RE: What becoming a brutal dictator can tell us about living
I see, so this is the post you mentioned in your comment. Interesting stuff. I think statism vs anarchism is a false dichotomy. Strong willed people will take control of the situation during times of crisis regardless of ideologies. It doesn't matter if there's a state nor what the state claims it stands for.
For example, it's funny how you can play as Atilla and Genghis Khan in Civ 5, but they never actually founded any real cities. They are the barbarians. Genghis Khan, like some Roman Emperors, promoted religious tolerance, but not in the way we are used to today. They just figured that the more people and gods who are on their side, the more victories they will have. Today, people like to blame religion, fascism, or communism for being dangerous. They think ideology is dangerous, but I think that's not the complete picture. Humans are dangerous, regardless of what they claim they believe. People are great at rationalizing to get their way no matter what. There is no solution or resolution. Empires will rise and fall in waves just as they always had in history.
Statism vs anarchism is an incomplete dichotomy, but regardless, you suggest that because anarchism appears unrealistic to you that it cannot oppose statism; that's not true.
There's some truth to the idea that we can cynically use ideology as simply a means to power, but it's a mistake to only consider human action in terms of power, there are other dimensions to social life.
Really my question in this series of posts however is: do these games support the status quo, and if so in what ways. Can they be tools to question the structure of things? What do they teach us?
I'm not ready to accept your fatalistic point of view.
What is status quo? The world is always changing. What's status quo now was new and flashy decades ago. There are also some things that stay status quo forever. We will always be carbon based life forms. Who decides which status quo is good or bad?
Games allow you to experiment with possibilities in a structured sandbox. The framework of the sandbox contains the bias of the programmer, but the gamer also has a large degree of freedom. Then throw in the meta question: Do you play by the rules of the game or do you exploit bugs or even write your own mods and hacks? Any game can be hacked, but so far, nobody is so great of a lifehacker to cheat death in real life.