RE: What becoming a brutal dictator can tell us about living
Fab post mate. It really spoke to me and brought back thoughts I were having a few years ago. I even watched The Great Dictator at the time, in which Chaplin is just pure brilliance. :)
My fascination with this topic started in my child hood, playing Settlers 3 and Amazon edition. It was just such a beautiful and sweetlooking game, but at the same time very realistic in terms of the actual division of labor needed to get me (a mighty god, working for the mightiest) all the resources needed for the labours to able to build and protect the settlers town.
I think right then and there I realized that I wanted to do something similar in real life. And as the story goes, due to other circumstance I also slowly picked up more and more, not just radical, but downright sociopathic ideological traits.
It can be very easy to confuse means with ends and not take proper notice when you start to contradict your end goals or when correlating needed means starts to reflect a way of being that is unhealthy.
The way I play games these days has become at times much more personal due to waking up to real world implications that I had missed in the past. Maybe it's an age thing as well or it has primarily to do with reading and doing philosophy, but just as when watching Titanic now many years after the first time I watched it, I'm able to get emersed in the actual experiences of the main characters like I never used to. Feelings overflowing. Tears guaranteed. In the greatest way. :)
The other way I do it is being very scientific about it, attempting to see the worlds created from the point of whoever produced the game/movie. It can provide a whole new and much more artistic experience.
In the end though, I think I play both simply to play for the enjoyment of what I would have done if it had been reality, but also sometimes to act out some of my darker side and see just what cruelty I and the system at hand are able of delivering (narrowly making sure I'm not actually fetischising it obviously). It gives sort of a cleansing of some of the destructive tendencies that you might be sitting on, but specifically a great opportunity to learn about sides to society or yourself that would not normally experience and have access to.
That's awesome that you have a personal experience with this stuff too, I'm delighted to read your thoughts on this 🙂
I suppose I'm wondering if we play the games and express ourselves through them, or are the games playing themselves through us, causing us to express the ideals of the game. And if so, what are the ideals? Are they serious like a respect of and a yearning for authoritarian power, or do they just inspire people to be bureaucrats or accountants? 😂 Maybe there needs to be actual research and not just speculation, like a longitudinal study following Civ players from childhood to old age 🙃
If we truly are the ones playing it's interesting to think we may be exorcizing demons, expressing stuff we can't otherwise, or as you call it "cleansing of any destructive tendencies". It reminds me of a popular idea in sexual psychology, that sex is about everything except sex and those with kinks are often exploring the darker sides of their desires more or less safely through sex.
Or have you heard of the Theatre of the Oppressed? Basically you act out power relations but take on different roles, not only your own role in real life, and it's supposed to help mediate disputes and power relations. It's pretty leftie, dealing with collective, class based oppression really, but the idea is that instead of passively watching theatre as we usually do, we act in it an instead of just catharsis we gain understanding by doing. (I think that sums it up correctly anyway!) So perhaps it could be a similar contrast as with watching a video movie and playing a video game. And it might have some of the same benefits, if the game encourages it that is. So do these games?
I think it's very similar to boxing. There's no determinism causing boxers to be violent in their lives in general, although surely it happens, but the act of punching a bag can help people let off some steam. If a person is having trouble dealing with some issue, it's a lot healthier to use for example boxing as a mechanism for beating inertia, rather than holding it in, as holding in emotions can in the long run cause resentment against oneself for having never fully dealt with the emotional issue.
But there can certainly be new issues caused if playing the game is simply an escape from the work of dealing with the original issue at hand, or if one for whatever reason choose to adopt new ways of being in ones general life, perhaps thinking that they will help one escape, mask, or dissolve this issue by changing ones emotional state of mind or general way of being. If one adopts a violent, agressive or ignorant mindset as a way of life, then we can start to see real issues.
As you allude to, sometimes this is done, still conciously on one level, but not fully conciously and thought through to the end. It's easy to trick oneselve (some might say that the 'mind' or 'brain' is the tricking 'you', which we might recognize that there is at least some truth to) that one hasn't changed, or that what one is doing is a positive or at least not worrying change, simply because we percieve it to be within the bounds of what was recently "normal". This is the reason many professional actors make great effort not to adopt the personality traits of the characters they play on the big screen. If done for a long time, this can be very difficult.
I think you're onto something when you mention sexual kinks. It's an area and a tool of exploration. Just like we can explore the world "materially" for the benefit that such exploration brings to us "materialy", so to speak, we can also explore the world (including that part of our own self which we are able of percieving) in order better to understand and get used to dealing with ourselves. The "theatre of the opressed", as well as many cults, secret societies etc, all use these principles to some extent and part of why they are so enticing to some people is their "mystical", exciting, explorable worlds, where a particular sort of self-reflection is encouraged. Often by going through rituals, rising in rank etc. The free masons for example, while deeply spiritual and ideological, can be seen as a pre-computer era MMORPG, built on top of guilds and practical forms of secrecy, "brotherhood" and cooperation.
I'm really coming around to the its-everything-and-nothing perspective, i.e. it depends on the person, their intentions, their character and situation.
Still, I think this fails to address one of the larger question, which is "do these games promote statism?" The post title is more about what we can learn personally, but I wonder what the effect is broadly, if anything is discernible at all. I need to do more reading 🤓
EDIT: btw I didn't address it, but that's really interesting. I would like to encourage you to write about this topic too in a post, I think you have thought fairly deeply about it and perhaps it would be a good compliment, in both senses of the word
The systemic risk I think would be significantly guided by other ideological and inter-social factors in society. If Putin plays a video game, is he going to play it the same way and make the same take aways as if Obama did it? I don't think so.
Thank you for your thoughts. I'll see what I can do.