Codex

I’d say the outcome is alienation; the process as the comic demonstrates it is a kind of recuperation, the process through which ideas (especially subversive or dangerous ones) are neutered and commodified.

In most of those, the alternatives are pretty weak and poorly supported. Also, violence isn’t the only kind of immorality, that is very much my point. And also… you have to name one that isn’t Undertale…

Moral choice in most games is pretty ridiculous anyway. In the vast majority of video games, the actions of play are already about doing unethical things (breaking into places you shouldn’t be, killing, looting, holding political office, etc) and the story or theming is just there to provide moral cover for why what you are doing is Good Actually ™️. Americans are great at justifying violence because our media trains us in doing it everyday.

If you tried to hold people to IRL standards of ethical behavior, the entire FPS genre would vanish. And that’s why these things don’t work well in games. You can’t punish bad behavior because it would feel anti-player. You also can’t reward bad behavior , even though that’s realistic, because it offends the miscalibrated normie sense of justice. And simulating the small-scale social consequences of immorality would also be immensely difficult and anti-fun.

I’ve gotten back into tinkering on a little Rust game project, it has about a dozen dependencies on various math and gamedev libraries. When I go to build (just like with npm in my JavaScript projects) cargo needs to download and build just over 200 projects. 3 of them build and run “install scripts” which are just also rust programs. I know this because my anti-virus flagged each of them and I had to allow them through so my little roguelike would build.

Like, what are we even suppose to tell “normal people” about security? “Yeah, don’t download files from people you don’t trust and never run executables from the web. How do I install this programming utility? Blindly run code from over 300 people and hope none of them wanted to sneak something malicious in there.”

I don’t want to go back to the days of hand chisling every routine into bare silicon by hand, but i feel l like there must be a better system we just haven’t devised yet.