Gaming Moments That Made You Feel Awkward or Uncomfortable

Has there ever been something related to video games that made you feel awkward or uncomfortable? This can be something that happened in a game, your response to an in-game event, a discussion you had with someone who doesn't play games, or anything else you can think of.

I had a moment like this in The Last Of Us. I cheered at the scene when Ellie hacks David to bits with a machete, but then I felt really shitty as soon as I realised that I had just cheered at a man being brutally murdered. True, David is a scumbag of the highest order and he absolutely had it coming, but I still felt bad about it. Maybe the Moral Guardians are right after all, and we are all bloodthirsty psychopaths...

Don't chuck me down to yer level, cretin

:P

I'd say any bizarre character designs Nintendo manages to yank out nowadays. If it's not Tingle in all his campy glory, it's something else. I guess stuff like Ghirahim/ The Fabulous Debbie licking his chops like a rapist over Link's shoulder is put there as Ninty's way of saying "I'M GOING TO MAKE GODDAMN SURE YOU CAN'T PLAY THIS IN FRONT OF FAMILY WITHOUT SQUIRMING!!"

edited 11th Nov '13 9:57:13 AM by Schitzo

If "literally made me vomit" can be counted as unconformable than the Kelly Chambers lapdance in Mass Effect 2.

There's a bit in Pavel's story in one of the Metro Last Light DL Cs.

Two mooks are playing a version of Russian roulette with an unloaded revolver, the older mook is just testing the newer mook's mettle and newer mook has no idea it's empty.

While their backs are turned you can sneak over to the revolver and load live ammunition into it. Do so and the older mook will shoot newer mook right in the chest.

I remember feeling just immensely guilty watching the newer mook die from a sucking chest wound and the older mook desperately try to help him. Newer mook dies and older mook eventually starts sobbing about how he just killed his friend.

edited 11th Nov '13 1:31:06 PM by LeGarcon

First one I remember making me uncomfortable was the old Overlord RPG "door" game on the local BBS. It's a text-based RPG. There's a scene where you come upon a group of Orcs assaulting a woman and can choose to fight them or join them (there might have been a third option to try to run). I quickly found out that they're really, really high-level, so you pretty had to choose to either lose a lot of progress in the game or sully yourself. I felt uncomfortably making that choice. Second one was playing Star Wars Knights Of The Old Republic with the "Romeo and Juliet" plot. I was playing Dark Side and engineered things so that the conflict escalated to violence. Again, really uncomfortable for me. Oddly enough, playing games like Saints Row and Grand Theft Auto don't bother me, I guess because there you're supposed to be scum.

Literally?

For me, the absurd sex scene in God of War III. Dear Lord, that's pathetic.

edited 11th Nov '13 10:56:52 AM by Ninety

Reading a report in Fallout: New Vegas. A guy sold some kidnapped kids as slaves to the Fiends, psychopathic drug addicts. On of them then proceeds to burn the boy to death and make the girls watch, then raped them. It's also implied that he's a cannibal...

Edit: Redundancy is fun.

edited 11th Nov '13 12:01:24 PM by Funden

MM Os in general, but a stand out is World of Warcraft when I was asked to bag up a bunch of children and hand them over to a tribesmen with the intent of raising them to prevent the extinction of their race, which you and the rest of the tribesmen's people seemed hellbent on causing. The quest is just a minor set of objectives pieced together to help you get experience and money like everything else in the game, but the parallels to actual genocidal and culture erasing practices left a really bad taste in my mouth.

Murdering the Flying Police in Bioshock Infinite, and especially when seeing what the Devil's Kiss kills look like. Like, I felt bad killing guys who were ultimately cops doing their job, corrupt or not, racist or not. And then I saw Devil's Kiss making their flesh melt reducing them to Skeletons which collapsed in a pile of slag and bones, and I felt REALLY bad… I still love the game, and I got used to it (Oh god.) but that felt nasty at the time…

Recently played the Spec Ops The Line demo. Didn't need to even get into the heavy shit the game is infamous for. Simply ordering my sniper to shoot a man in the head while he was having a casual conversation with a buddy was enough for me to shut it off.

You generally need to make bad guys SERIOUS scumbags for me to gleefully slaughter them without pause. It generally bugs me when the bad guys are a culture or species and not an organization too. Black Humor helps though.

edited 11th Nov '13 12:22:50 PM by ShirowShirow

Literally.

I'm sorry... That's really funny.

Lessee...that time I took the old widow's money that her husband had left her in Thief: Deadly Shadows, and talking to Rao in Okami.

edited 11th Nov '13 1:43:02 PM by Lemurian

I've only watched an LP of it, but nearly everything involving Aya in The 3rd Birthday.

edited 11th Nov '13 1:48:40 PM by Customer

in tales of the abyss, when the game kept trying to get laughs out of guys gynophobia, even after its been revealed to the party and the player that it originated from a serious trauma that...really shouldnt be trivialized for the sake of cheap laughs. also i think once or twice the group rubs luke's ignorance in his face long after his pointing out he's spent the 7 years he's effectively had to live trying to learn the faces of the people he was supposed to know.

not a personal experience, since i havent finished legendia yet, but a friend of mine once told me she found maurits being so easily forgiven kind of sickening. she didnt tell me what he did though...

oh and during arkham city, batman's..less than patient interactions with mr freeze.

Alistair yelling at me in Dragon Age Origins after I'd sacrificed Isolde in order to get the demon in Connor out of him. I actually reloaded an earlier save to go back and do the Circle Tower route instead.

Then there was also the ending of the Kasumi DLC in Mass Effect 2. That was one of the moments in the series (I recently replayed it with all of the DLC, which is where this moment came from) where, after I had been sure of myself in every decision, that I legitimately didn't know what the right choice was. I had her destroy the black box, though.

Does hating yourself count? Because I decided to leave Lilly behind after she shot Carley in The Walking Dead: The Game, and immediately felt like a terrible person.

You know Shirow, it's interesting that you say that, since that is what the developers of Spec Ops were aiming for. After all, they wanted to show that your enemies are people as well.

As for my moments, I'm gonna have to go with every time I killed a boss in Shadow Of The Colossus. Gosh dang, did I feel bad afterwards.

I don't remember that one. O.o

As for awkward moments, I'd say Sartan's side quest in Dungeon Siege II, "Sartan's Suspicion." I didn't feel good after finishing it.

I think this issue is the reason why nobody leaves Zulf behind in Bastion.

I set my sail...

I did. The second and third playthrough, first for completion and second to have a semi-canon two playthroughs.

edited 11th Nov '13 3:35:30 PM by Ninjaxenomorph

Youuuuuuuuuu

Thank you for EFFECTIVE spoiler tags for a game I still intend to play.

edited 11th Nov '13 3:46:59 PM by ShirowShirow

Do eet!