Monica Potts writes about how video games turn her into Phyllis Schlafly:
I eventually got the hang of The Sims, the best-selling computer game in history, and my Sim self became productive and happy. She always reached the top of her career, her children always did well in school, and she always had enough money for a comfortable simulated life. Another pattern emerged as well, one that I feel powerless to stop: My Sims are conservative. I’m in complete control of them, but for some reason their lives aren’t anything like the life I consider ideal in the real world. I’m a feminist graduate of an all-women’s college who has vowed to never change my name or end my career to raise children full time–though I would never undervalue the work that many women do in their home. By contrast, my Sims rarely remain single long into adulthood. My wives always take their husbands’ last names. They don’t just have children; they bear lots of them. And they leave their careers to take on the lion’s share of care-giving duties.
In my Bloggingheads with Peter Suderman, he noted that video games have adopted systems of incentives that offer realistic consequences for certain kinds of behavior that go beyond a binary conception of good and bad. Obviously because its an artificial world, those incentives are framed by someone. We play video games to do things we can’t do in real life, particu
