Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I may be running afoul of Poe's law here, but I'm going to take this essay at face value. The premise of the essay, from wha

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I may be running afoul of Poe's law here, but I'm going to take this essay at face value. The premise of the essay, from what I can tell, is that games like Animal Crossing: New Horizons are played by men and women who are fantasizing about being a little dictator over their own island which they control completely, because deep down they feel powerless and they can take their feelings of impotence out on the inhabitants of a virtual world. Or at least that these ideas are inextricably linked to such games. To me, this is like saying that people who make paintings of landscapes that don't exist are repressed miniature autocrats, because, unsatisfied with the world as it is, they have the neocolonialist compulsion to bend the world around them to their wills, and they express this in art. It's also akin to saying that people play first-person shooters like Counter Strike because they fantasize about joining the army and conquering foreign lands to take them as their own. I'm sure Minecraft is probably political to people like this as well, because apparently "there is no such thing as an apolitical video game". Stripped to their essentials, games like Animal Crossing are fundamentally about building. Humans like to build. There's nothing wrong with building things per se. I wonder at the unwillingness of some people to contemplate creativity without seeing politics, neocolonialism and oppression everywhere, _especially_ in virtual spaces where these real-world externalities specifically do not exist. You can shape an island without murdering and evicting indigenous peoples! You can build machines without having to think about whether you're destroying the planet, because you're not! Shouldn't these be what we strive to enjoy, instead of demonizing as neocolonialist and regressive? To say that "because others have destroyed to build means that portraying building _without_ also portraying destroying is bad" is patronizing and infantilizing, and belies a view of our fellow humans as being incapable of handling even slight nuance and complexity. To be clear, I can see the value in comparing and contrasting something like Animal Crossing to real life, where, for example, they really did commit genocide to build the "New World". But saying that a work of art is infected by all the evil that anyone has ever done, or that independent concepts, like the history of colonialism and building a house on an island, cannot be separated is a road that leads to madness in my opinion. To be sure, there probably really are, as the article describes, Riordanesque people who play these games, but saying that these messages are baked in to the media themselves is Quixotic. There are no enemies here to fight. The author pretending like they can peer into the mind of the Platonic ideal Animal Crossing gamer to reveal their neocolonialist tendencies is, to be kind, an unsupportable line of thinking. As a person who has played these games myself, what else can I say but "No"?