Should I trust my police captain when he says crime is out of control, or should I wonder if he’s just protecting his own livelihood?
The nice thing about most fiction (unreliable narrators exist), especially with video games, is that often you can trust what you are given. I’d think the SimCity police captain is just an NPC mouthpiece for which the game can report the crime frequency variable it has with no obfuscation, because that’s how games work—most are honest about stats. In real life I need to have this worry, to balance it with “am I incorrectly biased because I don’t see much crime and am incorrectly applying that to the entire rest of the city I don’t live in? Is it the police captain doing corrupt things? Is it both?” So much anxiety about what’s true and what is not, who’s twisting the truth, who genuinely intends to report truth but got something wrong by accident… but in fiction I can usually mindlessly trust the narrator, in games I can mindlessly trust the stats and the NPCs serving as mouthpieces for them. I am sure there are some games subverting this and having lying NPCs giving distorted stats, but in general, especially with older games…
The main sentiment I relate to too. I think getting older and experiencing or hearing about others’ suffering makes me less inclined to fuck with the pixels onscreen, even though they’re just pixels. The wonders of empathy! Not meant to say people who do nasty things in video games are bad in real life, I’m still locking Minecraft villagers in stalls where they have minimal room to move and making mob farms where a mob is spawned/“born” only to die painfully seconds afterwards.
The nice thing about most fiction (unreliable narrators exist), especially with video games, is that often you can trust what you are given. I’d think the SimCity police captain is just an NPC mouthpiece for which the game can report the crime frequency variable it has with no obfuscation, because that’s how games work—most are honest about stats. In real life I need to have this worry, to balance it with “am I incorrectly biased because I don’t see much crime and am incorrectly applying that to the entire rest of the city I don’t live in? Is it the police captain doing corrupt things? Is it both?” So much anxiety about what’s true and what is not, who’s twisting the truth, who genuinely intends to report truth but got something wrong by accident… but in fiction I can usually mindlessly trust the narrator, in games I can mindlessly trust the stats and the NPCs serving as mouthpieces for them. I am sure there are some games subverting this and having lying NPCs giving distorted stats, but in general, especially with older games…
The main sentiment I relate to too. I think getting older and experiencing or hearing about others’ suffering makes me less inclined to fuck with the pixels onscreen, even though they’re just pixels. The wonders of empathy! Not meant to say people who do nasty things in video games are bad in real life, I’m still locking Minecraft villagers in stalls where they have minimal room to move and making mob farms where a mob is spawned/“born” only to die painfully seconds afterwards.