Alora Fane

Here are a couple of youtube videos that touch on topics I've repeatedly mentioned, about how we can help others by listening to them, and about beliefs and how we can be blinded to others' humanity because of beliefs we form about them due to their group associations.

First, I've also updated ∞ the Alora Fane blog ∞ with some concept art stuff for what might be my next game. I feel like I should be focusing on Sindrel Song, but for now there's pretty much nothing left for me to actually do. So I'm using the time I'd otherwise be spending on that developing new ideas instead. I wasn't sure whether to talk about them in this blog as usual, or in the new one, but since I wanted to talk about that and this, I thought it'd be sensible to split them up. That is the point of having different blogs for personal and games stuff, after all!

I might talk about future game ideas in that blog in the near future... or maybe I should just focus on Sindrel Song until it's released? I'll probably do a bit of both.

Anyway, here's some more personal stuff.

I wasn't looking for these videos, but they showed up randomly in my recommended list. At first I was reluctant to view them due to my avoidance issues, but I've been trying to push through those lately, even if it's just in little ways, and I feel it was worth it in this case.

In this one, a man talks about how he was on the dark path to becoming a school shooter, because his life had been so bad that he had absolutely nothing to lose. It was a friend just treating him like a person - despite his awful behaviour that meant he didn't 'deserve' this - that ultimately got him onto a much better path, sparing his life and those of whoever he might have taken his pain out on.

His friend didn't patronisingly 'help' him by getting him to see a therapist or planning out a contrived course of action to 'make him better'. It sounds like he just treated him as a fellow being, which for some people is just so unfamiliar because everything else in their life has made them feel like something less.

If you treat someone like they're a monster, they'll probably act like one. If you treat them like a decent person, with worth, they'll be more likely to act like that.

I've talked about incels etc here in the past, and I get the feeling that I might come across as the equivalent of a Nazi apologist or something for doing so. But I feel that demonising an already clearly hurting group isn't going to do anyone any good, while such a group might not exist at all if more people treated them like actual humans. I don't know though; I suppose I'm just trying to explain why I bring it up, as much as anything.

On a similar note, but again this came up without me explicitly looking for it:

In this one, a journalist talks about researching the men's rights movement. She talks about how she started as a proud 'feminist', seeing them as the enemy, largely ignoring what they said while interviewing them while looking for little bits that confirmed her own beliefs (that they were subhuman misogynistic monsters). It was through carefully transcribing their words that she really heard what they'd said to her, and understood where they were coming from, which allowed her to develop sympathy for what she came to understand were genuine issues; she no longer dehumanised them.

Notably, she described an internal reaction where, in response to a man saying that men's lives were sometimes destroyed by false rape accusations, what she actually heard was "rape isn't that bad" or "women are making it up", and she experienced an emotional reaction as a result of that interpretation rather than what he actually said. I feel that something I said a while ago might have been similarly misconstrued?

She also talks about how by showing sympathy for this 'enemy' group, her own 'side' demonised her. To show sympathy for the enemy is to be one of them!! Surely that's not a good way to think?

My mind keeps coming back here, to the nature of beliefs, group membership, etc, and I keep touching on it in posts but leaving so much unsaid. One of these days, maybe it'd be worth diving into more deeply, but it's such a charged topic that it doesn't seem worth getting into right now.

It's something I'd like to explore in future games though. How easily we can see those different to us as 'others', and deny them the same empathy we'd give 'our kind'. While culturally there's a huge push for certain kinds of progressiveness - towards race and sexuality, most notably - our ingroup/outgroup perceptions are fundamental to human nature, and they work their way into all kinds of other perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours.

Sindrel Song has listening as a key mechanic, but doesn't really touch on this explicitly. I'd like to make something that allows the player to experience different, perhaps conflicting perspectives without being political, to make clear how every viewpoint seems valid from its holder's perspective... though I'll talk about that in another post, maybe on the Alora Fane site.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

Here's another that's largely unrelated to this but which is sort of related to other stuff that's come up here in the past, just for fun:

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