half-ironic theory: the accuracy of our societal view of survival and the development of technology has been significantly damaged by how those things are presented in videogames
because it is fun to take your little individual avatar and go do things that look like survival, people adopt a subconscious belief that an individual can go off into the woods and survive in something approximating what they consider reasonable comfort
@maya I suspect it’s the other way round - Enlightenment ideas of “progress” inform a whole lineage of fantasies from Robinson Crusoe through the myth of the frontier to the survivalists of the late Cold War and eventually into games
@ghost_bird I specifically mean the impact of how games have to have a palatable difficulty to be fun, so they can't represent things as too complex or too hard for the player to manage, so people get an unrealistic sense of what's "doable". as with all things there is, of course, More Context than is captured within that one dynamic
@maya Many more people play games than read survivalist fiction, at least, so I see your point