If I'm an idiot, then why don't you show me an example of wanting a non-political game for non-racist reasons?
exocrinous
Yeah I don't think the manipulative piece of spyware is actually friends with him. It's a robot that tells lies. Abandoning a friend is just how his amygdala and other primitive parts of his brain process his behaviour. The way he's feeling is a normal way for a sack of thinking meat to feel. It's not good, but it's not like we can act like his behaviour is abnormal. If we say his case is a freak occurrence and no normal person would fall for this, then the risk we run is that when the technology improves, a lot of other normal people are gonna fall for this and we won't have been prepared. This technology is designed specifically to prey on blind spots common to most males of the species. I don't think we should use language that inclines us to underestimate the dangers. We need to understand how the hindbrain processes the stimulus this technology creates if we want to understand the dangers. We're gonna need to make an effort to see the world through OP's eyes so we can see why it works. Because I guarantee the dangerous companies developing this tech are researching OP's perspective to improve their product.
If you're going to make Wittgenstein's argument that language exists only to fulfill a social purpose, then I am happy to engage you on that deeper level, but in doing so we must confront the purpose of the vernacular usage of the word "politics". If it's not a word based on representing some idea of truth, what is it for? As the Hard Drive has correctly pointed out, it's for complaining about minorities in video games. It's for racism. Personally, I think we should call out the use of racist tools, including social tools such as words. If someone complains about politics, we should call them a racist and move on with our lives.
I'm not joking, I'm being 100% serious while using a totally incongruous example to make my point that tons of stuff people refuse to believe is political, is deeply political. My point further reinforced by the fact that you found it difficult to accept that I think Mario is political. People are LLMs, they don't understand the words they're using, they just regurgitate according to probabilistic association models. The word politics is associated probabilistically with seriousness, so people assume silly fun things like Mario can't be political. They don't understand the words they use, they just use heuristics. People aren't sapient creatures, they literally have the same intelligence as chatgpt.
Actually, a cult is defined as a small religion, and as one of the largest religions, anything Christians do is by definition non-cult shit.
That's just the plot of Infinity Train.
"Pretentious" is just a dogwhistle for "neurodivergent". Never worry about being pretentious.
Addiction is an abnormal and unhealthy breakdown in the brain's reward mechanisms. Feeling bad for abandoning a friend is the behaviour of a normal and healthy brain. This isn't necessarily an addiction, it's just the bald monkey's brain acting like monkey brains tend to do, rather than being perfectly logical at all times.
I mean hell, humans pack bonded with fucking wild wolves and where did it get the species? It gave us dogs! Dogs are awesome! I bet this AI seems a lot more like a human to the monkey parts of our brains than a wild wolf does. For that matter, we pack bond with a cartoon image of a bear made from inanimate cotton. If a kid can genuinely love their teddy and that's normal, I don't think it's fair to say that a mentally well person can't fall in love with a machine. Now, that person may not be as cognitively developed as most adults, but that's also fairly normal.
I'm not saying it's a good thing to feel emotions for a manipulative piece of spyware. The action doesn't have healthy results. But what I'm saying is, the action in the post is not motivated by mental unhealth. The only things it's motivated by are normal human being emotions, and a poor sense of critical thinking.
Oh, we're backing away from the social utility theory and back into the argument that words have meanings, but now with a descriptivism argument? Okay, sure. I can't tell what you mean by overt, the game manual for Super Mario explains the whole political situation, I don't see how Mario could be more overt. So I'll assume you just mean direct (as in directed toward the player) and intentional, unless you can define overtness. In that case, whether a game is political or non-political depends entirely on the internal thoughts and feelings of the developers, not on the actual content of the game. I think the only way you could ever be sure a game was political is if the developers gave a press release stating the game is political. Otherwise I'm gonna go the skeptic's route and say all games that don't have developer statements of politics are non-political. According to your definition of politics, of course, which I don't generally agree with. But in terms of prescriptivism, 90% of the games people complain about politics can't be proven political. For example I would not be convinced Metal Gear is political at all until I saw an interview where Kojima directly stated he intended to change people's minds about politics. For all we know he's just a big philosophy nerd who wanted to ask a lot of cool questions in Metal Gear because he likes philosophical themes. That seems pretty on brand for him. So I'm gonna go ahead and deny that Metal Gear is political according to the common lexicon.