I have plowed through all of the questlines in the Battle for Azeroth WOW expansion. Mostly they were light and fluffy as per usual, but there was a surprising amount of emotional punch to a subset of them. Blizzard has gotten quite proficient at putting out polished content and their craftmanship shows. Still, there was one thing that stood out to me in a negative way - the main Drustvar questline.
It starts out with the people of Drustvar being under attack by witches. The witches were mind controlling people, summoning up monsters to assault villages, and sacrificing people to perform nasty rituals. That part seems fairly clear cut - stop all the murder! I did find some of it troubling though, because part of the story involves saving a woman from a lynch mob intent on killing her for being a witch. They went through the whole false accusation schtick, talking about which idiotic 'witch tests' they were going to implement. After that mess I was a lot less interested in saving the mob from the actual witches.
The most challenging part of the whole thing came later though when it came out that the people living in Drustvar right now are all colonizers. They arrived some time ago, decided that the natives were just barbarians, and committed genocide, killing every last Drust native.
Now one of the Drust natives, who survived for generations because magic magic magic, is trying to fight back against the colonizers who massacred his people and took their land. My job is to destroy him, to defend the colonizers, and end the Drust completely.
I wonder if the people who wrote this questline thought about what this all means in the real world. Do they think that we should murder all the natives that were displaced by European colonizers? Do they think that doing this is right? Did they stop to consider that the story of defending a genocidal people from those they annihilated is a problem?
This isn't some side questline either. To access huge portions of the game you simply have to go through it. I did all the quests, but it bothered me.
The funny thing is that certain bits of WOW stories bother me, like supporting the genocidal colonizers above, or using torture to extract information from people. When I encounter those stories they stand out and I quite dislike them. But there are tons of quests where some goblin wants money so I go and slaughter 50 people to collect some bit that the goblin needs to make a get rich quick scheme work. Those don't bother me. I have slaughtered thousands upon thousands of enemies in WOW, yet I shrug that off. Kill one spirit of a native that represents a destroyed people though? This gets under my skin.
Seems like the breakpoint is whether or not people in the real world would actually support the action in question. People wouldn't support me murdering 50 people to get a Ionizing Galvinator for a goblin, and the absurdity of it means it doesn't get to me. But torturing people for information? Lots of people think that actually works, and media portraying it as an effective tactic is actually dangerous. We have real debates in society about whether or not torture is a thing we should do, so torturing people in the game is a problem.
"The natives are inconvenient, so we would be better off with them all dead." is a thing real people believe. It is abhorrent to me, but it is a sentiment I have even heard at family events in the past few years. When that sort of sentiment appears in a game it isn't a silly thing we can all laugh at - we seriously have to stop this kind of thing.
I want people making games to be able to tell any kind of story they want. However, I also want those games to stop supporting truly evil mindsets, and it is wrong to place things like native genocide into stories in ways that suggest that it is fine and banal, and we ought to just accept it and move on. It isn't fine, we shouldn't accept it, and we are a long fucking way from just moving on.
