Cop-Out: A Thought-Provoking Video Game Video!

Now, often I'm not to keen on just posting YouTube videos for their own sake. However, today I'll make a small exception (in part because I'm stupefyingly busy this week and can't give you anything decent at the moment).

However, a little setup.

This is from a video game called Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I've mentioned it before a couple of times, but it bears worth mentioning again. If you enjoy Star Wars and you enjoy computer games, you owe it to yourself to play KOTOR and its sequel. Yes, they are...engaging (I probably spent about 200 hours between the two games), but you can portion them out over a long period of time, like a good book. And they play like a good book. A good, interactive book. With compelling stories and deep characters, the two games are excellent, and I'm sure you could find them for less than 10 bucks a pop (they're quite a few years old at this point; I played them when I was a college freshman, and they weren't fully new then, either).

In any event, while you're playing in the game, your non-player-controlled party members will interact with you and occasionally (and sometimes more interestingly) with each other. Since everyone has such a fully developed personality, it's interesting to see how they clash as the characters develop their relationships.

In any event, the clip you're about to watch is, for me, the moment I remember most out of the entire 200 hours I played either game. And it's not a battle at all. It's just a couple lines of dialogue. But those few lines spoke volumes to me.

Besides the player-controlled character (who mostly remains silent) the characters in this video are Carth Onasi, a flag-waving pilot of the Galactic Republic who fully believes in it, and wants nothing more than to protect people from the evils that threaten it. The second is Jolee Bindo, a "gray Jedi" (that is, a Jedi who has left the order but has not fallen to the dark side). In fact, Jolee didn't believe in either the light side or the dark side, taking a very relativistic stance. He ended up leaving the Jedi Order because the High Council did not punish him for making a mistake that caused the deaths of many. He lost faith in the Council's wisdom at that point. In my opinion, he's one of the wisest characters in the whole of the Star Wars universe (even more than, say Yoda).

Anyway, what Jolee says in this clip really speaks to me, especially because of all the rhetoric we hear everyday. Basically, you could replace the word "war" with "election", "economy", "technology", "society" or what have you, and it would still be relevant. And that's why it stood out to me so much, even after these years.


So, any of you have thoughts on the matter?