Gwen The Red Moss 🏳️⚧️<p>Y'know... I'm kinda glad I started playing Postal. I believe that we project ourselves on everything we come into contact with in the world. Art, media, religion, our spaces, anything that presents us with a choice; we try to reflect ourselves wherever we go. Sometimes it's interesting to try a different mirror and see what gets reflected back.</p><p>How many times have I seen an empty village in a later Elder Scrolls game? In Fallout? Name an RPG or a shooter with innocents? None of them get regarded as murder simulators. Now, I'm not an idiot. I understand why, but it's interesting to consider that those games give you the same freedom to kill and the player still makes a choice. </p><p>Postal (at least as far as I've gotten) doesn't ask you to kill innocents. The objective for each level is to kill a certain number of "hostiles". So, I've made the game harder on myself by trying to deliberately avoid civilian deaths. I'm not trying to paint myself like a saint or some shit. I'm saying the window for morality is shifted to the other side, but there's an overlap with the freedom of many other games. </p><p>How we choose to behave given the context of our situations, the pressures and what we "need" to do, is where we get that mirror effect. Where we get to learn a little something about ourselves. </p><p>While playing Postal, I'm in an ugly space. It's a grim mirror. The context is bad... but I still have room to choose, and that same logic can be expanded to life. Sometimes we're just in a shitty situation. We have a narrow range where we can act, and maybe it's not entirely comfortable, but we shouldn't judge ourselves too hard if the boundaries prevent us from acting in a way we truly want to. It doesn't say everything about us. We need multiple mirrors to get that three dimensional look at ourselves. </p><p><a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/Gaming" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Gaming</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/Life" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Life</span></a> ? <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/ShowerThoughts" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>ShowerThoughts</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/IDontFuckingKnow" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>IDontFuckingKnow</span></a> <a href="https://eldritch.cafe/tags/ImAWeirdoWhoThinksTooMuchAboutStuff" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>ImAWeirdoWhoThinksTooMuchAboutStuff</span></a></p>