this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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This feels very "just found out about politics and damn" tbh.
The game isn't really teaching anything of note beyond "private entities have their own interests," which anyone who would even find this compelling already knows.
Ok.
I think this would be of value for sharing with people that aren't aware (my kid when she was younger).
Or is there a better resource to do this?
if you want something on media , censorship, spin, ect? I'd say Not for Broadcast is pretty good.
The Westport Independent? This feels like it'll expire
Coming at this from an IT perspective, a lot of things that people "already know" seem to evaporate when it's time to actually apply that knowledge. Keeping that in mind, I think a game like this helps to cement the idea in people's heads in a more intuitive way. It bridges the gap between system 1 and system 2 thinking.
Most people seem to "never have found out about politics" yet seeing how they consume all newspaper content without critical thinking.
Everyone consumes whatever they agree with with less critical thinking, it's an absolutely normal bias to have and nobody is immune.
That's why when you hear someone say "I do my own research" you don't think "this person must be highly educated" but rather "this person listens to 'alternative' media."
Just because you consume a different kind of propaganda, doesn't make you wiser, it makes you have a different set of biases.
It's also important to remember that being aware of the psychological effects of something does not make you immune to those effects, or even consistently lessen them in a measurable way.
Placebo works even when the subject knows it's a placebo.
There's a difference between placebo and plain ignorance
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mental-health/the-power-of-the-placebo-effect
But pain is a different context to sociology
Yeah, pain is more tangible and actually experienced, whereas what society actually looks like is 99% vibes and personal biases.
So this applies even more to sociology than to painkillers.
Take how many people think they can't be racist. Pain is also a psychological effect.
What the fuck are you talking about? These two things aren't even remotely alike.
Such a hater comment to make. Woof.
First, shitting on folks who are new to left politics and (god forbid) harbor excitement for these new insights. At least we have folks leaving comments like this to grind that eagerness out of them.
Then, it failed a narrow expectation you fully put on it. Maybe it was using an a medium to express an idea in a novel way. What a concept. Let's call it Art. It can be something other than homework.
You're allowed to not be into it and express why, and if you have ideas for improving it, even better. But essentially saying "I'm above the target audience and it's pointless"...cool, share something you made
Christ on a pike, "enthusiastic about politics" is probably the worst thing you could ever be, it only leads to pie in the sky idiocy and utopianism.
Yes, please let's grind that down as fast as possible, politics is a pragmatic exercise like doing groceries and taking a shit, you shouldn't be excited about it. The only people excited by politics are fanatics and zealots and we could do with a lot fewer of those on all sides right now.
Yeah, God forbid I use my experience of the medium to judge a piece of art.
All this is, is a more biased, more cut down version of games like Papers, please, Not for Bradcast, or The Westport Independent, that doesn't even use its gameplay loop to really give any direct experience of the issue it's trying to showcase.
Having played it until I got bored of it, the only feeling reinforced through the gameplay is "boy i wish I could read faster".
It doesn't even leverage the idea that you need to send newspapers to print, allowing you to plan your front page to build a more coherent narrative, you literally just need to constantly swap articles in and out of the paper as if people's copies would change in real time. It doesn't account for the appearance of bias or conflicting interests between the parties you want to keep happy. It lacks nuance and a proper understanding of how to evoke what feeling through gameplay.
So, yeah, I think it's banal and aggressively poorly thought out, not even mediocre but genuinely bad. Are you going to argue otherwise or are you just gonna say I'm being too harsh or unfair?
And before you highlight that this is free, so is The Westport Independent, and it's been out for almost 10 years (god I feel old).
LOL I'm not about to dox myself to prove a stranger wrong, if you want to feel like you have successfully defended your point because you want to think I couldn't have pulled this crap off, feel free to do so.
My criticism stands on its own regardless of my own output or even of myself as a source for it.