Very hinged lemmy comment.

My wife has done courses on warning signs for abusive relationships as part of some mental health first aid certification stuff.

2 biiiiiig red flags are insisting on surveillance and not letting people have separate finances. We have a combined account sure, and also pocket money accounts and whatever else. For all I know she’s set up a trust. I mean I don’t think she has because she’d probably tell me but she has the freedom to do so.

Obviously we have wills lmao

Yes we’re teenagers. We’ve been married 15 years, ceremony was when we were three.

Privacy is important, have you never kept a diary? Do you film therapy sessions lest your partner not know what you discussed? Shit with the door open? You don’t need justification for wanting privacy, you need privacy so when you have a good reason for it nothing looks different.

What if there’s an emergency?

What if there is? Get help, that’s an insane fear to live with. If I am unconscious there’s nothing to do anyway, the hospital or whatever will find her details in my purse and call. What the fuck am I going to do, sit there watching the dot on the map and calling 000 if it stops moving? You are a lunatic, we have society to take care of us while we’re out and about and emergency beacons if you’re like camping beyond the black stump or sailing the Pacific.

You are obviously not a woman.

Therapy would be better for you than a panopticon.

What if your partner wants to run away from you? Do you not trust that they would have a good reason?

Vile.

I trust my wife, and she trusts me. We trust each other not to ask for stupid brain-poisoning shit that humans weren’t meant to have access to that could one day blow up horribly.

I don’t have her passwords, she doesn’t have mine. Our phones are locked. I could technically see what she’s doing online I suppose via traffic snooping in the router logs but the day I feel the urge to do something like that is the day I kill myself for having abandoned basic moral principles.

We’re apes, we have brains built for avoiding snakes in tall grass and finding water and berries. You poison yourself with surveillance, you feed your worst and most destructive impulses. Practice keeping secrets, practice being okay with not knowing. Trust isn’t surveillance, trust is knowing that if something fucking mattered you’d be told.

you get that this wouldn’t work as a critique if it was obvious you could make different choices right? Then it wouldn’t make the player complicit. If you’re not complicit it’s just a game saying “military shooters could be different” which is a nothing statement.

Like how games with a “get the information (evil)” and “get the information (good)” button aren’t offering real moral choices. Or how deus ex would lose all impact if the “here’s a gun, go kill these people” starting mission tempting you with a rocket launcher popped up a “you might change sides in the future” warning.

By involving you, leading you just like any other military shooter for a bit then cutting you loose is what creates the critique. You compare notes after playing and someone points out something and you go “huh, why didn’t I try that?”. It’s not condemning you for not trying that, it’s asking you if you’re happy with a genre which trains you to never to try it.

Military shooter games glorify war and shallowly reward horrible behaviour. Spec ops does it differently.

Majority of people: do horrible thing

Some people: experimental and find heroic thing is rewarded.

Discussion possible, why did the majority do that? could we talk about horrible and uncreative design patterns in the genre of military shooters? How media portrayals of war train us not to look for peaceful solutions? Whether this feeds into how we view American imperial wars?

you: no spec ops bad video game because I didn’t do the good option.

I think you’re actually engaging with it a bit shallowly. You are the one who invented the rule and a different framing is exploring how, if games seem to put us in situations where we must do horrible things to advance even a couple of times, we take that as a rule instead of risking losing to find other ways.

Which is a fairly glaring indictment of the whole military shooter genre which is all about “hard men and hard choices” that completely dehumanise the factions you’re in opposition to.

That fucking name is reason not to buy it already.

It’s not even claw, it’s CLAW grrrrr fear me and my pocket Cheeto dust.

It reminds me of when yoyos (yep I’m that old) were trying to be like “this is the spinanator 6000 XL Xtreme fireball mushroom cloud”