A game of trees (Gaming)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Tuesday, February 16, 2021, 11:30 (1158 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by Kermit, Tuesday, February 16, 2021, 11:35

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.

Ah, damn statistics. I've read my stat recently, but perhaps it was comparing the US to the Europe, and there are of course explanations behind the stats, like differences in the population make up. In other words, isolating the for-profit model or any other single factor is difficult. It's not like my example is fantastical, people come here for medical treatments all the time, but you have a larger narrative that you believe captures enough of reality to be true, and you'd want your art to reflect that, which is fine but I see that as limited in its ability to change people. People can see an agenda a mile away.

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?

You don't see any pitfall to that? YOU can discern the real truth of the larger context and are infallible in your capacity to do so. Perhaps a more humble approach is to focus on what is indisputably true--the human experience in a given situation, and trusting the audience to come to their own conclusions about the larger context having been informed by the experience you have to provided to them.

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.

Yes, books have covers, paintings have frames, movies and games have a duration. Limits are unavoidable on this plane of existence but they are not a synonym for bias. It seems like don't trust an audience to extrapolate or to reach their own conclusions about the politics and the larger world informed by the art they've experienced. When you say everything is political maybe you're just claiming that as your own yardstick for how you judge creative works, that is, whether they serve a political narrative you agree with or fail to do so. I think that's a poor way to evaluate art. Ultimately, we are left with having to say there is no such thing as objective truth because bias can't be eliminated. I believe if an artist is constantly asking themselves "is this true?" they can, depending on their talent, minimize their biases to the point where an audience believes in the truth they are experiencing through art, and that, paradoxically, is how you change people's hearts, not by beginning with your biases and building "art" in support of them.