I know everyone is like wow omg wholesome dad game with all white cast! yay! based!
But I am a father and playing the game makes me profoundly sad. I have real children near the same age and the game nails the mentality so perfectly I feel guilty playing it, like I am cheating on my real family. Maybe in 20 years I'll play through it to reminisce once they are gone. But I can't play it now for more than a couple minutes before feeling disgusting.
No one is realizing how seductive this is. Like porn tricks you into thinking you have endless women and thus defeating your drive to find a real one, Dad-games sap away your energy to have a real family.
I know in the hunter-gatherer sense all videogames are a waste of time and should be avoided, we're all addicts and none of this is healthy. I can't attack anyone for playing this game while I still waste time with other RPGs and shooters. But there's a reason this game came from a country where reclusive shutins are such a problem they have a completely collapsing birthrate.
Nah even movies are simulations and definitely affect and impress upon people emotionally and cognitively. This is psyop 101 stuff
Well, yes, fiction can stain the surface, and even pool in the empty skull crevices of those of small and smooth brains.
But you miss the point. The point is that these surface level manipulations do not, and as they are cannot, overwrite deep seated biological desires and imperatives.
Its why even the staunchest girl-boss strong independent woman feminist ends up with a dozen cats, or why the most accomplished monk takes apprentices. You can't media your way out of your instincts.
You're yapping a lot but its simple: stuff on a screen imitates reality and people integrate it into their worldview.
Sir, if you can't muster a real response, don't open your damned mouth.
Reddit tier response lol.
I'm not entirely sure that's true or will always be true. It was more true of video games 20+ years ago, but as games became more realistic, and continue to do so, I wonder how long that will remain the case.
Fictional experiences do impact the brain. From personal experience, I know I gained actual arachnophobia from watching the movie Arachnophobia when I was a kid, and 30+ years later I am still utterly terrified of spiders, and I can remember being a kid and this not being the case. People seek out thrills from roller coasters, haunted houses, scary movies, etc and the reason why that stuff works at all is because there is a deeper layer of the human brain that doesn't care or know if it's fictional or not. Your conscious brain knows something isn't real, but you can still have emotional reactions triggered by parts of your brain that aren't sophisticated enough to tell the difference. That's a major reason why simulated experiences work to begin with.
It is already demonstrated that fictional experiences, that your consciously know are not real, do still do something in the brain that simulate the effect of it being real. The question is, how long until something like video games, especially with advances in VR, get to a point where those parts of the brain really cannot tell the difference, even if you consciously can, and psychological or emotional damage is done as if it were real. I know we have a kneejerk reaction to the whole video games don't cause violence thing, and that is by and large true and has been true for a long time. But the brain is a tricky thing, and we don't understand how or why a lot of it works the way it does. Subjecting it to experiences that are designed to create emotional or psychological effects may end up having an effect, and it shouldn't be that surprising if it does. Especially as things become more realistic.
The first top-down GTA game certainly did not cause violence or make gamer do things, despite what the Jack Thompsons were claiming at the time. But we are nearing, and have passed in some ways, a point in gaming fidelity where the experiences on screen are almost indistinguishable from a real experience, at least visually. it is not entirely out of the question that can end up having effects on the brain we can't predict yet, doubly so when one of the major points of increasing the visual experience is to deliberately make it seem and feel more real.