duty

it sometimes feels like the entirety of games criticism is set up to justify doing the thing you wanted to do anyway. "i've had a fixation on making mario levels since i was 8 - here's why that's What We Need Right Now." here's why it's good, or important, or if you're on the commercial side here's why it's necessary to hit retention targets and appease the shareholders, etc.

for me the question abt vgames right now is - if you knew it was evil, would you do it anyway?

to use terms like right and wrong, moral and immoral etc - are you willing to abide strictly by these terms? to change your life in accordance, if it means giving up what you really want? or if you knew it was bad, or impossible, would you try to do it anyway? the latter is not to say something is beyond judgement, of yourself or other people. it's just to say those judgements are not why you did it - it's to resist camoflaguing your own desires in highminded terms of duty, to act as though you had no choice.

to be a hobbyist game developer is to say you did something because you wanted to. the famous yeats line: in dreams begin responsibilities. what i think of when i read it is that ethical obligation begins in desire, in all its strangeness. the desire to cause pain, the desire not to cause pain, how we make sense of these things, how we weigh them against each other. by this i mean not that desire must (or can) be brought in line with our own ethics - it's to acknowledge the murky realm of fantasy that the ethical itself springs from, and to resist displacing it into the other realm where we do whatever we do because it happens to be right.

i want to see games made from desire, because i want to know whatever it is that desire is worth.

(and perhaps this seems a step back from the arguments about political games, social change, etc... but to me the same dilemma applies. the histories of 20th century socialism are often unencouraging, and they certainly put an end to any idea that a better world would simply be inevitable, scientifically emerging untainted from any embarrassing forms of idealism. would you need to know the New World was certain before you fought for it?)