I think that it’s important, as consumers, to avoid letting the visual and mechanical shorthand language of video games color our reactions to real situations involving real people, as much of that shorthand can reflect and reinforce the destructive knee-jerk prejudice of the culture that produced it. As an example, let’s take Fallout. When you’re dungeoneering in Fallout and you come across a space where there are flayed, mutilated corpses strung up all over the place, that’s the developer using visual shorthand to frictionlessly inform you, without breaking the loop of play, that you have the moral high ground over whoever lives here, and thus moral license to kill them and take their things. But in real life, when you go over someone’s house and they’ve got flayed and mutilated corpses strung up all over the place? I mean, maybe that’s from the last tenant. Maybe they have a roommate. Maybe they were all just jerks. I mean you literally just got here, you don’t know, you gotta let this play out for a minute