Monday 14 December 2020

Playing Games for Fun is OK: An Argument

[Caveat: I am not sure I agree with my own argument in this post. I wrote it rather rapidly during my lunch break, and, reading back over it, I think there is a possibility that it is wrong and/or unfair. I put it on the blog unedited in the spirit of starting a debate, and nothing more than that.]

I came across two blog posts on Ethics in Strategy Gaming (here and here). The summary: one can experience moral qualms about playing games like Panzer General and Colonization, which cast the player in the role of a willing participant in acts of genocide, enslavement, crimes against humanity and the like. Which, in other words, make being a real-world baddy fun. No clear solution is presented to that predicament. (And it is a predicament. My rule in Colonization was always to avoid war with the natives, precisely becasuse I always felt squeamish about it.) But, and this is the key line:

Although the “just a game” defense may seem a tempting get-out-of-jail-free card in the context of a Panzer General or a Colonization, one should think long and hard before one plays it. For to do so is to infantilize the entire medium — to place it into some other, fundamentally different category from books and movies and other forms of media that are allowed a place at the table where serious cultural dialog takes place.

In other words, quoting somebody called Gilbert L. Brahms: 'If a computer game should truly aspire to become a work of art, it must fulfill both the recreative and the didactive functions inherent in all serious aesthetic productions: it must present horrible conflicts with all of their nasty details.' Games like Colonization and Panzer General, that is, are doing computer games a disservice, because they whitewash horrible crimes in the name of entertainment. 

Let's set aside the idea that art should have a didactive function (spoiler alert for that debate: didactic art is almost always bad art). Let's also set aside the claim that one can't learn skills from playing a computer game (problem solving, mental dexterity, etc.), thus fulfilling a 'didactive function' of a kind. Let's instead focus on the, to my eye, tendentious implicit claim that there is something bad about games being in a different category to books and movies and other forms of media that are 'allowed a place at the table where serious cultural dialog takes place'.

When people make statements like that, I always think it reveals a deep sense of insecurity about one's own likes and dislikes. I read books. I watch films. I play games. I also go to art galleries and watch and play sport. I like doing these things for different reasons; they scratch different itches. Why does it matter that some of them are 'allowed a place at the table where serious cultural dialog takes place', and some are not? Why does it matter that Colonization is not a topic for conversation at an upper-middle-class dinner party, but the latest novel by Zadie Smith is?

Perhaps this is a judgmental and doctrinaire thing to say, but in my view, games by definition are first and foremost about having fun testing oneself, either against a human or an artificial opponent. If you want more than that, you should be reading a book or watching a film instead. Beating up on Colonization or Panzer General for failing to 'aspire to become a work of art' is to commit a category error, just as would be complaining that a game of Sunday league football at the local playing fields doesn't aspire to having 'didactive functions'. (Although try running around in the mud and rain at 11am with a hangover for 90 minutes while dodging two-footed challenges from overweight men in knock-off Liverpool kits that are two sizes too small and tell me that it doesn't have its didactic qualities.) Art is one thing. Games are something else. If you want a game to do more than that, maybe you shouldn't be playing it. Maybe you should read something difficult or listen to some Shostakovich. 

This will sound harsh, probably elitist, probably arrogant. But maybe the problem isn't the infantilisation of the medium. There is absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying the infantile pleasures of playing a game for nothing more than the fun of it. Maybe the problem is just that you're not doing enough grown-up things to leaven the bread in your life and provide a counterbalance. 

87 comments:

  1. Of course games can be just games, and art simply beautiful or emotionally moving without being moral. And they can still be complex & clever at the same time. Unfortunately, we live in the Age of Moral Judgement and the new puritans insist morality comes first every time no matter what. Preferably in the form of a simple good/bad checklist & loud virtue signalling.

    At my upper-class dinner parties we cheerfully discuss Colonization or our favorite military uniforms (typically german) and Zadie Smith never gets mentioned as we consider her boring.

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    1. There is an exciting minor dopamine rush that people get when they think they have discovered what a piece of culture really 'means'. (Psychologists call this the 'feeling of knowing'.) It can be addictive. I attribute a lot of our current predicament to that. People just trawling through film, literature, art and entertainment to discover what it signifies about racism, sexism, etc. and get a rush from the 'feeling of knowing'.

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    2. Maybe. I tend to attribute it to a fashion for radical politics as a kind of lifestyle, LARPing activism (typically but not only online) as a hobby where you make activist interventions in trivial cases because it makes you feel good about yourself & allows you to show off. Yeah, could be a dopamine thing.

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  2. There's also plenty of works of art in literature and film that touch on, but don't engage seriously with, serious issues. It would be an odd critique to take on Pride and Prejudice mainly from the perspective of it ignoring the Napoleonic Wars and the implications of the militarization of the British Isles in that period - or at least to "fail" it on that point anyway.

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    1. Yeah, I think the point of the original blog post I linked to is that Panzer General is more directly about the subject matter of the Holocaust than Pride and Prejudice is about the militarisation.

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  3. Huh?

    Um. No. A game is a game...it's moving numbers around a map and hoping for a combo of luck and strategy to allow you to win. Everything else about a game is just "color."

    Violence is bad, war is horrible, WWII was really horrible, and the war crimes committed by some of the powers (looking at YOU, Germany, Japan, and Soviet Union) were atrocities that should rightly live in infamy for all time. But I have no qualms playing Axis & Allies with my child, even playing a side that butchered millions of civilians in the course of the war. I'm just pushing plastic pieces and rolling dice.

    Capitalism is a damn scourge of our world and responsible for exploitation, slavery, and all sorts of crimes against humanity. Do I have to have a sit down discussion with my kids every time we break out the Monopoly game? Does there need to be a disclaimer regarding systemic inequality on the cover of the boardgame "Life?"

    It's just about collecting points. There's no real money, no real deaths, and (for me) no question of "ethics" about the thing. Games do not cause diaspora or evict families or carpetbomb towns or murder humans. Games are an entertaining pastime of light competition, "flavored" or "colored" with theme to make the thing more interesting.

    At least as far as board games and parlor games. VR and video games...eh...it's all binary code underneath, right? That's still just "point" manipulation, ain't it?

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    1. Just as games are just "point manipulation" you could argue that books are just blots of ink on a page and movies are just light coming from a screen. reducing art purely to its medium can't possibly be done in good faith. A game of Candyland will inevitably "feel" different if it's reskinned into being about the Rwandan genocide, even if the mechanics are functionally the same.

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    2. As a fun fact, monopoly was originally created by someone who was against landownership, to highlight the inherent horribleness and lack of balance in our economic system. It was apparently originally known as the "The Landlord's Game." I'm sure the original creator would've LOVED for you to have a sit down discussion with your kids!


      I also don't think its an ethical issue, or that anyone's framing it as an ethical issue. To me it feels more like a piece of art critique: what is inherent 'meanings' that the systems and "story" of our games imply? To use a really simple example, the game "Life" has some really blatant implications about how society works in it: you 'win' by retiring, its assumed that characters will 'want' to marry (one person) and have kids, etc. The game presents a 'view' of what life is like. That doesn't necessarily mean its ethical or un-ethical, its just... a thing. That's worse discussing.

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    3. I agree that is a piece of art critique, but I think that type of art critique (having had to engage in lots of it as an undergrad) is really soul-destroying and ultimately rather uninteresting. You take a book, film, game, etc. - something which is unique, specific, situated, contextual - and then extrapolate it to discussions of the general, abstract and societal. In the process you lose the capacity to enjoy things for what they are, and you diminish the entire practice of making art in the first place.

      (I'm not accusing you specifically of this!)

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    4. I've come to reject art critique and 'deconstructions' for the most part because one you've taken every work apart and reduced it to its barest component and declared all author biases and all elements based in reality (be it the good or bad parts of if), you are left with nothing. There is no work left. No genre to enjoy. Nothing to love or to admire. Everything become either sterile politics or vain moralizing.

      Let stories be stories and let humanity shine, both the good and the bad. There is no story, no work of fiction, which would pass everyone's own morality test.

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    5. I'm on again confused where you get morality from it. To examine the underlying expectations or meaning of a work isn't an act of moral judgement.

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  4. Well, sure, games are about having fun by testing yourself. But isn't the issue really about how you choose to test yourself? I think it is fair to question whether testing yourself by simulating the commission of acts of atrocity is moral or ethical. There are other games you can play.

    It is pretty easy to dismiss these questions as politically correct whining if the issues involved don't affect you - if you are, for instance, a white male living in your European country of origin (I'm including Englishmen in the UK) discussing acts perpetrated against other peoples on another continent.

    But bring it closer to home. If you are a parent, would you be OK with playing a game that challenged the players by simulating various sorts of abuses of children? Even if the game was "realistic" given its chosen historical and cultural setting? Would you be comfortable with other people playing such a game?

    I also think the degree of abstraction matters, but only if you aren't just using it to delude yourself. It is unlikely that anyone objects to Chess as glorifying the horrors of war, for instance. And subjugating space aliens in a sci-fi game is probably less likely to make people uncomfortable. But if you give those aliens traits associated with real world racial stereotypes, you might not be fooling anyone other than yourself.

    On the other hand, these are all works of fiction. As works of fiction, the author chooses what elements to include. If the author of a game elects to simulate a period from history, he will be judged in part by his treatment of problematic historical elements. Glorifying those elements will surely offend those on the receiving end of the atrocities, but so will pretending the atrocities never happened. Unless the author is very good at addressing those elements head on, he may be better off picking a different subject.

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    1. Yeah, this is why I was not sure whether I agreed with what I wrote. My initial reaction was "Who cares if Panzer General is about playing as the baddies?" but then I actually thought of exactly the same example you did - I certainly would object to the ethical implications of playing a game in which you act as a serial rapist, child murderer, etc. One shouldn't be completely blithe about these things.

      As an aside, I don't mean this to come across as aggressive, or pointing at you for special criticism, but I am really sick of being told that it is illegitimate to have views about things because of factors I can't control. Would being a white male matter if I was Polish? Or Latvian? Or a Finn? Would I be allowed to discuss acts perpetrated on peoples on another continent then? Or maybe on the other hand I should be allowed to discuss 'Colonization' because my parents' families both came from Catholic backgrounds in Ulster, the original subject of British colonialism? And in any event maybe the fact that my grandfathers fought in the Second World War and my grandmothers were bombed by the Germans give me permission to talk about Panzer General, at least, even if I'm not allowed to talk about Colonization?

      Or maybe we can just get rid of all the bullshit rules about who owns what subject matter and who is allowed to express a view about it, and just discuss ideas openly? I think on balance I'd prefer that.

      Your comment is otherwise a very good one and I appreciate the addition of nuance.

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    2. I agree that there's too much viewpoint policing and identity-based silencing of the type you're indicating.

      However, I read Beoric's "white male"/"Englishman in the UK" point as less about telling you that you can't have a view, and more as a cautionary note about evaluating your views in situations where it's your own ox being gored, not just others'.

      So if you feel really strongly about Irish colonialism, that's a good place to test your views about "bad guy" games. But if you don't, then it's probably not.

      Generally a good policy I find.

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    3. I did not mean to suggest that anyone can't have opinion. I do think we should be conscious of the information and experience we may lack when forming our opinions. And when we hold opinions respecting a topic about which we lack information, we should hold those opinions lightly - as you clearly did based on your initial statement.

      No, my comment was aimed more at people - and I'm assuming Gavroche falls into this group, it was his comment that prompted mine - who in an absence of all experience and understanding of the impacts of policy upon living, breathing people, dismiss the expression of the pain they experience as though it was manufactured for political purposes.

      I work closely with Indigenous groups in a colonized nation. Part of that works involves a close review of portions of the historical record. It is becoming clear to me that a good deal of the historical and current discrimination that Indigenous people face arises from the literal marketing of myths about Indigenous peoples and the actions of the colonizers. That is, people with commercial interests for commercial purposes deliberately spread falsehoods about the nature of the Indigenous peoples, and about their own actions toward them, in order to garner public support for their commercial activities. The portrayal of Blacks in order to justify the slave trade is an obvious example, but similar tactics were used to gain support for the illegal seizure of First Nations lands - and I have seen the primary source evidence of this with my own eyes. A lot of those falsehoods caught on, and continue to be spread today, and are likely a leading cause of, for instance, violence against Indigenous women in Canada.

      Creating a game like Colonization carries the risk that the author becomes an inadvertent contributor to that false narrative. To the extent that such games inaccurately portray colonization as essentially bloodless, they feed the narrative that the Indigenous peoples really don't have anything to complain about. And if they in any way portray the colonizers as heroic, or colonization as a positive force, one can well imagine that colonized groups would take exception to that. It may be "just a game", but it is media that we consume, that repeats tropes we have seen elsewhere, the repetition of which causes them to form a part of our understanding of reality. They may not be high art, but **any** public expression of ideas has an impact on our collective understanding of reality, and the more widespread, the greater the impact. That is why marketing works, it changes our opinions (and by extension, our culture) in increments without our even being aware that the change is happening.

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    4. Beoric, I don't want to be dismissive or blithe about these issues, but it seems to me that you're falling foul of the problem I'm trying to identify. Thinking of the world in this way is attractive because it gives you a 'feeling of knowing' - a way of interpreting the past which gives you the sensation that you know what happened, and what it was all about, and what the effects of it are now.

      I am dubious about the value of that. I think it reduces the unbelievably complex and rich tapestry of human history to a fairly pat formula which passes over the literally uncountable number of individual events which have brought us to the position we are each in today. It's reductive, and it causes one to miss the vital human element in history.

      And this is how we get to the idea that creating a game like Colonization contributes to a 'false narrative' which apparently ends in real-world negative effects - even 'violence against indigenous women in Canada'. I just don't accept that things are ever that simple. And I think it lets us off the hook in asking why any single individual woman is subject to violence in any single incident, at the hands of any particular individual. All of those things have their own specficity. They don't have their roots in a narrative perpetrated by a few nerds playing a PC game.

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    5. "And I think it lets us off the hook in asking why any single individual woman is subject to violence in any single incident, at the hands of any particular individual."

      I believe the reverse to be true, or perhaps also true. Reducing every transaction to a consideration only of the individuals involved lets us off the hook from considering why some things happen disproportionately more to individuals belonging to one group than they do to individuals belonging to another group. It lets us avoid looking critically at the bias in our institutions, or even in ourselves.

      Yes, my comment on your blog is somewhat simplified and perhaps lacks some nuance and detail. That is because it is a comment in a blog post and not a scholarly article. Nor did I suggest that these factors were the only factors at work, merely that they are real factors with continuing impacts.

      I cannot comprehensively detail for you the primary source historical evidence I have reviewed over 20+ years of working in this industry, not can I explain to you the pain I see in the eyes and hear in the voices of my clients when they are confronted for the millionth time in their lives with narratives that demean them and their way of life. I can tell you in the matters upon which I have worked (not the slavery issue, but First Nation issues, with which I have direct experience) the evidence has invariably sways those who have seen it, in a formal setting and subject to rigorous testing, regardless of their starting position.

      But you do not know these things. You have no experience, yet you dismiss theirs without any real consideration of it. Whereas I ALSO acknowledge the role in individual responsibility, you dismiss my argument entirely. Perhaps it is not I that is choosing a position based on the comfort it gives.

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    6. Beoric is self-indulgent and vainglorious but you Noisms are rejecting his lived experience and passive-bullies are not tolerated in these trying sentimental times.

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    7. Kent: Yes, I have a healthy ego, I do not deny it. But being educated and experienced in a subject doesn't mean I'm wrong.

      Yes, I chose to lean on that education and experience in argument after 10 years or so of hanging around the community, where I have seen an increasing number of these arguments. I was reacting, perhaps unfairly, to my perception that noisms was dismissing my opinion as that of some sort of frivolous dilettante in love with a new theory. That stung a bit; thinking critically about these issues from both sides, and helping the sides understand each other enough to find common ground and practical solutions, has been and continues to be a big part of my career. Yes, it was probably self-indulgent to throw my experience around now. I doubt there will be much patience for me doing it in the future, so I'll try to practice more self-restraint from now on. I will try to be humble and measured, like yourself.

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  5. I still play Panzer General 2, an excellent hex & chit computer game from the '90s, now and then. I'm not sure in what sense it 'whitewashes horrible war crimes' - it's not like *Total War* where you get to murder your prisoners. At the level of abstraction it's played at, war crimes don't really seem to be an issue. I suppose it could have included an 'encourage/discourage atrocities' option - this would presumably apply to Allied commanders as well as the Nazis.

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    1. Yeah, I love me a bit of Steel Panthers, and I agree that Panzer General is a bit of an odd one to pick on. I think the criticism is precisely what you identify - the fact that war crimes don't seem to be an issue when they "should" be.

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    2. I recently saw a Youtube video about Patten encouraging a green US division to commit atrocities in Italy - he thought they needed to toughen up & get their hands bloody - they went on to massacre lots of Italian prisoners. I'm not sure to what extent Generals normally deal with atrocities. Do/did they often send out 'take no prisoners' type orders? No hex & chit game I've played has ever dealt with this, though I can see it being a military factor.

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    3. You see that more in films now - Saving Private Ryan, obviously, and also The Irishman recently.

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  6. Are you familiar with the game Train by Brenda Romero? It's a pretty head-on and shocking attempt to address this question:
    https://venturebeat.com/2013/05/11/brenda-romero-train-board-game-holocaust/

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    1. I hadn't heard of it but I'm always suspicious with that kind of game that it either preaches to the converted or misses the point. People are either not going to play it because they're uncomfortable with it, or they're going to play it for larks in order to he 'edgy'. Either way I doubt it has the outcome intended.

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  7. Games are not art, unless we start defining art as something entirely different than its usual meaning. But not being art doesn't make games inferior. And that's something about I wrote a while ago when Chaosium suits proclaimed that RPGs are arthttps://magickuser.wordpress.com/2019/09/06/glorantha-or-game-as-art-but-not-really/

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  8. The attitude that these games are a problem cuts deeper than just whether these games are a problem. THe thought that they would accept wargames in general, but single out only certain ones and certain historical events as problematic while not caring about others speaks to the problems we're witnessing today.

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  9. I mean of course it's fair to remember that games CAN and HAVE been "artistically legitimate," the medium's proven itself time and again to be able to deliver experiences far beyond "simple fun"... I think that puts it into perspective a bit. I've got no qualms with playing a game for fun, just as I've got no qualms with reading a pulp novel or watching a dumb comedy. but when an author of a work chooses to engage with material loaded with heavy significance, and chooses to actively ignore the heavy parts of it... well, it's like setting a silly comedy flick in the midst of the Holocaust. even Life Is Beautiful barely got away with that, and it still made an active artistic statement out of its own light-heartedness. it's an incredibly difficult balancing act.

    point being, would you be comfortable watching a simple, "non-artistic" film or reading a similar sort of book that espoused the same sort of perspective as these games? that's the standard I suspect these things should be judged by.

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    1. Well said! I tend to end up on long rambles about the meaning of art or whatever when I try to talk about this sort of stuff and thats pretensious even by MY standard so I'm probably gonna start using this phrasing instead.

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    2. I think we disagree from first principles. I'm just not sure I agree that games can and have been artistically legitimate. But we'd then have to have a very big long discussion about what makes something artistically legitimate!

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  10. Is it significant to this discussion that both games mentioned in the original quote--Colonization and Panzer General are both twenty-five years old (give or take)? That's a long time in a medium as young as video games. Certainly there are lots of movies from that era that haven't aged well--in terms of contemporary progressive sensibilities. I'm no expert, but I'd be surprised if Sid Meier saw himself as engaged in profoundly artistic labour when he was churning out the hits back in the Nineties. Maybe the argument would be fairer if we considered more contemporary games, games whose designers were more likely to have artistic aims (or pretensions, if you prefer).

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    1. You may be right about that. Total War may be a good example. Or the Paradox Interactive ones - Victoria, for instance.

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  11. I am reminded of the words from Penny Arcade's 'Tycho Brahe':

    "You know that feeling, the one you're feeling? That *is* the game."

    I agree that setting out to be didactic is usually a fail in any work of art. But I don't see why games can't *provoke* a reaction in those who engage with them and thereby lead them to examine their worldview or choices or whatever. Isn't this the same mechanism at work in good literature? Just the way you felt squeamish about war with the natives in Colonization, you might have the same feeling reading a book set in the same conflict.

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    1. Playing Panzer General 2 as the Germans, I do always get an odd feeling in the pit of my stomach when I capture the US nuclear weapons research facility at Oak Ridge, the successful end of the main campaign. The end montage implies that the US still produces the atomic bomb at Los Alamos and that the final result is nuclear war where no one wins.

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    2. No, I don't think it is the same mechanism at work in good literature. I really do quite strongly object to this idea that literature should have a didactic function and lead one to 'examine one's worldview'. It may indirectly have that effect, but the moment that it explicitly tries to do so, it fails.

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    3. What did I type here?

      "I agree that setting out to be didactic is usually a fail in any work of art." Artistic works which point to something outside themselves have already fallen on their face.

      Yet it's inescapable that great works of art to *contain* something which enriches. And the mechanism of this is, I think, in the reaction of the person who experiences them. Not by watching Roots and realizing slavery was bad when you see Levar Burton get whipped, but by reading any good work and developing one's empathy with the characters, whatever the storyline or context might be about. Learning a little bit about the world and other human beings. I'm sure someone with a liberal arts education can elucidate this more clearly, but it has always seemed obvious to me.

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    4. Fair enough - I totally misread your comment. I think we're in complete agreement.

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    5. I don't always type the best on my first try.

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  12. I think you might've slightly misunderstood the point that the article was making.

    As far as I can tell, your argument is that games should be allowed to just be cheap trash, consumed entirely for fun and thus not subject to the same standards that a piece of high literature or classic cinema is.

    This seems to entirely ignore the point of the article which, again, as far as I can tell, seems to be as follows:

    Video games ARE art, in the same way books are art or movies are art. That doesn't mean they're all good art: Just as we have Colonization or Panzer General for games, we have pulpy novels and trashy action movies for books and movies respectively.

    Saying that Panzer General or Colonization is somehow separate from those forms becomes a way to dodge criticism. This game trivializes horrible stuff? Doesn't matter its "just a game." This game has you taking the role of a historically horrible collection of people with absolutely 0 commentary on the fact that you ARE the bad guys? Doesn't matter its "just a game."
    It's the same school of thought that argues that we shouldn't care that, say, HP lovecraft's works contain deeply racist subtext (and text), or that any discussions of how marvel movies glorify the military is 'overthinking it.'
    All works of art that we consume contains themes, even if its pulp art or pop art: to pretend otherwise does a disservice to ourselves.

    I might be misreading your points though- feel free to let me know if I misunderstood your argument.

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    1. It's not that I've misunderstood - it's that I disagree from first principles. I don't really think that video games are art. I just don't understand why one would think that, or why one would think it desirable for them to be art.

      I do think that the consumption of entertainment affects the soul. What you watch, what you play, what you read, what you listen to, has ethical implications on that basis. I would not want to play a game that featured the main character as a rapist or torturer, for example, and I would not want such a game to become popular. But that's got nothing to do with it being art or otherwise.

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    2. I think a lot of the debates over this stuff come from a different on first principals, yeah. I (and others) don't SUPER believe that the act of only consuming media itself is an amoral thing, so I feel extremely comfortable critiquing the morals WITHIN stories or media I enjoy (or that others enjoy), which can tend to make others who fall into the camp of Media Consumption As Morality feel like they're being accused of doing "something wrong" for liking that piece of Media.


      Also, huh! I'm (I think) a generation or two after you, and I think my opinion on "games as art" is shaped by that. I grew up experincing a lot of games that actively attempted to cary inherent meanings in both the story and the mechanics, and that's colored a lot of my perception I think.

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  13. I think games like Colonization can be usefully didactic in that they show WHY all of those horrible things take place. It wasn't so much because of individual assholes (although there were certainly plenty of them) but because the overall system had strong inventives that rewarded horror.

    Same deal as games like Papers, Please.

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    1. Hmm. This may result in a huge diversion, but I couldn't disagree more strongly with a comment. I think that bad things happen generally ONLY because of individual assholes - large numbers of them, failing to act morally or acting with a warped moral compass.

      But I also think that a lot of what happened as a result of colonisation was the effect of forces outside of anybody's control, most notably disease. What conquered the Americas was not genocide, except in some local cases - it was smallpox, measles, etc.

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    2. Bureaucracy, corruption, fraud and commercial interests played a pretty big part in "conquering" North America (note for the largest part of North America neither war nor the law of conquest played any role). Disease and environmental collapse played a role in the western part of the continent by making Indigenous groups vulnerable those forces, but the environmental collapse likely occurred in part because of poorly considered government policy, corruption of government officials and the unchecked exploitation of resources by commercial interests; and I expect the resulting poverty greatly contributed to the prevalence of disease.

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    3. I'm both American and took a history minor, and the majority of the evidence seems to agree that colonization in the US was based in genocide. Even if you ignore the first actions of colonists in the days of British rule, American expansionism to the west relied on the repeated violation of tribal sovereignty and the mass removal and murder of the natives. (The Trail of Tears is perhaps the most well known example, but it's definitely not the only one). That's not even touching things like the spanish colonization system, which relied on the direct subjugation and enslavement of the natives (the encomienda system "entitled' conquerers to the indefinite labor of the non-christain conquered). The "germs killed more then the colonists" idea is based in some extremely shaky data.

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    4. Well yes of course all kinds of horrible things happened because of disease. Whole areas collapsed even before any Europeans set foot in the area so obviously the diseases could do a lot by themselves, that doesn't mean that individual people weren't also doing horrible things.

      "Hmm. This may result in a huge diversion, but I couldn't disagree more strongly with a comment. I think that bad things happen generally ONLY because of individual assholes - large numbers of them, failing to act morally or acting with a warped moral compass."

      I don't agree with that, if you look at everything on the individual level you miss the forest for the trees.

      Sure there are wonderful people and horrible assholes but in between there's a vast gradient of people who just take the path of least resistance, keep their heads down and make sure that their family is fed. In different situations what that path of least resistance is differs enormously and games can help show that.

      It's like running, we can all choose where we run but the terrain mains certain paths a hell of a lot harder or easier and people respond to those kinds of incentives, especially in a game.

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    5. Societal collapse and imperialist policies often led to epidemics, rather than the other way around: https://qr.ae/pNZkH9

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    6. There was a disease apocalypse in the Americas, but it happened in the 1500s, not the 1800s. It predated and facilitated Anglo colonisation.

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    7. Guys..you do know that Old World diseases were probably the major contributing factor in the conquest of the Americas? Smallpox, measles, chicken pox and the like killed something like 60-90% of the population of the continent in the decades after European arrival. Smallpox saved Cortez's bacon and allowed him to escape destruction in Tenochtitlan, and then brought down the Aztecs. An epidemic is almost certainly what precipitated political crisis and civil war in the Inca Empire on the eve of Pizarro's arrival. It was the biggest factor in the conquest of Peru. Plagues brought by de Soto devastated North American societies. When the English colonists arrived they were arriving on a continent which had been completely devastated by disease - where entire civilisations had collapsed because of it, and without in many cases even seeing a white man. It's not 'shaky data'. It is what happened. Societal collapse didn't cause plague - plague caused collapse. And the reason is simple: no prior immunity to the new diseases Europeans unwittingly brought with them.

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    8. I think your position may be "reduc[ing] the unbelievably complex and rich tapestry of human history to a fairly pat formula".

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    9. Nope that last comment wasn't directed at me. I'm VERY well aware of how much horror was caused by the diseases. Diseases obviously had a bigger body count than colonialism as can be seen in how the population of many areas collapsed WELL before there was any meaningful colonialism in the area.

      Just that colonialism also did bad stuff and killed people. Don't think that's too controversial either. It also often exacerbated the effects of plagues by making it harder for societies to hold together and recover in the wake of the mass disease-related die-offs.

      Also tangential to the point I was originally making in that games like Colonialism let us see the bad things that happened and, more important, see WHY people did them. I generally played the English in Colonization and usually was pretty nice to the Indians and didn't pick fights with them. However I slowly squeezed them out of their lands as my population increased and as I kid that helped me get a grasp of how colonization function as I could see how bad stuff what happening to the Indians due to economic motives and simply not giving a shit rather than through moustache-twirling villainy (in many cases at least). So Colonization served a useful didactic function for me personally as a kid.

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    10. Beoric: This is why one should never argue on the internet. I was forgetting the importance of that principle. If you'll scroll back, you'll see that the context of this discussion is my original statement to the effect that "a lot of what happened was outside anybody's control". All I have sought to do was give evidence for that, and I have done. There's no attempt to explain everything - it's just a pointer to historical complexity. If you'd like to disagree with the observation you are of course free to.

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    11. Bosh: That's a fair observation. What I think is important about it, though, is that the makers of Colonization probably didn't set out deliberately to make people think in that way. It happened to you organically, which is why it influenced you. Explicit attempts to teach lessons are much less likely to be successful in my view.

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  14. (Although try running around in the mud and rain at 11am with a hangover for 90 minutes while dodging two-footed challenges from overweight men in knock-off Liverpool kits that are two sizes too small and tell me that it doesn't have its didactic qualities.)
    This aptly explains why I eventually chucked rugby at school, and why I sometimes contemplate taking it up again.

    If games are about 'having fun testing oneself' I would argue there is a class of book that certainly talks about testing oneself with sufficient depth. Technically focused science fiction (A Fall of Moondust or The Martian) may be one part of this class; consider also individual-experience thrillers like Household's Rogue Male, or The Day of the Jackal - or wider Tom Clancy-esque cast of thousands stuff. These aren't necessarily the stuff of well-to-do dinner discussions, but aren't quite pure pulp either.
    As for 'doing enough grown-up things' ..... well, we have all been confined to the nursery-room this year. But I try to throw into my enjoyment of the (relatively) infantile enough discussion or review or contemplation to leaven it - aside from responsibilities or my other choices in reading material.

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    1. Yes, and I have a liking for that kind of book, although I could never stomach Tom Clancy. When the prose is that deaden I just become impatient with it. You don't have to be Marcel Proust, but a bit of effort to write somewhat stylistically goes a long way.

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  15. Colonization is a great game; I fire it up every so often to play a campaign. I KNOW Colonization. It is an odd target for moral outrage.

    Not only is it very old (as pointed out before), but it is very specifically a game of mostly peaceful settlement-building, asset trading, and human resource management. Most of your time is spent farming food and lumber, growing tobacco or hunting for fur, and shuffling colonists with special expertise between your various settlements to maximise your gains. It is slow-paced, and does not really reward massive military expansions, or even major territorial expansion. It is a damn farming simulation.

    A major push inland will either eat up your armed troops, or stretch your supply lines beyond sustainability. The final score deducts a ton of points for destroyed Indian villages, making it Totally Not Worth It. It is pretty didactic about cooperation and peaceful co-existence. You can theoretically play as the Spanish (who get a bonus for attacking Indians, and can loot more treasure), but it is neither very effective nor very fun in the long run.

    Of course, that's because the game is Hispanophobic.

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    1. That's an interesting point! Do you think that presenting a time period that was by all accounts full of blood and genocide as one in which the main actions of the colonizers are peaceful and passive is something the designers thought about? SHOULD they have thought about it?

      To me the game kind of sounds like the old western movies that present the expansion of America to the west as something inevitable and beautiful, instead of the economicly driven mass displacement and genocide that it was. I'm always interested in how different historical games choose to portray the time periods they're set in through systems (Perhaps the most egregious examples being the total war games, a series I love to bits, that effectively posits the whole of human history as a struggle for military domination...)

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    2. That's true, Melan. Long time since I played it, but it's coming back to me now.

      I thought Colonization was reasonably fair-minded and historical in its portrayal of the early colonial era - it's not really about Westward expansion because you don't get that far. If it's 'about' anything it's probably the inevitability of American independence but, as you say, it's mostly about trade management.

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  16. Of course (to abandon propriety), the real question is, how did most of our society turn into a basket of cuckolds. The instinctive reaction to this shameful hand-wringing is revulsion and contempt.

    Oh no! The bad game teaches bad ideas!

    These are not men.

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    1. "these are not men"

      Ok boomer

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    2. It's complicated. I do actually share the sense of contempt to a degree. If one thinks about these things too much, then one becomes a very bland, passive sort of a person - there is literally no end to it. Bad things happened everywhere in history, to everyone - unless perhaps you're a member of royalty somewhere. We all have a basis for greivance, and it's more edifying and life-affirming to live by one's lights and deny that what came before has to play any role in confining us now. I also really resent the rather parochial and historically specific issues affecting America being applied globally as if 'privilege' means the same thing everywhere.

      But, are we really saying that a game about being a slave trader or death camp administrator would have absolutely no ethical implications? Are we really saying that a game about child sexual abuse is fine because it's "just a game"? Because I don't think it is.

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    3. Perhaps not, but often it's no worse than "bad fun", something that is wrong according to rules of society but at the same time pretty trivial as nobody is actually hurt.

      Perhaps there is something very wrong with you if you indulge in it so obsessively you start to blur the lines between fiction & reality (not common!) but it seems equally wrong to spend a lot of time & energy condemning this sort of stuff. We're still talking fantasy & representation, no real life crimes.

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    4. It's easier for people to generalize "bad things happen everywhere" when they're not experincing or up close with the day to day consequences of that stuff, I think. Child abuse as a subject hits us all hard, because that feels like something that could happen to us, or to someone we know. It's harder to "personalize" the consequences of generations of slavery or of forced relocation, though. Those things are too big to give us that knee jerk reaction, and too long ago for us to "feel" like they should still matter (even if they totally did. I didn't really grok what had happened to the first nations people of America until I visited a reservation and saw the literal, today-consequences, of what displacement on that scale does)

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    5. Hand-wringing about how western civilization is getting cucked because some retard wrote a shitty article ain't very manly either, buddy.

      Seethe and dilate more.

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    6. It's harder to "personalize" the consequences of generations of slavery or of forced relocation, though.

      That's because those things are not personal, now. They're historical. That makes a big difference.

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    7. "It's easier for people to generalize "bad things happen everywhere" when they're not experincing or up close with the day to day consequences of that stuff"

      But it's still true.

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    8. "It's harder to "personalize" the consequences of generations of slavery or of forced relocation, though."

      "That's because those things are not personal, now. They're historical. That makes a big difference."

      Its pretty recent history where I come from. The last residential school was closed in 1996; many of the people who suffered those abuses are still alive and still dealing with the consequences. Indigenous peoples in my country still have reduced access to education and health care in their communities, even while a narrative continues alleging that the access they get is greater. It still requires the navigation of a massive federal beaurocractic process for First Nations to grant licenses or leases of their own land. (Try doing business when it takes two years of red tape and a plebicite to get a lease signed.) The requirement for Federal approval of local bylaws enacted by First Nations governments was only ended 5 years ago. I can't remember when First Nations peoples living on reserve got the right to sell their cattle without getting a special permit, but it was recent enough that I know people whose businesses were affected by those and other discriminatory regulations.

      Treaty obligations are still in force, and there are hundreds of lawsuits currently being pursued over historical and current breaches by the Federal government of its obligations. Indigenous children are still being removed from their parents homes and alienated to non-Indigenous families - an activity which is considered to be genocide under article 2(e) of the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

      Indigenous people are more likely to be stopped if they haven't committed a crime, more likely to be convicted if they have been accused of a crime, and consistently receive harsher sentences if they are convicted of a crime.

      Trust me, it's still personal.

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    10. Beoric: Fair enough, some things are still personal, but it's not that I don't think those things are bad or that I'm denying they have happened. It's that they do, as Simon pointed out, happen everywhere. Do you think people from poor socioeconomic backgrounds aren't forced into abusive schools, forcibly taken from their parents and given up for adoption, trodden down by 'the system', in every country on earth? I live 5 minutes' drive away from one of the poorest post code districts in Britain. I can show you women who have had their children taken from them, kids who have been dumped out of the school system or locked up in abusive 'young offender institutes', streets of abandoned houses from which people have been forcibly relocated to out-of-town estates because the council has some development project in mind. Until pretty recently kids in the Scottish Highlands and Islands were forbidden to speak Gaelic and had their wrists broken for working on whisky distilleries. I don't mean to dismiss misery by just saying that "shit happens", it's that the world can be very, very mean. And we all know that. And all of that meanness has its roots in history.

      In other words, if you start pulling at that thread you end up in a situation in which history only exists as a list of stern lessons we are all supposed to learn about how terrible everything used to be and still is. I would rather have a more balanced view and accept that it is okay to play Colonization for fun and not think about it too deeply - while obviously not remaining ignorant of the awful things that were done in the past, and which one can read about in books.

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    11. The pacification of the Scottish Highlands - the 'Highland Clearances' - used a very similar model to that used with the Amerindian tribes. Make legal agreement with clan or tribal leader, treat them as 'owner' of the land, gives legal justification to then clear the clansmen/tribesmen off the land.

      Anglos definitely do/have done bad things, including genocide, like everyone else. I think they're more likely to take a legalistic & moralistic approach to doing so than are most other groups. Sometimes the moralism is genuinely felt - the do-gooder liberals who take Aboriginal & Amerindian children from their drunken & abusive parents certainly believe they are doing it for the best, and maybe they are. Or deferring to very white 'Aboriginal' academics as genuine representatives/champions of the Aboriginal peoples - on the one hand those white Aboriginal academics speak the right language & are very effective at getting what they want; OTOH they seem to have at best a limited connection to & understanding of the peoples with whom they identify & for whom they advocate.

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    12. Noisms: I do recognize and agree that poverty exists elsewhere and that it has similar impacts to whomever it occurs, and I have those discussions with people on the other side of this argument. In my experience, however, poor white trash are still higher up on the pecking order than poor minorities. And they face economic and social barriers, but are much less likely to face systemic barriers and have an easier time blending in with greater society.

      As a modern example, Indigenous lawyers in Canada are often mistaken for, and treated like, social workers, parties or accused when they go to court; but if a white factory worker throws on a suit, everyone assumes he is a lawyer. The same sorts of things happen in encounters with the health care system.

      To be clear, I am not trying to stigmatize people who play Colonization, or even the people who made it. I just don't think we should dismiss the impact that ANY media has upon our collective understanding of the world. I am ALSO critical of media and tropes that vilify colonial powers and colonists through inaccurate portrayals of them, or inaccurately lionize the colonized, although a certain amount of it is inevitable and may even be necessary while members of oppressed groups find their voices and their confidence. "Ignorant, dirty savages who live in squalor" is an inaccurate trope and deserves to be discredited, but "noble savages living in harmony with nature" has other problems and may do almost as much damage in its own way.

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    1. @ Annon#8107 It must feel nice to have such a superior moral imagination.

      Nevermind that it's based on a spurious simplistic & reductionist view of history which neatly separates perpetually weak but innocent victims from eternally evil oppressors and ignores the often complex interactions over long periods by many different actors. If you genuinely believe the ancestors of the people you like to see as oppressors never experienced collective bad stuff on a large scale social level and their descendants are therefore incapable of proper empathy & understanding, you only show off your lack of knowledge. No amount of disaster tourism or lofty posturing can cover that up.

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    2. Commented on the wrong post, dude. Also wow, that seems to have struck a and a half with you. My point wasn't about how some people have experienced past wrongs: it's about how the scars of those wrongs are still felt today. To argue that some past atrocities aren't still relevant to the present sits wrong with me.

      I was also making a larger point about empathy: this isn't something that oppressed people are somehow immune to. There is, for example, a lot of homophobia on some black communities, or a lot of anti-native sentiments in some queer communities. To be oppressed does not make you empathetic to others struggles, rather, it leaves you more aware of your own.

      Also, disaster tourism? Reservations aren't like, disaster zones or anything, they're economic/political zones. Lot of assumptions and insults there my guy, I'd reccomend pulling it back about 5 notches.

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    3. Yeah, I mistyped. Happens to the best of us. Can't help noticing the switch from pseudo-empathy to aggression in your posts, but that was entirely expected. It's how SJW roll when faced with direct criticism. And you're not exactly short on assumptiosn either :-p

      I know what your point is about, and I think you are plain wrong and understand nothing about history. The past contains many atrocities, perpetrated by many people on all sides. If they're recent, yes, the scars matter. If we're talking stuff that happened long ago (slavery in the US for example) and of which there are no living survivors, I don't accept the emotional hysterics. These people are simply indulging in fantasy hurt.

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    4. "hey, it's harder to empathize with pain when it's communal and thus harder to think it's real"
      "Hah you idiot I don't empathize with communal pain and so obviously it's not real"
      Great post, such debate.

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    5. I'm staying on your level :-)

      I did point out your deficient view of history, btw. And I haven't really seen any arguments from your side on why empathizing with collective pain (which in your examples of long ago events I also deny is genuine) is harder. All we get from you are smug assertions, and when they're challenged, the tone immediately condescending & fairly aggressive.

      Nevermind, talking to the woke is a waste of time.

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  19. Just to stick my foot in the bear trap, US Slavery was not that long ago. People alive today are the grandchildren of slaves and slave owners. Lynchings have happened in my lifetime. The KKK is still around. These things linger for multiple generations.

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  23. Games are art, pop-tarts are sandwiches. I'll sword-fight dissenters.

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  24. Very very late to the discussion - this post was in my backlog of "things to look at seriously when I have the time and energy" - but I did want to point out a major problem in the post: the assertion that "didactic art is almost always bad art."

    This is just false on its face. Sure, it's easy for blatantly didactic art, with no other purpose or redeeming features to stand out in the consumer's consciousness and memory as an example of Didactic Bad Art. So I can see why the false impression exists.

    But if you think about it, most of what we hold as "great" art is also blatantly didactic. It's just that the pill is sugarcoated, so to speak: you get moving character interactions, and dramatic plots, and mysteries, and all the other fun stuff instead of just a Very Important Lesson being crammed down your throat.

    Let me put it this way: essentially every major religious text, whether it belongs to a major modern religion or something that we just think of as "myth," is didactic; its purpose is to teach you how you're supposed to behave to best please or appease the forces that run the world. All the surviving Greek plays are didactic. The Iliad and Odyssey are didactic. The Journey to the West is didactic. The Genji Monogatari and Heike Monogatari are super didactic. Dickens? Didactic. Mark Twain? Didactic. Dostoyevsky? Didactic. Voltaire? Didactic. Tolkien? Didactic. Ralph Ellison? Didactic. Citizen Kane? Didactic. The Godfather? Didactic.

    The Fallout games are didactic; being satire doesn't mean they don't have a lesson to impart! The Bioshock series, super didactic. Shadow of the Colossus, didactic. Everything with "Sim" in its name? Blatantly didactic. Oregon Trail? Explicitly a teaching tool. Heck, the entire origin of board gaming as we know it is the didactic mode of "hey let's find a way to teach people a lesson without them having to live through X experience in its entirety." Chess is just a tool for teaching would-be leaders about positioning and tactics. Monopoly was literally made to teach players how awful and destructive unfettered capitalism is. Snakes & Ladders was a moralistic game designed to help children internalize the concepts of selected vices and virtues.

    Most of the art that we recognize as good or great is enduring specifically because it has a didactic aspect! This gives it depth and weight, and probably helped its author(s) because they shaped the work to carry a message that was important to them. It's perhaps easy to counter with specific works that are didactic and bad, but that's just a misapplication of Sturgeon's Law. A thing done badly is bad, yes. Most things are not done very well. But that doesn't make a work with a specific message or "moral" any more likely to be bad than something crafted specifically to be mindless entertainment - quite the opposite, as a rule.

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