A game of trees (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Tuesday, February 16, 2021, 09:55 (1158 days ago) @ Kermit
edited by Cody Miller, Tuesday, February 16, 2021, 10:17

Maybe the grandfather doesn't feel the need to spend his savings in another country, but maybe the granddaughter dies because they are not in the U.S., which has the highest survival rate for cancer.

That's not even true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_quality_of_healthcare

Major cancers we are 5th, behind 4 countries that have universal healthcare. 15 is but a mere 2 percentage points below us. We are 19th for cervical cancer. If he wanted the best outcome, he'd fly her to South Korea.

I don't buy the game of trees criticism. Can't art that explores the humanity of individuals caught up in war help us to see war as less of an abstraction (which I see as a good thing)? Might that affect people's perception of the cost of war regardless of their politics and be more effective at doing that than something that obviously adheres to a party-line political narrative?

Yes, but as I explained this has the power to spectacularly mislead and hide the real truth of the situation. So the best thing as an artist, the best thing as a storyteller, is to take an individual experience and then put that within the larger context. What does this individual story represent to the larger whole?

What is most mysterious and most interesting? Us. That's why a game that focuses on individuals can be great, and can actually change how people see the world, which might change how they feel about political issues. If you begin with the goal of educating people so that they adopt your political views, you're a propagandist, not an artist.

The selectiveness of the presentation is just as 'biased' either way. Tamte flat out says they are not interested in portraying or exploring many of the things that happened there. That is itself a bias. You take a picture, and it's not reality because it doesn't show what is beyond the frame. This is why everything is inherently political. Every piece of art that has anything socially to say is political because of what you choose to omit.