I couldn’t find a place to put this in the main Far Cry 5 Is Dumb post, so I’m splitting it out instead.
In the Jacob Seed sub-plot of Far Cry 5, you get kidnapped like three times. This happens in all of the game’s three sub-plots, and the only one where it even slightly works is in Faith’s, because there it’s unclear how physically captured you are by any of her drug sequences and it’s totally plausible that Faith is actually just talking to you over the radio (as video game enemies do) while you’re high on the large ambient Bliss in her region of the map. Here in Jacob’s region, you get physically kidnapped for multiple days on multiple occasions and at no point does Jacob just fucking kill you, but instead does some sci-fi Manchurian Candidate bullshit. He does succeed in getting you to kill the region’s resistance leader Eli, but he was winning against Eli and he is losing against you. His threat prioritization is totally backwards here.
Unlike Bliss, a made-up mind control drug, Jacob’s mind control is supposed to work on classical conditioning. But, like, classical conditioning doesn’t work like that. Training someone to salivate in response to a bell is not the same as playing music that induces a mindless murder fugue. At best, and this is a reach but it’s close enough to real that the game could still call itself gritty with a straight face, you might be able to condition someone to draw and fire a gun in response to a specific stimulus. Even that faces serious limitations, though. You’d need the stimulus to be rare enough that they don’t train themselves out of it once released from your program, like, if it’s a certain birdsong common to the area then they’ll get triggered at random and learn to suppress the reflex.
But then you also need to be able to play the stimulus at-will, so it does need to be something like a specific music track, except it also needs to be sufficiently loud and startling to trigger an immediate reaction, because classical conditioning does not erase decades of regular human social instincts with two weeks of training, so there’s going to be quite a bit of resistance to shooting anyone the target knows and cares about, even a little. Even a half-second of hesitation is enough for the conscious mind to catch up with what’s going on and override the reflex, because no matter how much classical conditioning you do it’s still a reflex. Like, have you ever reflexively started driving somewhere more familiar than your intended destination because you just switched to auto-pilot while on a familiar part of the route, reflexively punched someone in a haunted house, or looked for HUD elements for half a second in a real life situation that resembled a video game you’d been playing a lot? Classical conditioning is just building in instincts like that on purpose.
Militaries do use that for the much more macabre purpose of training soldiers to reflexively aim and shoot lethal weapons at a human silhouette (you know those shooting range challenges in shooter games where little human silhouettes pop out from behind cover? Yeah, that’s why those use human silhouettes and not circular targets – it’s about training reflexes in response to stimulus, not accuracy). But there’s no secret turbo-hardcore version of this that ingrains the instinct any deeper than what video games accomplish. The idea that a slideshow and some music repeated long enough will cause a victim to find and assassinate a specific target is as stupid as the idea that you would actually search for or hallucinate stealth indicators while crouching in tall grass because you’ve played a lot of Assassin’s Creed games lately. You totally might reflexively search for icons indicating if you’ve been spotted in that situation, but a half-second later your conscious mind catches up, knows immediately that this is ridiculous, and discards the idea. No amount of additional trauma in the conditioning process will change that (it can build in-group loyalty for other reasons, so there are tactically sound reasons for a psychopath cultist to do it, but it won’t make the conditioning any more potent).
And when the game tries to use video game conditioning on the player, it’s bad at it and it didn’t work on me. As I said earlier, games totally can condition reflexes into players and it’s a foundational part of many common kinds of gameplay. Far Cry 5 tries to take advantage of this, by having sequences where you’re being conditioned where you have to use provided weapons to clear a ghostly hallucination type area of enemies within a time limit, and since it’s not a real location, it involves things like a short labyrinth full of enemies who shoot at you when you turn the corner. This does indeed train the player to follow a specific path and shoot enemies immediately after turning the corner, without allowing their conscious mind to catch up and process what they’re seeing. In the final conditioning sequence, the last enemy you have to kill is the leader of this region’s resistance. They’re trying to do a thing where the player actively participates in being brainwashed into killing the resistance leader Manchurian Candidate style.
Except each conditioning sequence is slightly longer than the last one, adding an additional section to the end. So what I was actually trained to do was to be on high alert for new information as I was reaching the end of the familiar part of the sequence. I knew from previous training sequences that they got extended each time, that it was easy to get lost in a new environment (especially since these hallucination environments make no sense, which makes them harder to navigate), so far from reflexively snap-shotting enemies who were exactly where I expected them to be, I was paying a lot of attention to the new environment and noticed immediately that these guys were ragdolling and leaving behind corpses instead of vanishing into a puff of smoke like the hallucinated foes in earlier parts of the sequence, which made it easy to guess what was going on. When I reached the named character with a unique model I’d been sent to assassinate, I waited out the clock to see if anything would happen. This just resets the sequence like any other failure, so fine, I went through with the assassination to progress the plot (it’s not like it would’ve been hard to program in a slight branching path here, we’re at the end of the Jacob Seed sub-plot and the sub-plots are completely silo’d off from each other, geographically separated and with no characters in common, so the death or survival of the resistance leader would’ve had no impact on the rest of the game).
If they’d made the resistance leader one of those guys in the labyrinth, placed in the exact position as one of the hallucinated enemies from the earlier sequence, odds are fantastic they could’ve successfully conditioned me into turning a corner and blasting him without even thinking about it. But not only do they vastly overstate what classical conditioning can accomplish, they aren’t even capable of using classical conditioning competently for the things it can do.
And this kind of thing bugs me because it usually stems from the belief that being evil grants you magic superpowers, which is one of the most persistent obviously false beliefs which make the world a worse place. Compassion and empathy are not inventions of civilization. They are instincts which we evolved because they work. We also evolved instincts for selfishness and aggression because there are other situations where those work, and you can do a lot better strategically than blindly trusting your instincts all the time anyway, but blindly acting against your instincts all the time is not an effective way to accomplish anything. “Evil = superpowers” is the kind of stupid worldview held by someone too dumb to operate in the real world where you have to be observant and analytical and figure out when to use one approach or the other, so they hard commit to one strategy all the time and hope that it works out.
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