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Funnily enough, I never saw those games as criticising me. I saw them as portraying a particular character, who I was playing as but ultimately had little control over.

In Spec Ops: The Line, I'd go out of the way to check whether there was a way to avoid committing a war crime before taking the action the game was railroading me towards. This meant that I was able to prevent some things, e.g. shooting over the heads of a hostile crowd to drive them away rather than firing into them, but at other times the needs of the character's narrative drove the experience. It felt like playing as the remnants of a conscience, rather than controlling the whole mind.




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