bit easier to figure out.

Now, where Kant gets weird is when you start to consider that since he doesen't take consequences into account at all, you can reach really weird places. We've established that lying is wrong, well, Kant argues that this is *always* wrong. Even say, lying about a jew the nazis are hunting. Since consequences doesen't matter this can easily lead to rather absurd examples where relatively minor transgressions could have averted huge disasters.

It's probably worth mentioning that Kant was infamously a loner, and thus his ethics tends to be rather... self-centered (in the true sense of the word) it's all about how *you* are supposed to act, and if other people don't act properly at least you can comfort yourself with the fact that you did.

After reading this post that says "Romanticized supervillain-esque conflicts", I suddenly just realized how much I want a Sandbox game where you play a customizable comic book style supervillain with super powers.

There was such a game. Then NCSOFT cancelled it. Dicks.

Although I am a fan of Immanuel Kant, can't deny that.

edited 1st Oct '13 1:40:19 PM by ShirowShirow

On intent: a rule of thumb I've often used for determining Alignment by Dungeons & Dragons terminology has typically been this: who do you intend your actions to benefit?

• Good answers, "Everyone."
• Neutral answers, "My tribe/family/friends/people."
• Evil answers, "Me."

Based on this, would I be correct in stating that your chief complaint is that the majority of heroes are actually Neutral, rather than Good?

I can't take Kant seriously since I played Socrates Jones: Pro Philospher. All the talk about Categorical Imperatives gets lost under him observing that he lacks facial hair.

On a side note, if anyone here has never heard of Immanuel Kant the game linked up there provides a VERY rough crash course on his philosophy. Which is only better than a Wikipedia page by means of being entertaining. /tangent

Back on topic, I think it might be a split thing. Maybe some developers just don't know how to write a real heroic character well. Maybe they're a bunch of Liefedldian 90's kids who think tough and badass are the only character traits a character needs to be a hero. Maybe some publishers *coughEAcough* just require horrible protagonists in all their games and the devs don't get a choice. Pretty sure it's a mix of all three (and then some) but I can't say how much any given thing is effecting the industry.

Boobs.

that...is actually very fun.

thank you for giving me a way to pass the time.

Cue a flood of deer repellant in-jokes and posters crying NONSENSE!

I think part of the issue with defining heroism through a character doing good in spite of having no personal stake in a conflict is that, due to the most basic of narrative conventions, protagonists in stories very rarely have no stake in their story's conflict regardless of moral allegiance. I think if we're going to use a lack of stake in the plot for a criteria of pure heroism, you need to also consider what the circumstances were that put the average video game hero in the position to get tied up in a game's plot to begin with. Especially when you consider the fact that several of the characters you use as examples of characters who do good for the sake of doing good end up involved in plots where - even though their initial acts of heroism that got them involved in the story's plot were purely altruistic - the stakes of their stories are ultimately raised to a point where being good is the "only option" anyway. Solid Snake, Zidane, the cast of Persona 4, Raiden, etc all ultimately stumble across plots that would have doomed or otherwise irrevocably hurt humanity anyway, the time it took for their conflicts to have a personal stake in addition to a moral stake just took longer than heroes who had them at the beginning of the game.

You mentioned much earlier in the thread that Faith of Mirror's Edge, while a moral character, gets tied up in the story's plot because her sister is wrongfully implicated in the story's central conspiracy. This is true - to a certain extent - but the actual reason why Faith gets involved in her story's plot is because she was willingly and entirely on her own volition a runner who worked to undermine the government's repressive restrictions on free speech. Yes, the incrimination of Faith's sister serves as the crux of the plot in Mirror's edge. Technically were Faith a gigantic asshole she probably would have tried to do something about her sister anyway, but the fact that she's a Runner who put her life on the line to bring the people information is an important one to her character. Asking "where have all the heroes gone?" and then setting such rigid boundaries for heroism is a self-defeating task. Are the Wonderful 101 fighting against world-threatening forces? Yes. But they're also a group of people who had dedicated their lives to saving people for one reason or another before the game ever started. Was the Lara croft of 2013's Tomb Raider thrust into her situation? Yes. But the narrative of the plot makes it very, very clear that trying to get her friends out of the situation alive is just as important to her - if not more so - than ensuring her own survival. Where are the heroes? No less prominent than any other era of gaming, really. A hero is defined through a lot more than the circumstance that inspires their actions.

By similar logic, there's also not many video games about being a villain doing acts of evil for the sake of being evil. GTA V stands out as a game where all of the protagonists are almost entirely driven by their greed, but even the most brooding and edgy antiheroes are either out for revenge because they were wronged or were forced into their situation. People going out and putting their lives on the line based entirely on their altruistic nature are considered cliche - just ac cliche as characters doing things entirely because evil makes them feel good - for a reason, and its not because of any innate cynicism that's overshadowed the optimism of writers in the world recently.

The chivilric hero got his literary takedown via Don Quixote. In 1605. Because people realized that the character Quixote represented was a tired, trite, and unrealistic one a good four hundred years ago.

Nobody's a hero 4/7. Paladins did good because their God was said to reward their earthy sacrifices. Soldiers risk their lives overseas to provide for their family. Even Superman, the single most prominent figure of a paragon for justice in our media, spends a majority of his time in Metropolis because that's where the people he cares about most live. And that isn't saying something ugly about people, but acknowledging that we're primarily motivated by things we have personal stake in - be that our home, our family, religious faith or wealth - is what makes the moments where we put ourselves on the line for others feel so heroic.

So the short answer to "Where have all the heroes gone" is mostly just a case of understanding that most of them were heroes well before the situation they were in.

edited 1st Oct '13 4:06:22 PM by flackw

I can't take Kant seriously since I played Socrates Jones: Pro Philospher. All the talk about Categorical Imperatives gets lost under him observing that he lacks facial hair.

Whoah, that game really suffers from the "mass effect phenomena" in that you have no way how the character is going to phrase the argument.

But who expected a hero to be a hero 24/7? The appeal in the everyman hero is that he is not and for that matter, the cowl usually is not either, even if that is not as much of what attracts us to him. Zorro, Phantom and Batman had lives that could easily be lived without the choice to involve themselves in fighting imperialism/nobility/crime.

Wait, but Batman wants revenge, that's his personal stake? Well, not really. His personal revenge would have been against Joe Chill, not the Joker. Bruce Wayne could have left his mask hanging up and never had to have personally bothered with Joker's takeover of an asylum, or Ras's destruction of a city that is little better than a hole in the ground either. There is a greater element of choice there that a lot of video game protagonists, especially when they are "heroes", are not allowed.

Or lets look at some of our real heroes. I am sure there are some volunteer firemen who fight fires because of some personal loss but I have yet to have meet one. I know no law enforcers who had a do it now or die ultimatum. Most of our famous activists were well educated or well connected people who could have easily left the places that inspired their great indignation and lived easier lives elsewhere.

But let us say this only applies to the unrealistic Knight Errant. Fine, but when I can heel my wounds with magic, food or walking around don't we have more room for some unrealistic knight errants? Contrary to the belief Don Quixote killed them all they still exist in literature(it has the largest section on the trope's page) and remain popular in pretty much every medium except for recent video games.

What, Batman had a life? Since when, I don't remember that ever happening. :/

Touche. The point being he personally benefits little from his chosen life obsession and chose it and stuck with it anyway.

Socrates Jones is stupid. That is what I have learned today.

This conversation has gone in pretty much every direction except the one I meant for it to go in.

Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that I suppose.

What was the direction you wanted it to go in? I'm rereading the OP and I'm still not getting what your getting at.