Gaming and Emotions

Sylvester's Designing Games wrote: Emotion is the goal of game design. Game mechanics interact to generate events, which in turn provoke emotions in players.

Sylvester on Reddit wrote: RimWorld's depiction of humanity is not meant to represent an ideal society, or characters who should act as role models. It's not a Star Trek utopia. It's a depiction of a messy group of humans (not idealized heroes) in a broken, backward society, in desperate circumstances. Some RimWorld characters have gender prejudices, some enjoy cannibalism or causing others suffering. Some are just lazy or selfish. Many of them come from medieval planets, others from industrial dictatorships, others from pirate bands or brutal armies. They're very very flawed, and not particularly enlightened.

The characters are very flawed because flaws drive drama, and drama is the heart of RimWorld. Depicting all the RimWorld colonists as idealized, perfectly-adjusted, bias-free people would make for a rather boring social simulation, in my opinion. So, please don't criticize how the game models humans as though it's my personal ideal of optimal human behavior. It's not.

Hunter S Thompson wrote:“We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's.

Sylvester's Designing Games wrote: When I first started making games, I never thought that I would have to face ethical questions in my work.

Sylvester on Twitter wrote:I prefer Picard to Kirk.

Entertainment is the front line of social control.

because

Entertainment is where corrupt elite opinions get uncritically passed on to the masses.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/12/between-the-null-and-the-void/ wrote:To watch the news these days is to be seated at a dark table in a casino for games of death. Or fantasies of death. At a certain point, it doesn’t really matter. At a certain point, one will lead to the other. Eventually, the fantasy must become reality. Those are the house rules. The thrill of the fantasy will ultimately be paid out in real blood.

Listening to Donald Trump speak is to be privy to a weird kind of political séance. He has become a fuming animation of the primordial grudges and resentments of white America, people who feel their invisibility made flesh in the figure of Trump, people who thrill at every low-minded slur and threat. He conjures up phantasms of what the elites and the minorities have done to them. He feeds them their fears in raw chunks. He offers sacrificial killing on their behalf. Mass arrests. Torture. Deportation of the sick and helpless. He vows to turn entire nations into glowing morgues. All for them. And they eat it up, savoring the bitterness. How long can this last, how long before the fever breaks?

Against Moral Austerity: On the Need for a Christian Left wrote:
Let’s call it the problem of liberalism’s moral austerity—a kind of companion to the economic program of the same name. Too often mainstream liberals chafe against robust moral critiques of the status quo, whether connected to religion or angry progressive populism, whether they invoke the language of sin or the language of greed and corruption. The idea of a moral politics itself seems dubious, too fraught with passion and hope, too detached from technocratic solutions for the guardians of the liberal center.

This is the deeply anti-political strain that runs through liberalism, an aversion to the task of moving others to fight together for a genuinely decent and just society—and all the argument, persuasion, and organizing that requires. The rhetoric of choices, nudges, and incentives comes naturally to the liberal mind and it threatens to become all liberals can offer—an attachment to the existing order and a deference to “the market” that can do little more than promise slight improvements to the status quo.  

This basic moral posture means viewing people in terms other than efficiency and utility. It demands humility in the face of social problems: refusing to pathologize the poor; understanding how circumstances or bad luck press upon us; and grasping that we are fallible and flawed beings, not utility-maximizing agents. No human being should be a mere abstraction, a person whose life and livelihood is made expendable by the supposed demands of creative destruction. It also means seeing through the illusions of those who believe the present order of things, the “winners” and “losers” of the status quo, have truly earned all that they have. It becomes a plea to de-link our politics and economics from notions of deserving and undeserving, from the self-serving justifications of meritocracy. We have to strip away the illusion that things are the way they are simply because of differences in virtue.

The starkest divides that we face are over these matters. And when it comes to such fundamental convictions—on what serving the dignity of the human person means, on what our neighbors deserve—religious people, social democrats, the populist left, and compassionate liberals can find agreement.

The challenge ahead of us is going to be a battle between those who think you only deserve a decent life if you've "earned" it, and those who believe all humans are worthy of basic dignity .