[REQ] Non-violent child suitable RTS!

The issue at hand Kiwi is the subtle, not the blunt. All children at some point wonder what horror movies are like, they frequently find out that they really aren't that interesting. Yeah, they're spooky, they'll give you nightmares, but I can't remember one good horror movie I've seen. When such psychological concepts as torture, extradimensional hauntings, homicide, sexual assault, unnatural and painful death are presented to almost any human, especially in a fictitious format, they quickly develop a tolerance, and eventually an aloofness for those concepts. It isn't dangerous because it is blatant and extravagant fiction.

Videogames on the other hand insinuate, instead of present. Horror movies bluntly say "Horror is bad. It'll give you chills. Not for the faint of heart." While videogames whisper, very quietly, that "War! Never been so much fun. War! Never been so much fun. War! Never been so much fun! Go to your brother, kill him with your gun. Leave him lyin' in his uniform, dying in the sun!"

It's the things you aren't conscious of that are most dangerous.

Or horror movies hint "Watching others in distress is fun and entertainment! How just it is that stupid teenagers meet untimely ends." It's easy to create a strawman argument when you allow yourself the luxury of deciding what the evidence is.

I think it would be relatively easy to mod the violence out of PA by turning gameplay into city building, removing fighting units entirely. To do this you'd need to:

• Make a single player campaign to give the game structure
• Each level create a different environment with obstacles to overcome
• Each level create unique goals, things like:
  • Build x before time y
  • Build x before opponent y does
  • Obtain resource x
  • Fly a rocket to the moon
• There is still room for opponents. You can compete over resources (metal), in a whoever gets there first kind of way
• Opponents also provide a way to time restrict a goal, without resorting to a boring timer

Making it fun would be hard. It would probably involve adding new gameplay elements to replace the gameplay lost by eliminating combat.

Mind you my point of view is entirely subjective. I've never found horror movies fun or entertaining, so someone else would have to bring their own qualitative observations to the table for that one.

You should have been watching Grep's stream last night. Truly horrifying

I'm not talking about pure fictional horror. Let's face it, there's nothing fundamentally scary about a zombie flick. Even as a metaphor for the simple fact that one day, death will catch up to you, no matter how fast you run or how hard you fight it, it still isn't scary.

The thing is that the subject matter often isn't fiction. Read newspapers. There are quite a few story lines for decent horror movies that make headlines. And then people make moviess based on real stories, or inspired by real stories. I'm not talking about horror movies that draw on the fantastical.


Note my talking about murder mysteries. War-like videogames do not whisper "Kill your brother". They whisper "Kill the guy who is shooting you, before you get shot". Which is more or less what society will expect of you in the event that an actual war occurs, and you sign up or get conscripted. At the very worst, war-like video games inspire a xenophobic approach to foreign countries, because ultimately you are shooting people who are not in your group.

I can think of many murder mysteries where people kill members of their own family (i.e. brothers/sisters/mothers/fathers/children). And there are sometimes where they do that for love, to protect their loved one from some truth.

I can't think of a single video game that encourages you to kill people because you love them.

Slightly off topic, but as a point of opinion I will say that most violent games tend to make people more pacifist then violent.

Not that this really has much to do with the topic, as the goal isn't to have a non-violent game because it would be harmful, but to remove it for people who don't want it, or don't care for it.

What with the relative abundance of combat RTS games.