I think I saw a clip of that, I remember one of the characters being disappointed that it wasn’t more competitive and playing it badly? And the game was not prepared for this. And I found it dispiriting and isolating because it reminded me that… basically all of the socially conscious game design friends I’ve accumulated, if I turned to them for help and asked them how to get players who actually most need cohabitive games to vibe with a cohabitive game, they’d be uninterested, because I’m asking them for tips in talking to the outgroup, and they hate talking to the outgroup.
Rewatching a review of Strange Worlds, it does have the same smell, overall. It teaches environmentalism, but it seems to be solely marketing itself to environmentalists.
Games are inherently about inflicting change on our surroundings in a bottomless delve into the depths of strategic invention, and yet making a game about reaching a point of stability and stasis does not sound infeasible to me, it’s kinda an interesting design challenge. But it bothers me as a propaganda piece, because society should not be striving after comfortable stasis, mere harmony, if we were capable of making such a transformation there would be much better states of harmony to pursue beyond what we can concretely imagine today, and in the real world, that seems to be an important thing to acknowledge, even just to have a hope of addressing climate change. I’m fairly sure there are already problems on our plate that techno-conservative austerity and degrowth cannot solve.
I think I saw a clip of that, I remember one of the characters being disappointed that it wasn’t more competitive and playing it badly? And the game was not prepared for this. And I found it dispiriting and isolating because it reminded me that… basically all of the socially conscious game design friends I’ve accumulated, if I turned to them for help and asked them how to get players who actually most need cohabitive games to vibe with a cohabitive game, they’d be uninterested, because I’m asking them for tips in talking to the outgroup, and they hate talking to the outgroup.
Rewatching a review of Strange Worlds, it does have the same smell, overall. It teaches environmentalism, but it seems to be solely marketing itself to environmentalists.
Games are inherently about inflicting change on our surroundings in a bottomless delve into the depths of strategic invention, and yet making a game about reaching a point of stability and stasis does not sound infeasible to me, it’s kinda an interesting design challenge.
But it bothers me as a propaganda piece, because society should not be striving after comfortable stasis, mere harmony, if we were capable of making such a transformation there would be much better states of harmony to pursue beyond what we can concretely imagine today, and in the real world, that seems to be an important thing to acknowledge, even just to have a hope of addressing climate change. I’m fairly sure there are already problems on our plate that techno-conservative austerity and degrowth cannot solve.