Humor me on this one. Also CW for some violence descriptions.

Maybe it starts out with something really small, like you park in a bike lane because you’re in a hurry and you tried to find parking but you can’t and you’re late for work. But it’s okay you tried! It’s just this time. Unfortunately a biker isn’t paying attention and hurts themselves on your car. It’s their fault though for not pay attention right? Later you see a news report that says the police are looking out for a shoplifter and they need your help, and you think it might be your neighbor so you call the cops. They ride up and he’s cleaning his gun so the cops blow the dude apart. Turns out he didn’t even shoplift but you justify it because he shouldn’t have answered the door with a gun barrel in his hand.

Eventually you’re literally running over pedestrians blocking a freeway and shooting at people who don’t look like you and guarding concentration camps (yeah this was an FPS tower defense game the whole time snuck that one in didn’t I) and the whole time the game keeps throwing flimsier and flimsier justifications for it. The character in the game just keeps begrudgingly accepting those justifications and does the evil things as a result.

What’s really important in this game is to make sure the player has lots of agency in the game EXCEPT when it comes time to accept the justification and do the evil act. Then they have to do it they don’t have a choice. But fill the game with non evil optional things the player could do and let them do those too so they feel better about the evil things a little. But mostly players will keep thinking the whole time “surely this time the character won’t fall for that, the evil is too great and the justification too flimsy.” But the character does fall for it and does do the evil. And every time the player gets more and more upset at how obvious it is that the character shouldn’t do it. How could someone do so much evil with so little justification? Surely real life isn’t that way, the player thinks!

Basically I want libs to know what it feels like to be me when I talk to them.