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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 9781783" data-attributes="member: 6779196">I think both pure hopeful and pure despairing are too limited. Analyzing human interaction using game theory (also a limited lens, but sometimes a useful one) reveals that whether selfish or selfless strategies in classic scenarios like the prisoner’s dilemma are more effective is highly context-dependent. This suggests that people are neither inherently good nor inherently evil, but rather, their behavior is shaped by their circumstances. Different communities encourage different strategies of social behavior, and going against a community’s dominant strategy is always more challenging, though altruistic strategies tend to be more rewarding for everyone in a community, if the community successfully adopts them.I like for my game worlds to reflect these observed behaviors. Start from a place of despair. Acknowledge harsh realities, pick scabs. But make it possible, if not necessarily easy, for the players to bring hope, to make change. We will never escape the systems that oppress us if we can’t imagine alternatives to those systems. But just imagining better alternatives isn’t enough if we we can’t also imagine how to get from A to B. So, yeah, I’m a big fan of despairing baseline setting assumptions, but with a glimmer of hope that dedicated players can tend, stoke, and build into something bigger if they’re willing to fight for it. It should, perhaps, be easier to give in to despair, but more rewarding to persevere and encourage hope in the long run, if they are successful.EDIT: On this note I’m also a big fan of focusing on building hope within smaller communities. Even if the heroes can’t fix the world, they can at least make things better within their own little town, and that’s a good place to start. That creates the implication that other heroes could do the same in their towns. If the success of hope vs despair depends on the dominant strategy within a community, the more communities can have their scales tipped towards hope, the closer we get to maybe someday building a predominantly hopeful world. Even if the heroes don’t live to see the day that comes to pass, they can rest easy knowing they did everything they could to bring it closer to fruition, and entrust the next steps to those who come after.</blockquote>

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