I don’t really have the words to explain why yet, but there’s this certain mood pervasive in a lot of survival or settlement building games- your Frostpunks, your This War Of Mines- that ascribe to human beings in crisis situations this… nihilism and selfishness we roundly don’t possess as a rule. It’s always “every man for himself”, “people are monsters at heart when the chips are down, “no matter how moral you are situations will eventually drive you to do horrible shit,” but in every crisis situation you see in real life, every disaster, what is our first instinct? It’s to help one another, to step up, to form communities. It feels like those sorts of games don’t want to show humanity as we are, but how the narrative or the game’s creators want to see us, and it’s always this unflattering bullshit that assumes we’re all hypercapitalist individualists, it bugs me.
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in reply to @feybeasts's post:
clearly the particular people or groups being focused on in such games are ancaps
even in game, people are helpful most of the time unless the mechanics specifically punish that. vanilla Minecraft inevitably turns into What If Communism
YEAH THO it’s so so funny that at heart we want to play together and work together and games have to create these contrivances and skinner boxes to try to enforce the Rugged Individualism so many of them try to promote
and when they do have people working together they're Evil Groups Of Rebels™
Frostpunk seemed alright about that imo, considering that it'd be -your- choice to go to the extremes, and iirc it rewards being kind and saving people generally (though at costs normally because it's extreme conditions) (and also imo most of the real bad options bite you in the ass in game but that's likely just how I would play it)
but YEAH that is really really common in basically anything where society breaks down ngl. immediate splitting into lil groups that are VERY HOSTILE, everyone being very selfish overall, just really REALLY underestimating how often people tend to work together in crises
Always annoying when I can't just like, tell a random group of survivors "hey we have extra space and food and stuff you can live with us instead of fighting" in those kinds of survival games