Prepare to be spoiled
if you don't want Prey spoilers this is your chance to bail
and go play Prey it's really good.
I'm serious as soon as the music
Finishes playing I'm going to drop like the biggest spoiler this game has
I am buying you time right now and that window is closing
This is it here. We go three two one
Prey ends with what seems like the stupidest most "videogamy" moral choice ever
it literally reads kill everybody or take your brother's hand
on the surface that seems so ludicrous and so typical
of badly done video game moral choice moments
that it's easy to dismiss
But it's actually not quite as simple as it may sound
because that ridiculous choice is actually just part of a much larger ethical journey
that prey has been working the player through from the opening minutes
At the outset of the game, you're presented with a psychological test
And it seems like a throwaway exercise a nothing moment filled with the kind of pablum
pseudo psych questions that you would see shared
by your more pretentious friends on Facebook or on a Voight-Kampff test
But what you may not realize in that moment is that prey the game
is that psychological test the whole experience is designed to mirror the test
both in fiction and for the player
Let's look at that test for a moment. It's questions can be summed up as
One: how open are you to new experiences?
Two: Say you're sentenced to death for something you've done
How do you feel
Three: Which is more important the good of the few or the good of the many?
Four: which matters more to you your personal well-being or the well-being of others
These questions are all very easy to answer in the abstract
you probably already have an idea of how you would answer them
But the genius of Prey is that after it has you answer those questions
It is going to force you to act them out for real or at least in a simulation
and in doing so Prey is going to force you not only to question the answers you gave
but to reveal your true answers through your actions
The in-game quiz itself is a pretty big hint to Prey's larger purpose
But what's astounding?
Is that prey makes this even more overt by having that simulation actually be the in-game story?
After the credits roll Prey reveals that the whole game has actually been a simulation
designed to test an alien creature to see if it has the right psychological makeup
and that creature is you. You have literally been playing that creature the whole time
which means that you as the human being playing this game are a creature taking a
psychological test in the form of a simulation in which you inhabit a creature
taking a psychological test in the form of a simulation
So let's see how the game forces you to address each of those questions on that test
Question one: how open are you to new experiences?
This one's fairly straightforward.
In a mechanical sense, there's usually many different ways to solve any given problem in this game
Did you actually seek out alternative solutions?
Or did you just use the same solutions over and over again shooting or hacking your way through everything?
shooting or hacking your way through everything?
Question two: Say you're sentenced to death for something you've done
How do you feel?
This one's a strangely specific question
And it's actually the premise of how the player is supposed to understand the story for most of the game
Early on you meet basically a robot version of yourself
who tells you that you have to destroy the station you're on and
That you are going down with the ship that you have to do this because of the things you've done
It is made explicit that this is a death sentence and that you are the one who has to carry it out
Why do you have to carry it out though
well because past you decided to secretly conduct very dangerous experiments
Experiments that might endanger mankind itself.
Why did you do it? In flashbacks your character gives several justifications
But they all boil down to ushering in a new era for mankind.
To create a future where as a species we are something greater, something more
And that brings us to question 3.
Which is more important the good of the few or the good of the many?
On the test this was phrased as a hackneyed psyche hypothetical:
a runaway train is bearing down on five people tied to a track.
You can cause the train to switch tracks
But there's one person tied to the second track - so what do you do?
For many people this seems like just a simple equation
You switch the tracks and do the least harm. But that is the very justification
that the trans star employees have used to justify all of the horrors you find on this station.
All of this killing in thename of science all of this torture and inhumanity
All of it was justified by saying that it was the sacrifice of a few to save millions of lives.
To make all of humanity better
The entire game is built to point out that the question of the good of the few versus the good of the many
is a fundamentally flawed question that it can't be reduced to an abstract equation
the reality of that question is so complex and when somebody tries to make that decision
from a removed abstract point of view, terrible realities can ensue.
To drive this home the game makes it abundantly clear
Just how difficult it is to make that choice as an abstract calculation when in a real situation
Throughout the whole game over and over and over you are told
that if even one of these alien creatures gets to earth,
mankind is doomed, billions of people would die
and yet I'll bet a lot of you who played this tried to find a way to get people
safely off the station before you blew it up
I bet that seemed like the right thing to do saving those people
but in doing so you put everybody on earth at risk.
Any shuttle any escape pod leaving that station could easily house one of those shape-shifting aliens
They could take the form of a seatbelt or a clipboard or a coffee cup in terms of pure calculation
You can't risk that it is ridiculous to try to save a handful of people
from what can be thought of as the world's most infectious disease
if it means risking the whole planet below
And yet without even thinking
it's easy to prioritize the people standing right in front of you.
These people with faces and names over the unnamed and unknown masses
Which leads us to the last question.
Question 4, which matters more to you
Would you put the good of the many over the good of yourself?
Here we come to the end of the line. The question looked so silly at first
Choosing whether to take your brother's hand or kill everybody
Because in the light of the rest of test and in light of everything you've experienced on the station,
that question has become about whether there is inherent worth in humanity.
Whether we are redeemable
The philosophy that Prey explores is a very bleak one. It presents us with aliens the typhon
And we are taught to think of them as the enemy as violent ruthless killers
Then we're told that the typhon lack empathy they lack compassion
It's not that they suppress empathy
but that they simply don't have any understanding or capacity for it
they may not even understand that they're killing people when they transmute us
or incorporate our consciousness into the coral they weave
But do you remember when you were first told this truth about the typhon?
It was amidst some scenes of the most compassionless human acts
amid scientific tests carried out on living human beings. It forces us to ask who is worse
these aliens who kill with no capacity for empathy or
human beings who have that capacity and yet ignore it to do terrible acts.
There's this one moment where a man an ex cosmonaut
whose only crime is disagreeing with the government
is sealed in a test chamber.
He pleads with the characters
He tells them that he signed on for this to see his daughter
that they promised that he could see his daughter
Meanwhile the scientists just read over the Diagnostics for their tests
Then they begin. They dropped one of the Typhon into his chamber
and watch as the creature devours him
It is not quick or painless you hear his screams
And the only point to this test was to see if the creature would metamorphose differently
using an old subject rather than a young one.
It seems so arbitrary an experiment done
Just because they could like a child poking an animal with a stick just to see what it'll do
and that whole experiment was ordered by the character you are currently playing
Your character might be the worst person on this station
the one most willing to expend others lives the one most certain that the ends will justify the means
And so we arrive at that last choice
Do we kill humanity or embrace it?
Ultimately it's asking us if we can look at our human tribe objectively
and really see the darkness in us see a darkness, darker than those inky Typhon
Darker than those living shadows that walk the halls of Talos one
If we can, then and only then will we have the perspective to make this choice
We can condemn humanity knowing that mankind often casts aside the compassion
we've been endowed with to achieve our goals
or we can spare humanity declaring that so long as we have the capacity for compassion within us,
we have a chance at redemption
Therein lies the genius of prey it begins by asking you simple ethics questions
And then proceeds to make you put the lie to each answer you gave
Thereby forcing you to actually examine those answers
I said I like to try new things and yet I fell back on guns and hacking most of the time
I said that I would feel confident in the worth of my choices
Even if society condemned me for them
But when push came to shove I scrambled to find a way out to find a way to escape this space station
I
Said that I would put the good of the many over the good of the few and yet I fought to save Talos one's occupants
breaking quarantine and potentially exposing earth to the most dire of threats
I said that I would choose the good of the many over my own
And yet I left that station alive and in the end I chose to take my brother's hand
And I'm still asking myself
Did I do it because I believe in humanity?
Or did I do it simply because I am human and I need to believe that there is some good in this species
Otherwise what hope is there for me?
Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week