The game’s messaging is presented with all the subtlety of a shovel-launching bazooka. The bumbling story has already been criticized by many people much smarter than me (back in 2018, when it was still relevant and timely). In fact, the weakest moments in FC5 come when that control is taken away from the player in the form of predetermined cutscenes. Having that sense of autonomy is linked to having positive levels of well-being.” “You feel like you have the decisions yourself, you have control over everything that you do in the game. “The experience is autonomy,” says Yemaya Halbrook, who researches the positive effects that video games have on well-being at Ireland's Mary Immaculate College. A game that mirrors real-life problems gives you a chance to fight back in a way that feels immediate and visceral. Animal Crossing became a pandemic hit because of how calming and gentle it is. It’s why people seek out movies like Contagion during a pandemic. It can be comforting to escape to a world that's worse off than ours.
“People seem to get drawn toward nihilistic media when they’re in more difficult times,” says Chris Ferguson, who researches the effects of violence in video games at Stetson University. Sometimes it’s simpler just to stare into the abyss. There’s an appeal to facing off against enemies who are distortions of real life, exaggerated and explicit in their malice. Fictional narratives tend to be more clear cut. As a society, we haven’t exactly figured out where this kind of willful ignorance ranks on the morality scale. It has also moved to a fully online curriculum.) These actions may have been negligent, but they're obviously not the outright cruelty of a Far Cry–style cult. (Bethel leadership has officially disavowed these gatherings and says it is working in collaboration with Shasta County Public Health officials. Over 100 students and staff tested positive for Covid-19 after the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry welcomed them back on campus in September, contributing to a recent outbreak that pushed Shasta County back into the state's more restrictive purple tier. In righteous defiance of public health guidelines during a pandemic, some of Bethel’s leadership have mocked mask orders, and one prominent member led a Christian music concert that drew large crowds to a Redding bridge. It doesn’t take a murderous rampage to sow chaos in a community. It's the controversy they've elicited that is familiar. To be clear, these real-life churchgoers are not at all the vicious marauders of Far Cry.
Sign up for our Games newsletter and never miss our latest gaming tips, reviews, and features. Even the game’s soundtrack is reminiscent of the kind of music I’d hear blaring out the speakers of a big, lifted Dodge Ram with an airbrushed bald eagle splashed across the hood. Quaint cottages perched on the shore of a lake. The game gets the details right in all the places that matter: There are towering mountains and sprawling meadows. The setting might be a couple states removed, but its geological splendor and prevailing political sentiments are familiar enough to evoke my own backwoods nostalgia. The plot of Far Cry 5 centers on a group of hyper-violent doomsday cultists who take over a fictional Montana county. I establish my redneck bona fides here to explain why this game had the effect it did. Growing up, I swam in creeks, split firewood, pulled ticks and burs off the dogs, and always kept an eye out for prowling mountain lions. For as long as I can remember, many of the people there have harbored ambitions to secede from the rest of California and form their own state. It’s red-state Trump territory that has long been sidelined by the broader liberalism of California’s coastal cities. The closest real town is Redding, a sprawling hodgepodge of suburbs, strip malls, and freeways.
You had to drive 25 miles just to get gas. Our only community buildings were a post office and two bars. The backdrop of my formative years was a tiny gold rush town a couple hundred miles north of San Francisco. But before my move to the big city, I spent most of my life in rural California.
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