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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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(FC3 spoilers again, really don't know what's going on with the spoiler tags, they're showing up for me in the preview and everything.) || The game doesn't punish you for being a murder-hobo. That being said, I'd be delighted if Far Cry 3 gave an honest Far Cry 4 secret ending in the beginning, and treated you to a "Congratulations! You did the reasonable thing and didn't engage in violence. Here's a fully-animated spread of Vaas raping and murdering you and all of your friends to death! Sure is a good thing you didn't try to fight back, right?"

If you as the game developer need to cheat and take away my agency when the mechanics you have given me up until that point say I can do X, because you need me to do not-X for your story to land, you are a bad game developer and/or a bad writer. The logical consequence of fully-engaging with murder-hobo gameplay is not "I decide to kill my friends for no reason and then the retarded Bad End happens", it's a cut to Citra's perspective as she is waiting for you to approach, is concerned that you are taking so long, turns to look a the captives, and when she turns back all of the Rakyat are dead and Jason is standing in front of her, machete out, with vacant stare and happy smile, because the fun isn't over and now he gets to do all the outpost liberations again. I buy that a drugged-out witch would delude herself into thinking "Aha, I am manipulating the American super-soldier into doing my bidding!" and not noticing that he's killing people he has reason to kill, and that this started before she met him, or even that the last three times her brother literally killed him and the hundreds of times he got maimed by bullets, fire, or crocodiles he just casually came back from the dead.

If the game disapproves of my choice to engage with it, then the game is dumb, and if the game is instead offering implicit approval of Vaas and Citra by saying that they weren't punished for their own murder-hoboism, then the game is just the authors engaging in contempt and sneering at their audience instead of trying to make a point, and said sneering says much more about them then it does about me. ||

Can't do spoiler tags multi-paragraph, I think. You need separate tags per paragraph. The preview operates on slightly different rules. Click 'view source' on my post.


(FC3 spoilers again, really don't know what's going on with the spoiler tags, they're showing up for me in the preview and everything.) The game doesn't punish you for being a murder-hobo. That being said, I'd be delighted if Far Cry 3 gave an honest Far Cry 4 secret ending in the beginning, and treated you to a "Congratulations! You did the reasonable thing and didn't engage in violence. Here's a fully-animated spread of Vaas raping and murdering you and all of your friends to death! Sure is a good thing you didn't try to fight back, right?"

If you as the game developer need to cheat and take away my agency when the mechanics you have given me up until that point say I can do X, because you need me to do not-X for your story to land, you are a bad game developer and/or a bad writer. The logical consequence of fully-engaging with murder-hobo gameplay is not "I decide to kill my friends for no reason and then the retarded Bad End happens", it's a cut to Citra's perspective as she is waiting for you to approach, is concerned that you are taking so long, turns to look a the captives, and when she turns back all of the Rakyat are dead and Jason is standing in front of her, machete out, with vacant stare and happy smile, because the fun isn't over and now he gets to do all the outpost liberations again. I buy that a drugged-out witch would delude herself into thinking "Aha, I am manipulating the American super-soldier into doing my bidding!" and not noticing that he's killing people he has reason to kill, and that this started before she met him, or even that the last three times her brother literally killed him and the hundreds of times he got maimed by bullets, fire, or crocodiles he just casually came back from the dead.

If the game disapproves of my choice to engage with it, then the game is dumb, and if the game is instead offering implicit approval of Vaas and Citra by saying that they weren't punished for their own murder-hoboism, then the game is just the authors engaging in contempt and sneering at their audience instead of trying to make a point, and said sneering says much more about them then it does about me.

Have to spoiler-tag each paragraph individually. Dunno why it's better-behaved in the preview than in post. Use escaped control characters or periods to keep the paragraphs separate after.