Video games can teach deep truths about life, society and human nature.
Which ones stand out for you?
"There will come a day when you feel crushed by the burden of modern life, and your bright spirit will fade before a growing emptiness.” from Stardew
“Stand in the ashes of a trillion dead souls and ask the ghosts if honor matters. The silence is your answer” Javik (Mass Effect)
“When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!”
-Cave JohnsonSo motivational and inspiring.
“A man chooses, a slave obeys.” — BioShock
From Andrew Ryan, the founder of Rapture, the underwater utopia gone wrong in BioShock. This is Ryan’s philosophy valuing individual freedom and rationality over collectivism and morality. I can never decide whether I agree with this or not. There’s truth in it, but it can be misguided and extreme as well.
‘All your base are belong to us’
They set us up the bomb!
What you say?
We get signal.
“it’s my business doing pleasure with you”.
- some Madame in Hitman
“What is better: to be born good or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?” — Paarthurnax, Skyrim
I’ve always thought this quote was silly, because the first one is obviously better.
Paarthurnax did atrocities. Plural. If he were born good, less people would have died horribly, which is better all around.
The quote isn’t about which is more good, because yeah, obviously it would be better if no one was evil, but the quote is asking which is more praiseworthy. Do you think the person who naturally is a hero saving everyone they meet is more honourable, or is it the one who desires violence and destruction by nature and rejected that to choose to do good instead?
That is the quote that stayed with me the most after 30 years of gaming. Also, fuck the Blades.
In a world without gold, we might have been heroes!
—Blackbeard, Assassin’s Creed IV
Everything that lives is designed to end. We are perpetually trapped in a never-ending spiral of life and death. Is this a curse? Or some kind of punishment? I often think about the god who blessed us with this cryptic puzzle…and wonder if we’ll ever get the chance to kill him.
—2B, Nier Automata
I am a potato
—GLaDOS, Portal 2
NieR: Automata is pure love, joy, and sadness, mixed with action and philosophically induced emptyness.
And this quote is just the perfect example of how strong it starts.
“Rise and shine Mr. Freeman. […] The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world."
“Tell me… Do you ever feel a strange sadness as dusk falls? They say it’s the only time when our world intersects with theirs… The only time we can feel the lingering regrets of spirits who have left our world. That is why loneliness always pervades the hour of twilight…” -Rusl, the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
As a teen I loved the ambience of Twilight Princess and as an adult I understand the strangely cathartic melancholy a lot better. This quote was the perfect thesis statement for the game and it stuck with me.
War, war never changes. -Fallout
Made me think of this one :
War, it’s fan-ta-stic !
- Hot Shots
Rivaled only by “War has changed.” -Solid Snake in MGS4
“Just because you fear the dark does not make the light your friend.”
-Sunless Skies
deleted by creator
KotOR 2 Kreia:
To be united by hated is a fragile alliance at best.
Apathy is death. Worse than death. Because at least a rotting corpse feeds the beasts and insects
“Shouldn’t we wait for reinforcements?”
“I am the reinforcements.”
- Vagrant Story, PS1
