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"Press F to Pay Respects" and other gaming memes that have had incredible staying power
- Thread starter ItWasMeantToBe19
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The honor, my good man, belongs to us whom you gifted said meme.
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I believe that the first screenshot of the posted scene was from the PC version.
In the vein of press f to respect, press 1 if you feel bad for Hungrybox has had pretty good staying power, although it's more niche. Hell fox only, final destination, no items is definitely a good example that has even started to spread beyond games
The issue was due to two things: verbalizing an emotion in such a way that it became laughably mechanical and forcing the player to complete that mechanical interaction as part of the game's checklist progression system without any other roleplaying. Paying respects at a funeral is to offer condolences or sympathy which are emotional responses, not simply touching the coffin which is the physical action itself.
Here are some alternate ways the scene could have worked, had more impact for players who were engaging with the story, and could have prevented it from turning into a meme:
1. Remove the text entirely. Simply have the player walk up to the coffin and display the interact key (F, X, whatever) to let them know they can do something. The exact same animation plays but without the text explicitly telling you that pressing that button just made your character express emotion. Some players would see the physical action of touching the coffin as a polite formality while others would see it as touching, but not verbalizing it removes the mechanical insincerity of telling the player that their character was emotional on command.
2. Don't even make it a button prompt. Just make it so players can observe other characters walking up to the coffin first, and then allow the player to do the same. If the player stands over it for a half second, then trigger the animation automatically.
3. Make it optional in any scenario. Part of the issue was that it was required of the player before they could progress. For players who just wanted to run and gun in a game about robots and heavy weaponry, making "paying respects" be a forced mission checklist item no different from any other mission about exploding robot heads made it less unique and more laughable.
If this was a Fallout game and the "paying your respects" was one of several options provided when you were, say, talking to the dead character's mother, it could also work. In that case the player is already roleplaying and has several choice on how to handle the situation, at least one of which will presumably line up with how the player actually feels. Forcing it as the one and only emotional response in a game that never deals with that type of situation again is part of what makes it less sincere and explicitly mechanical.
4. The worst option, but at the very least change the text to describe the action itself "touch the coffin" rather than the emotion. Pairing any simple mechanical button press with a complex emotion (press F to feel regret, weep in sadness, express remorse, etc.) is never going to hit the emotional target. Maybe that's what they intended, because within that context 'touching the coffin' and 'paying respects' can both refer to the physical action alone; however, 'paying respects' also refers to expressing real emotional sorrow as well, which is why it comes off as silly.
Additional edit: Representing a physical response with a button input works fine within games. If a drill instructor in real life told you to jump, or punch, or shoot a rifle, or use a knife, or even to say you're sorry or call your mother and tell her you love her, you could do so instantly because these are all direct physical actions that can be completed regardless of your real feelings. But emotions don't work that way. If that same drill instructor told you to feel happy, or remorseful, or melancholy, or loved, or surprised, etc. you couldn't necessarily experience those emotions instantly. Having videogame characters who can experience emotions instantaneously at the press of a button is what's so silly.
It's the same reason the Squenix "Please be excited" line also became a meme. A person can't simply become excited if asked. People don't have direct control over what they find exciting. At best you could fake the physical appearance of being excited, but you wouldn't be able to force yourself to feel emotional excitement just because someone asked it of you.
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Happened in the past. It's called backstory. Particularly if you're gonna pull a "player doesn't fully remember what they did" twist, you have to foster that on the player. While the player is in control of Booker, they are prompted for all key actions. And this is wholly intentional. Look at Prey.
Prey does the exact same thing despite the fact you are not actually Morgan. You are an alien that thinks it is Morgan, taking part in a simulation where everything that Morgan does, you are responsible for. Your entire experience is a test to see whether you can empathise, which is almost like a commentary on videogames in general.
Because it's a great example, albeit one with some caveats. Also because Booker and Mitchell have the same voice actor and both games are cut from the same story-driven FPS cloth. Bioshock: Infinite has many other "Press F to do a thing, and no, you don't actually have a choice here" prompts. Including the "Intervene" one where you kill you-know-who. I think you might be misunderstanding the underlying idea. And this is not some rare idea. You may not agree with "the protagonist should never perform major actions without the player's prompting", but look around you. The industry at large does. Go pick up any of the popular story-driven FPS games made in the past few years. They almost universally try to tell their stories in this manner. Even Doom 2016 does it, although players might not realise it. You know the scene where you back up Vega? You press E to interact with the computer. Backing him up isn't prompted, but the player was the one who started rolling the ball. That is very, very important. The action of backing up Vega was implicitly triggered by the player. Look at Far Cry 5, the best selling game of this year. It's an FPS game where all the major player interactions are prompted or directly triggered by the player in some way. This is not at all accidental design. (Why do you think it appears near-identically in both Titanfall 2 and Infinite Warfare, for instance?) It's explicit and intentional and designed to ensure the player presses E to... you know, that thing that happens at the end of Far Cry 5, thus making them responsible and complicit with what happens next. Yes, some games cheat and some games compromise. Consistency is hard. But developers, particularly FPS developers, strive to ensure the player and protagonist are the same person and the player directly triggers any major actions carried out by the protagonist, as much as possible, without overloading the player with prompts.
In an ideal world, every game would be Call of Duty: Black Ops II and you'd have choices at every major junction point. But really this seems to come back to the Call of Duty brand, the "Call of Duty audience". Advanced Warfare is a linear game. Player agency is not a consideration. Personally the game is weaker for that. In fact, this is a problem with linear FPS games in general. At the end of Advanced Warfare, you must kill Irons by cutting off your robot arm. There's even a prompt to do it. Whether the player agrees with killing Irons or not, particularly since Irons spared them, they are playing a predefined character who is determined to kill Irons. If they'd removed the text prompt and simply displayed a flashing "F" like they do later in the game to KILL THE MAN WHO LOVED YOU LIKE A SON, it wouldn't have attracted any of the meme criticism. It's the label that does it, for better or worse.
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Sure, but I don't think every dev needs to invest in divergent stories. Preset characters are fine, I'm in the camp that thinks Link's and Gordon's silence is silly at this point because they're fairly well defined, visually express emotions (Link) or apparently talk and provide responses to situations as evidenced by other characters' reactions (Gordon). The "pay your respects" label being is the issue is exactly what I was saying in the the first 2 points - have the character perform the action but without the label and it's not an issue.
My edit to that post elaborates further on how physical or even vocal actions are fine being performed as a result of a button press, but feeling an emotion is not. Shooting a gun or having an RPG character respond with a sympathetic comment both work fine as button presses, but having a character whose actual emotions can be driven instantaneously with button presses doesn't work. Asking people to "please be excited" is a world away from asking them to 'please show your excitement.' One is a genuine emotional response that can't be controlled while the other is an external response can be performed regardless of sincerity.
Attaching sincerity to a binary button will always come off as insincere and hilarious in inverse proportion to how seriously the work is taking itself.
"I fight for my friends!" - Ike in SSB Brawl/3DS/Wii U
"You'll get no sympathy from me!" - Ike in SSB Brawl/3DS/Wii U
EXPAND DONG
"Where's that DAMN fourth Chaos Emerald?!" - Shadow
"You'll get no sympathy from me!" - Ike in SSB Brawl/3DS/Wii U
EXPAND DONG
"Where's that DAMN fourth Chaos Emerald?!" - Shadow
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The idea that FPSs need player interaction at all times to help you feel immersed in the character or something is just weird. BJ Blazkowicz is his own person and own character. Unlike me, he's deeply religious. I'm not, it's fine.
The idea that it's okay in an FPS for our player character to be sympathetic in story after we kill fucking thousands of mooks but then we can't have important story sequences happen without the player is just bizarre. I can put away how many people Ellie has killed to care about what she's doing in the cutscene... I can get over not having a button prompt to feel emotion from my character. The much greater immersion break of a scene with your character paying respects is the button prompt. There would have been less immersion breaking without the button prompt. Much less.
Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2 settled this like... 20 years ago.
The idea that it's okay in an FPS for our player character to be sympathetic in story after we kill fucking thousands of mooks but then we can't have important story sequences happen without the player is just bizarre. I can put away how many people Ellie has killed to care about what she's doing in the cutscene... I can get over not having a button prompt to feel emotion from my character. The much greater immersion break of a scene with your character paying respects is the button prompt. There would have been less immersion breaking without the button prompt. Much less.
Metal Gear Solid 1 and 2 settled this like... 20 years ago.
Could you fucking IMAGINE the end of MGS3 if it was "Press F to shoot" instead.
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Well, the end of Metal Gear Solid 1 is Snake refusing to shoot at his friend no matter how many times you try. Because Snake is his own person and character, not just a player avatar.
And players still related to Snake a ton despite that!
Both great examples, your post just reminded me of how brilliant the ending of MGS3 was and how completely ruined and endlessly mocked it would have been if there was a fucking text prompt on screen to do the action instead.
Just the other day, when doing an Alexander raid in FFXIV, we were explaining the mechanics for new players, and midway through, the tank typed "Leeeeroy Jenkins!" and pulled the boss. So it does still happen!
And we wiped to mechanics.
"I never asked for this" from Deus Ex HR's teaser trailer. An ordinary (okay, a little overly-angsty, but STILL) line that the Internet decided to perpetuate until it turned into the name of the sequel's hardcore-mode fourth difficulty.
The "press F to pay respects" thing always felt like a really dumb meme.
I'm not saying that scene was well handled, and the criticisms are legit, but the way it blew up always felt a little stupid. There's tons of stuff like that in other video games, it's just when Call of Duty does it, people tend to throw out tons of hyperbole.
I'm not saying that scene was well handled, and the criticisms are legit, but the way it blew up always felt a little stupid. There's tons of stuff like that in other video games, it's just when Call of Duty does it, people tend to throw out tons of hyperbole.
It absolutely is the game's fault for not setting it up properly or for misreading its audience. If the audience in general is not interested in emotionally complex situations, stressing such situations is not a good idea. However, games like Sony's stuff, most walking simulators, visual novels and interactive movie games show that emotional content can be well-regarded among video game players. Putting such a shallow interaction into a most mechanically focussed game like CoD is a dumb decision though. In fact, I think that it is right to ridicule the absurdity of putting such a shallow forced action to express a deep emotional response over the same mechanic for mundane tasks. Especially if the absurdity is furthered by the context of being placed in a game where you spend 99% of your time killing countless people.
"Press F to pay respect" has staying power because it's such an absurd phrase. If the game had simply had a button icon with no text, nobody would even have noticed it or cared, but the full sentence highlights the banality of a simple button press during something that was supposed to be an emotional moment.
I'd just like to say that bioshock infinite's implementation of player choice is atrocious. If they let you aim and click to throw that baseball at the beginning it would have been good, but no, they don't trust you to aim and launch a projectile in their first person shooter game.
it's F on PC and it was F the first time the public got to see it. i think i youtuber uploaded the video of the pc version.
It really captured how fake and manufactured patriotism and the appreciation for the military is in the US too.
Then I took an arrow in the kneeTypically the best gaming memes either were already set and are grandfathered in like "All your base" or "You were almost a Jill Sandwich" or have some sort of easy use that never feels overplayed.
Saying "F to pay respects" is quick and easy to the point. The same with "They played us like damn fiddle".
A bad video game meme is something with no real use outside a bad punchline. AKA "I took an arrow to the knee"
Which was the equivalent of your friend telling one joke to everyone and praying someone would laugh at it.
Hate it when people mis-spread :P (not you, whoever did the pic)
