I am surprised at the scale of modern censorship in supposedly democratic countries, that every day there is a new ban, a new cancel (ostracism), a new call to court for a tweet. This is a clear sign of regression, it is a factor in the degradation of society, culture, and man.

Anti-Ableism

This is one of the modern censorship initiatives, which has the “good intentions” that usually pave the way to hell: to protect vulnerable people from abuse, such as the deaf and blind, hysterics, morons, idiots, autistics, schizophrenics, disabled people, epileptics, etc. If you have caught the essence of the selection, then you will understand that this list is very long and you will be able to estimate the scale of censorship: anti-ableism forbid the use of words related to the selected category of disorders, diseases, mutilations, etc. That is, you cannot say “deaf” or “blind” in order not to receive a fine. Some owners of Internet sites, chats, communities, and forums add Abelo banwords to the black-list, and if your message contains a banword, you will automatically be muted or banned; if you try to bypass the filter by adding, for example, similar symbols (“id10t”), the moderators will most certainly ban you manually and update the list of banwords with a new variation.

Let’s figure it out. First, no one has the right to limit freedom of speech, which is guaranteed by the constitution. Secondly, “ableism” is an artificial concept, this is extremely important! Woke’s political correctors invent a crime where there is none, they invented a special subcategory in blaming for the words they chose and called it “ableism”, and then attacked everyone who uses “censored” words. This is a typical feature of the Soviet censors: under invented pretexts to put up obstacles, to repress; in the ruzzia today you can pay for the blue and yellow colors in your clothes, for the word “peace”, for a rainbow… Thirdly, such censors always bypass meanings, for them form is more important. After all, words usually have several meanings, “deaf” is not only a man with limited or absent hearing, it is also a person who does not know how to or does not want to listen. Fourth, there is a fundamental difference between blaming someone who is actually deaf on the basis of their disability, and calling someone who is not deaf — deaf. Compare: “Haha! You are deaf and do not hear what I say!” — it is impolite and unacceptable; “my advice falls on deaf ears” is a linguistic allegorical sigh, an acceptable criticism. It turns out that many people do not understand this obviousness… But I do not believe that the initiators do not understand this, I am sure that this is simply a censorship order to strengthen senseless political correctness within the framework of the global construction of a “bright future” in the wonderful rays of something like Blue Beam, i.e. hyperreality. If you follow this path, then the opposite definitions should also be censored: “smart”, “genius”, because it offends people with a low IQ, “skinny”, because fat people are offended, “handsome”, because it affects the unsophisticated, it is impossible to say “strong” so as not to offend the weak. And you can’t talk at all, because it will offend the mute or deaf. This is absurd.

Anti-ebolism is not self-sufficient, it is part of a larger mechanism of suppression of self-expression, suppression of free-thinking, suppression of freedoms.

As you can see, anti-Ebleuism not only violates the constitution, but is also illiterate, accordingly, those who use its principles: criminals and ignoramuses.

I will tell a real story from Discord, where on one server this summer (2024) admins suddenly decided to introduce an anti-Able “order” and updated the list of stop-words, in particular, “autist”. This is a story about how such actions harm those whom they are supposed to protect. The innovation provoked a controversy, now no one in the chat could write the word “autist”, for this you received automute for 10 minutes, but the restrictions did not affect the moderators, and one of the administrators in the middle of a verbal spat shouted: “I am autistic”, that is, he demonstratively (and with impunity) wrote the forbidden word “autist”, then clarified that he actually has “autistic spectrum disorder”. It outraged me to the extreme, since I am also autistic, but I can’t say about it now! Before the event, I wasn’t going to tell anyone about it, why? When you go to school-class, you don’t tell everyone about your disorders and illnesses, do you? It is appropriate (and right) to remain silent about such things, it is cultural: not to stress those around you with your problems, to talk about your illnesses with the general public is a bad thing, you should do this face to face with your doctor. So, as soon as I voiced my dissatisfaction with the fact that now only the “elite” has the right to express themselves freely, and noted that I (not only the admin) a _ u _ t _ i _ s _ t _ i _ c, but to talk about it (unlike the admin) I can’t because of the automod… I was permabaned instantly 😄 Paradox: the rules that were supposed to protect autistic people shut their mouths and repressed them.

Until I was kicked out, I managed to make an interesting observation that reveals the motivation of the administrators to implement these idiotic rules: one of them slandered that this was necessary for “education, you cattle”, I pointed to the educated one at “cattle”, he apologized, but the main word here is “education”, it means that these people see themselves as educators. Now we extrapolate this local episode into the global field, and we will see the true purpose of such trends: to educate uncouth barbarians. One question: are you barbarians and did you sign up for parenting lessons? And what is education? — incited to violate the constitution? In messy, senseless self-censorship? In the primitivization of vocabulary? This is not education, gentlemen, but debilitation, similar to the infamous “education of the Soviet man.” The Soviets also rejected ratio in a stupid desire to educate, breed, give birth to homo soveticus: a condo communist who would have an innate immunity to common sense.

Anti-Eubsianism has no reason to exist in the field of communication ethics. It’s just a despotic restriction that turns a series of allegories into silly n-words.

This case shows how anti-Ablablaism silences those who really have some problems. Anti-Abebelism clears the information field from you if you are, for example, autistic. This is a clear example of discrimination, when the rights of vulnerable groups and the general right to freedom of speech are reduced. Anti-Eybueism is linguistic Nazism, it promotes a superior race of “pure (from blaming) words” and suffocates dissenters in ban cells. The word “anti-Ablashitism” should become a synonym for “hypocrisy”, because anti-Abelists advocate the protection of autistic people, and oppress them.

Non-binary dictionaries

Anti-abluvomitism is not something original, special, it is a link of blunt, crude censorship of the word. It is joined by censors from among the LGBT+ people, who always do not like how are said about them in public space. Their effort to protect non-binary persons led to the editing of explanatory dictionaries, at least in the English language, where the word ‘they’ (plural “they”) was assigned a new singular meaning: “they” (‘singular they’), which is not only illiteracy, but also bad taste. I don’t understand why it was necessary to distort a normal word, why not come up with a new one? For example thi(t): they+it. If you are not in the topic: a non-binary person does not want to be either “he” or “she”, he chooses the neuter pronoun, the problem is that in English there is no neuter pronoun for naming people. But the presence of no pronoun does not guarantee the compatibility of non-binary, because nouns do not have a neuter form. So this non-binary word-game is just for fun, don’t take it public with bans.

By the way, editing dictionaries is a precedent that should encourage to backup sensitive, important information that can be changed online.

I respect all people and understand their choice, if someone wants to be non-binary and prefers to be addressed by “they”,— no problem! Without irony: I will gladly address such a person as the person wants. But for mercy’s sake: don’t try to force me to speak the way you want outside of a private conversation. In my speech, I will rely on logic and common sense, not on ‘singular they’.

Mediaterror and bots

The following example of restriction of freedom of speech is probably well known to all of you: the infamous censorship on Youtube, TikTok and other media sites in 2024 reaches the limit of absurdity. Under the pretext of protecting children (?), a harsh automod is activated on YouTube with a huge list of banwords based on the frequency of baking, inattentive bloggers who have omitted a prohibited word in their language risk sitting without monetization. The problem is aggravated by “cross-platformness”: bloggers from other platforms, which have their own censorship, drag bad substitutes for banwords to their neighbors, who have not yet banned those words. And it so happens that bloggers “from the future” appear on YouTube (or somewhere), they are ahead of events, disguising pseudo-banwords 😅

It’s sad that this newspeak gibberish has migrated to comments, text content, and Internet communication. Thanks to whom it “migrated” is a good question. I have two options, the culprits are: a) society trained by bloggers; b) bots. Bots are mostly to blame, I think. I can’t imagine that a real man, after watching a video on YouTube, then somewhere on Reddit wrote ‘unalive’ instead of “suicide” 🤦‍♂️ Now that bots have become cheap and relatively intelligent, it is profitable to use them to shape the customer’s desired public opinion, to normalize certain ideas through misinformation, controversy, and the Mandela effect, to downgrade human content and bring automatic into trends. The process of replacing people takes place not only in IRL at factories (which is good), but also in the infofield (which is bad). For a thorough understanding of the problem, google ‘dead internet theory’.

The list of stop words includes “murder”, “suicide”, “rape”, “pedophilia”, “assault”, “war”, “terrorism”, etc. What can be achieved with such an action? The fact that it stifles freedom of speech: a fact. But does it level the phenomena whose names it forbids? Of course not! Let’s delete the word “war” from the dictionaries and wars will be a thing of the past!

Some enthusiastic bloggers are so passionate about this topic that they fall into some kind of psychosis, for example, Skeeter Jean removed from his vocabulary “pedophilia” and everything that he thought was connected with it, and even the numeral “thirteen” (maybe others), because it describes age in particular… at first I wanted to laugh, but then I cried.

Scanthropic trash

One minecrafter published on social media a screenshot of the game’s web cabinet, on which the system reported an error in the nickname: Flying_Racoon, such a nickname automod perceived as “offensive” for certain people and rejected it. It is clear that this is not about grammarnazi, the absence of one “s” is not an excuse. The problem is ‘coon’, it’s a slang insulting word for Negros, and I learned about it in the comments under that post 😃 which once again proves the pointlessness of such restrictions, they rather spread what they are fighting against. This incident is wider than it seems, it has a whole concept: “Scunthorpe problem”. But this method of censorship is wrong, and not only because of the attack on freedom of speech and privacy (perluster algorithms scan email correspondence as well), but also logically: you can’t separate the whole thing and draw a conclusion about the whole thing by its parts. When you break a watch, you have parts of the watch, but not the watch. This is stupid, like in case when you divide a word for searching a new “hidden” meaning of the whole word is deduced from the parts (butterfly: butter fly — “butter fly”; pineapple: pine apple — “pine apple”; cowboy: cow boy — “calf”; hotdog: hot dog — “Korean street food”). To fully understand this, read the article on Wikipedia, there are plenty of examples.

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In conclusion we have the displacement of free communication and creativity beyond the visible Internet in the abyss of the deep-darkweb and in the “kitchen”: closed platforms.

Absolute freedom of speech

The constitution of any civilized country guarantees its citizens freedom of speech. In the famous First Amendment to the US constitution, this guarantee is provided unconditionally. But I want to note that on the Internet, where the situation is uncontrolled, here every owner of a site, server, chat is his own master with his own constitution. There is an impression that when you go to the Internet, you leave the country 😆 Why do local entities not obey the global law? Can the owner of, say, an IRL-club establish its own rules in which homicide is allowed? The country in which this club is located should not regulate this situation? Murder in a club where homicide is allowed by its rules: legal? No. Then why is cancellation in such an internet free speech club normal? This is abnormal and should be regulated at the level of the main law.

Freedom of speech should be absolute. Today it sounds like a utopia, in an anarchist way. But this is the right way.

Many people are afraid of such freedom, they are afraid of any infinity (I saw a docfilm where a scientist thought about numbers and suggested that they are not infinite… he wanted to believe that, that someday people will reach the last largest number, he was frightened by infinity), and this is due to a tendency to authoritarianism, such people need to have control over the situation in order to be calm, even if this situation does not concern them, they do not trust those around them, they are afraid that they will either screw them up or take away their power. Therefore, in principle, authoritarians cannot be trusted with power, they will use it selfishly: they will restrain everything that goes beyond their “comfort zone”, their rules, they will make a cage out of infinity.

Wars don’t start with calls to fight, or orders to fight, no, war starts with action: when a soldier picks up a machine gun and goes to fight. Of course, both the first and the second are guilty, but without the second, the first is powerless, his words are incapable of harming anyone, his words do not have a TNT equivalent, but he will undoubtedly answer to God for his words.

At this summer (2024) in England, a 28-year-old guy was sentenced to a real 3 years in a prison for a post on Twitter. In that post, he called for aggression in the streets, this against the background of the recent events with the triple murder. In russia, thousands of people have already been sentenced for posts, reposts and even likes, there, they are being tried, in particular, for pacifism, Christian rejection of violence (militarism).

All this censorship is powerless and ineffective, it only leads to resistance according to the law of physics about “action and counteraction”, it does not form in a person resistance to unworthy acts, because censorship itself is an unworthy act.

If a man speaks some gibberish, you can ignore him, there is a great “ignore” option on the Internet for this. You can issue warnings, express your displeasure with dislikes, There are many tools, ban is the last and unacceptable, like the death penalty. No matter what anyone says, the one who uses force illegally is always guilty. F. Herbert in “Messiah Dune” called “improper use of force” a fatal sin.

Why does the editorial office of, let’s say, a newspaper (media) disclaim responsibility for placing advertisements on its pages, or disclaim: “the opinion of the author may not coincide with the editorial opinion”, why do not social networks follow the same path? — don’t like someone’s tweet? OK! — just ignore it, there is a special option for this. “The opinion of contributors may not coincide with the policy of the platform”, this is not the problem of the platform, but of the contributor. Why are words equated with illegal content? If pirated movies are stored on someone’s server, that server will be asked to remove them, or they will try to close it completely, condemn its owners. The words are also stored on someone else’s server, but they are legal: freedom of speech is guaranteed! — then why are they being asked to remove it and sanctioned if they refuse to comply? This is a rhetorical question, because this is how tyranny manifests itself.

A cultured man will never offend another. A truly cultured man does not need rules, he already has them in himself, for him it is a self-important, self-evident thing. For a Christian, such a guide to ethics is Christianity. Jesus said that everyone will answer to Him on the last day for their words, so give this judgment to Him, but He commanded us: not to judge anyone.

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This article is translated from Ukrainian by AI.

Modern mass culture performs one function: the promotion of “traditional values”. Every civilization has its own traditions and values, and the (evil) civilization, striving to reshape man in its own image and likeness, shows superiority over the individual and unforgivingly digs into the plate with informational food, choosing from there that which, according to the opinion of the civilization, can harm, and throwing in that, which according to civilization will be useful. Such behavior is absolutely unacceptable. In an field of high culture, even looking at someone else’s plate is tactless, let alone touching someone else’s food with your bare hands!

All this ruthlessness is necessary for an evil civilization to build a hyperreality: a virtual superstructure in the global infofield for the moderation of collective consciousness. Because of hyperreality, a civilization can control people without any problems and they will not even know about it, because they will have no alternatives to compare. This focus is actively used by despots, for example, Russia, North Korea, China, Iran, or in the past, the Soviets: people under the Iron Curtain do not know about the real world, they really accept everything that authorities and influencers tell them; the North Koreans feel sorry for the poor Americans, those who are starving, standing in lines for drinking water, and even resorting to cannibalism. In the same way, they pity the “unfree” Americans (Europeans) of the Motzkovites (for example, the “putler detachments” or the Solovyovs), they really think that in the West it is worse than in their swamps. And the West actively uses these propaganda tools, this rudeness for its own needs, it is not going to defeat evil with good, and therefore, the cap of a crooked mirror falls on Europe.

Dissent is branded with marginality and banned. Try to say the unpopular opinion outside the meme context: you will be banned here and now, and this is only an opinion, not a petition, not an art, not a protest (action). For the latter, you will be persecuted, intimidated, possibly killed. And getting banned for words is the easiest thing, despite technology, the supposed high culture, European (Western) progressiveness, democracy, I think no one will be surprised when they hear that a couple of bullets were planted in someone at the entrance for a couple of words? Matrix architects are intolerant.

The leitmotif of this culture: pleasing everyone. But when you please everyone, you will please no one. It is simply physically impossible to please everyone. If your film aims to express internationality, you will have to respect the actors of representatives of all nations. If you want to comment on the idea of ​​equality of people, you cannot forget at least one minority. These urges are sometimes simply paradoxical, when you illustrate feminist narratives, you insult women opposed to feminism; by normalizing fatness, you insult not only common sense (science) but also those who fall out of your imaginary normality: thin and normal people, giving preference to Blacks, you insult Whites and Asians. Someone will always be offended if creativity is viewed through a prism with ideological layers.

The correct analysis of creativity should be conducted exclusively through the prism of common sense: the author’s ideas should be considered in the field of “good and evil”, objective symbols, and not imaginary, political ones. For example, if the author exalts a certain race of people over others in his work, then this is a really uncultured work that distorts the truth, since people, although different, are essentially equal. On the other hand, if the author did not represent any races in his work, except for a certain one, this is not an offense, just as it is not an offense to have a movie about bees that does not contain bumblebees.

In books, for the most part, race is not described when it is not important to the plot, in a rock ’n roll song you will not hear jazz or k-pop, in shooters you will not meet RTS, and in impressionism Suprematism, and this is normal, it defines the difference of essences and reveals the diversity of means and ideas, creative wealth. Attempting to melt everything, to merge it into one mixture, is a crime against art, it is like mixing all the colors in one glass for painting: it will turn out to be an unsightly mess. On the contrary, you need to cultivate dissimilarity. Originality inspires and becomes the basis for experiments, motivates to challenges and creates competitiveness. Originality is valued for its originality, for its uniqueness, it is a valuable thing, and no one needs a non-unique product. There are many precious stones, if we make one of them and discard the others, will we gain or lose? Far away, I say obvious, banal things, which, however, have become as incomprehensible to many as the round Earth.

It is not necessary to please everyone, there is no such requirement for creators. The essence of creativity is self-expression: your creativity comes from your heart, that is, from your middle, and modern censors, latent communists, are trying to put a filter on your mouth to block out everything that, in their opinion, is inappropriate, dangerous for the construction of hyperreality. Bots are involved with the same goal, they spam their random-shit content in social networks to cut off human content, to turn people exclusively into consumers of poor content, to turn the Internet, an interactive environment, into a static environment, TV. The goal of this action: creation of homo neosoveticus.

Today bots (AI) cannot generate adequate media content, but the mass release of the first films (like this) and games from AI is not far away, shit of electronic brains: cartoons, serials, books (applied literature is already on the shelves (freelancers constantly receive orders for “writing”-editing, for example, books on psychology via ChatGPT)), memes, YouTube videos, etc., will soon flood our infofield, Orwell wrote about it in “1984”, remember the barrel with stories for books? This is it. And the propagandist crap from the collaborators* that we see today: it belongs to the training base of AI, modern samples of underculture will become its food, from which it will have the power to build a “wonderful new world”.

*We live in times of cultural occupation, our modernity is aggressively moderated, normalized according to someone else’s order, the past is rewritten, branded and crossed out. Accordingly, those who support these trends are collaborators.

Let’s consider a few examples of propaganda, distortion of reality, and artificial impoverishment, debasement for the sake of ideological indoctrination and the formation of bad taste

LOTR (movie, series)To begin with, you can compare original works and remixes or modernized versions, for example “The Lord of the Rings”. Everyone knows perfectly well how outstanding the trilogy was, it took 17 (!) Oscars out of 30 nominations, has a very high rating from critics:

And not worse the rating from the audience:

*Rotten Tomatoes: 95%; 95%; 86%. *IMDB: 8.9; 8.8; 9.0. *Metacritic: 9.0; 9.0; 8,9.

The series has been added to all sorts of best and significant film lists, for example: “In 2021, The Fellowship of the Ring was selected by the US Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for “cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance”, this is from Wikipedia. And no one asked at the time about racial quotas for actors, the representation of minorities, the role of women in history, everyone contemplated art and drew conclusions from the impressions that the film ignited, from the aestheticism that it interested, from the thoughts that it stirred.

Now let’s look at the pitiable analogue (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022)) from Netflix:

*39% of Rotten Tomatoes viewers praised the series, *on IMDB, 25% of viewers (25,645 people) rated the series 1/10, *Amazon was forced to freeze the rating system for 72 hours due to a flurry of viewer negativity, *rating on Metacritic 2.6 and disabled comments (on M. it is common practice to turn off comments for questionable titles).

I think no one will dispute that the audience rating is the most objective. It will be difficult to quietly buy tens of thousands of men so that they respond favorably to your nonsenseries, but with dozens of “critics” it is easier. No, I’m not saying that the critics who praised the Netflix series were bought, maybe some actually liked it (*facepalm*), but look at the percentage of favorable reviews from “experts”: Rotten Tomatoes scored 85% (7.5\10 ) based on 230 reviews; Metacritic 71\100 (37 “expert” reviews). Such a discrepancy with the audience rating is, to speak politically correct, suspicious. And in general, I am surprised that, for example, IMDB simply did not roll back the ratings after a wave of dislikes, as they did with the series Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, where the English queen was played by a black woman (!), then IMDB wrote out the series 7+\10 by their own hand, rejecting all the viewers “ones”, and after that I left this service, because suppressing freedom of speech is disrespectful to a man and a manifestation of autocracy, I’m not going to sit under a dome and deceive myself.

Complaints about the series are predictable: the movie diverges from the book to fulfill its feminist, racist plot tasks, in particular, to portray Galadriel, a strong and independent femalelf, Amazon-like warrior who defies her king, and essentially inherits the meme image of the American “Karen” . The actors are full of Negroids, but does the ancient universe of Tolkien’s fantasy Middle-earth: British-Scandinavian myth involve non-European characters? The inclusion of foreign races in a purely European work looks as comical as the intervention of white actors in some specific, authentic, local African film. Can you imagine, let’s say, filmmakers from Niger, who invited up to 50 % white actors from Europe to play in a film adaptation of a local folklore plot? Wouldn’t the audience look around the cinema mockingly to see their conventional Uhamba Bayund played by a conventional red-haired Robin Jancey from Ireland? This is a farce, a caricature.

Also, endless circling around “minorities” distracts from the plot. Men are depicted as dumb. And it’s also funny that among the orcs there are women-orcs, but don’t orcs breed in an incubator? These are killing machines, they are grown in incubators, whats the women?! Women are physically weaker, they are not as enduring as men, so it makes no sense for orcs to breed them. For real, how come Netflix didn’t think of giving dendroids sexual characteristics?! 😄

Star Wars (films) The original Star Wars series became a cult, this cultural phenomenon spawned countless fan fiction, sequels, and alternatives. The story went beyond the cinema screen, turned into video games and board games, LEGO, became a theme in cosplay, embodied in books and comics, in memes, Master Yoda’s pronunciation became one of the reminiscent markers. And now compare the first 6 films of the series with the last ones, especially with the final “Skywalker” (2019), where there is nothing left of art: we see nothing new, instead, a lot of racial and feminist propaganda — the main characters here are exclusively women and blacks, they are on the light side of the Force, and white men are purely evils, they are on the dark side of the Force. Therefore, this film is not perceived as art, but as a topic for twitter shitting.

He-Man (series) The animated series He-Man (USA) was popular in the 80s of the 20th century, a lot was heard about him in Europe as well. He-Man became the hero of memes. At one time, the series branched out into She-Ra, where the main character is a woman — He-Man’s sister. And even if you don’t know these series, you will guess the content from the title itself: He-Man is a white man, reflects a typical masculine image, She-Ra is presented in the image of an Amazon. In 2020, Netflix made its mock version of He-Man. The ridiculousness is that the cover of the new series looks more or less “canonical”, He-Man is the same and placed in front, which is normal, because he is the main character. But in the very first episode, he is abruptly killed, and his place is taken by a woman… If Netflix didn’t want to laugh at men, they would have made their own version of the film, instead of parasitizing on a well-known title, in the worst case, they would have remake She-Ra in particular, and “He-Man” would not be touched. Well, no, Netflix took the ready-made creative and turned it upside down. A movie called “He-Man” cannot have a main character other than He-Man. A. Sapkowski uses a similar trick in his “The Witcher” when he pushes the expected hero to the second, or even to the twenty-second plan, instead sticking out feminine images.

Lords of the Sky (TV series) Modern cinema, poisoned by racial propaganda, reaches absurdity. Look at the poster of “Lords of the Sky”: all the characters in focus are not Europeans, typically Mongoloid and Negroid… although the series is about the events of the WWII from the point of view of American military aviators. Do you see American military aviators on the poster? When I first saw this poster, I thought that it was either about Pearl Harbor from the perspective of a kamikaze, or some low-budget Chinese action movie. In the 40s of the past, racial segregation prevailed in the USA, African Americans were called colored, they were allocated seats on buses, there were separate shops, schools, cafeterias for them, even drinking fountains were separate for them. And here (on the poster) there are immediately three blacks and two Asians in the foreground in the image of aviators. Who do you want to fool? Is this cinema in the context of an alternative history?

Gladiator II (film) One of the textbook examples, so to speak, of creating a simulacrum can be seen in R. Scott’s film “Gladiator II” (2024). There is a Black character, Macrinus (D. Washington), an arms dealer and a gladiator — a sly, resourceful figure who ultimately reaches the Roman throne through cunning and intrigue; yes, you heard that right: a Black man becomes the Emperor of Rome in Scott’s movie.

On the left is Makrin as seen by AI, on the right is Makrin as seen by R. Scot

Antique image of Macrinus

The problem is that Macrinus is a real historical figure, Marcus Opellius Macrinus. He indeed ruled Rome for one year (217–218 AD), but, as you might have guessed, he was not Black! Nor was he a gladiator or an arms dealer. He hailed from North Africa and belonged to the Berbers. Not all inhabitants of Africa are Black. Thus, in this film, the creators make the same fundamental mistake as the creators of the series “African Queens: Queen Cleopatra” (2023), where Cleopatra herself was played by a biracial actress. This caused an uproar in Egypt, with Netflix being accused of “Afrocentrism,” “including slogans and inscriptions aimed at distorting and erasing Egyptian identity,” and facing lawsuits to ban their series in Egypt.

Netflix-version of Cleopatra

The Avengers (film) In “Avengers. The Finale (2019)” Europeoid Captain America gets old and passes his shield to a young black man, now he is the new Captain America, or should we say “Captain Afroamerica”? At the same time, the white man Thor calls the black woman “the queen of New Asgard”. You don’t have to be smart enough to pick out the politics and artificiality of these scenes, they are far-fetched, unnecessary, they are not grounded in the plot, that is, the authors did not even manage to bring the plot under these casts, but suddenly made such a move. YouTubers do the same by integrating advertising into their videos. When advertising is skillfully integrated, it is possible not to notice, and sometimes the entire video is disguised advertising, here the story is similar. By the way, this movie has two Audi ad integrations from Iron Man, and that’s with the fact that the movie has a $400 million budget! Such integrations are typical for B, C, Z category trash movies, which proves once again: art in the past, modern art relies on customers of ideas and goods.

Assassins Creed (game) Another example of absurdity was bred at Ubisoft, where they make a historical game in the setting of ancient Japan, and one of the samurai (Yasuke) is black. Do you hear? — A samurai is a negroid. Another example of simulacrum and mockery. The Japanese were outraged by the distortion of historical reality, wrote a petition, but Unisoft spat at you and your reality, they are the creators of a new reality — hyperreality.

Sweet Baby Inc. (games) There is even Sweet Baby Inc., an organization that advises game developers on woke(DEI)-representations in games, they help create images that would correspond to hyperreality. Sweet Baby Inc. or similar DEI-consultants today, although they do not have enough influence, but under the condition of public loyalty, or at least neutrality, they will surely receive famous funding to strengthen their positions and normalize the very phenomenon of “consultations”. Now these consultations are voluntary, but who is to guarantee that the game will not be shadowbanned (or permabanned) later due to the lack of a “Agreed with Sweet Baby Inc.” sticker? Isn’t that how the Overton window works?

The Witcher (book) In some places, literature is even worse. Take, at least, the “Witcher” series, which was promoted just today. It is important to note that everyone heard about the Witcher somewhere from the mid-2010s (mostly thanks to the games), I myself thought that Sapkowski wrote the series then, but as it turned out, he wrote it in the early 90s. Are you surprised? But why be surprised, because right now there are orders for such cul stories, because “The Witcher” is really a story not about a witcher, not about Geralt, not about a man, but about femininity, about Yenefer, Ciri and their female friends, it typical feminist literature. The name “Witcher” serves only as clickbait and selling point for men. Who would buy a book called “Yenefer. Justice fan”? And “The Witcher. The Sword of Destiny”? The difference in vibes is obvious. When I started reading the series, I thought I was diving into a heroic fantasy, but I was teased, I dived into something else. Sapkowski teased me and all the men, on the cover he promised a fantasy about Geralt-the main-hero-the-powerful, but shows Geralt-the slug-heel, a pitiful serf who is owned by the lady Yenefer, or even does not show it at all, in the 2nd and in the 3rd book, he almost does not appear before the reader, it is all about women and their adventures, and about menstruation. I read this crap halfway through book 4 and threw it in the trash.

The Da Vinci Code (book) It’s the same story with artificially promoted bestselling author D. Brown, who became popular thanks to his debut with “The Da Vinci Code”. In this book, he obsessively promotes matriarchy, paganism with goddess worship, his main character Langdon obeys the orders of a woman, the whole plot is looking for a female grail, at the end he acquires “wisdom” from a church servant (woman), and all this is built on anti-Christian rhetoric. How such crap became popular is beyond me, the only explanation is that it was all paid for by the secret organizations he writes about.

Music After 2020, there were two very thorough experiments (news 1, news 2), which revealed the primitivization of music in relation to both melody and lyrics. Although the simplified melody is compensated by compression from instrumental, sound layers, the latest technologies allow synthesizing almost any sound and this is considered a modern achievement in music, the sounds in the tracks have increased. But the lyrics did not gain any visibility and gave birth to memes with comparisons of song texts of the past (1970+) and the present. The style of today’s lyrics is degraded, often operates with the simplest images and verbal turns, consists of constant repetitions. Songs have become more aggressive, self-centered, narcissistic, and, of course, agenda-advancing, trendy simulacra. Suggestion through music is especially effective, because music is essentially aimed at the emotion, it is perceived first of all by the heart — feelings, and then it is analyzed, if it is analyzed at all.

The End Woke-trend or woke-culture claims to be avant-garde, but in fact they do not go beyond marginality. Since the 2020s, there are so many simulacrum manifestations in culture that it no longer makes sense to weed them out, now it is easier to focus on real creativity than to point to the plastering of jokers. Can you name a new popular movie or game without racism and feminism? I think not. If you search, you will probably find something artistic, value, but in the future, when there will be no passive resistance, everything that we call adequate today will be called barbaric. There are already precedents: look at modern reviews of old works, for example Lovecraft, the reviewers disclaim at the beginning: the author lived in the old dark times and had no idea about progressive morality, called African Americans negroes (I condemn!). Such reviewers have accepted the simulacrum of “racist” names from the mass media and do not know that “negro” is the definition of “negroid”, i.e. race, this is a normal dictionary word, it comes from Spanish, Latin, where it is interpreted as “black”. When calling an African-American “black” or “black skinned” is acceptable, why is it not acceptable to call an African-American “negro”? These are synonyms 😄 Such are the fruits of political correctness, which is one of the tools of censorship of dictatorial building hyperrealities, extremes and radicalism are characteristic of it. More and more words are included in the list of ban words: suicide, murder, assault, rape, pedophilia, which are baselessly, senselessly and ridiculously euphemized (by people and (or) bots): unalive, grape, unpronounceable (replaced with the spoiler “well, you understand what am I talking about”) or are censored by beeping. Look at modern (2024) Youtube: the site has been turned into a laughing stock, everything is soaped up and baked, except for videos about cats and dogs, you can’t post anything there without censorship. This is an attack on freedom of speech, this is the introduction of Orwellian newspeak.

This nonsense should be opposed primarily in the financial sphere: do not buy a spoiled product! No matter how much they sponsor propagandists and instigators of debilitation, if they stop paying for their bullshit, their self-confidence will fall from their faces and they will change their tactics. They will “change”, they will not refuse. But having principle and the will to maintain that principle, any tricks are not scary, and hypocrites are laughable. We live in a European universe and have the right to demand comfortable, natural content. This is violence: to force Europeans to a foreign culture, to foreign symbols, traditions, and religions. If I want to watch an Asian movie, play an African game, or listen to Latin American music, I will turn to the relevant community, to the original sources, there is no need to drag, import caricatured, inferior models into the European cultural field, this is inappropriate, ridiculous, this is stupidity and aggression. Thoughtless imitation reminds me of cargo cults, drawing a watch on the wrist.

There are incompatible (incompatible) cultures, take at least rap, no matter how hard the whites tried to stick in there, nothing succeeded in them, because it is a characteristically black theme, whites are outsiders there apriori. Yes, Africans called Eminem “theirs”, but they probably did it out of condescension, they saw how a person is trying and praised them for those efforts, not the results. No, I’m not saying that white people can’t rap, rap as much as you want, but white and black rap are different worlds, and if you’re white and rap, you won’t join the black party, you’ll always be in the white rap bubble. That’s why a white person who is squirming from a black person looks ridiculous and unworthy. Funny, like the Russians in the 18th century aped Europeans in fashion and architecture: a dignified man in a curly wig with a black satin bow, in lacquered shoes with a gilded buckle, in white trousers, in a silk camisole under an embroidered caftan emerges from a tall building with a figured pediment, a wide portico, and sculpted rococo decorations... spits on the muddy dirt road, looks around in the middle of the street with mowed bushes. A man in rags comes, takes off his hat, bows with the words: “Hello, my lord, slaves (chattles) are bought like you obey”, a humpback rolls past, a rumpled humpback swings balls from under its tail, the humpback’s wheel has fallen into the slop, splashes around swamp, speckles white pants and makes the “gentleman” faintly squirm. It is impossible not to notice the inconsistencies, if you do not notice: you are curving your soul, because it is as obvious as, for example, transgender men in sports: they self-identified as women and moved to a women’s league, everyone sees that this is absurd, but they close their eyes, this a typical example of post-truth.

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This article is translated from Ukrainian by AI.

Another important point: the game can be satisfactory but have unethical elements, or it can be completely inappropriate. This list will help you better understand the mechanics of ethical gaming, how it works, and apply its principles to your experience as a player or developer.

1. The GTA series, including GTA III, Vice City, San-Andreas: bad. None of these games can be completed without a homicide. This is the base, but there are many other problems: red blood, brutal scenes (beheadings), real models of weapons, the criminal plot is presented without alternatives and without judgment. For example, Vice City was created on the basis of “Scar Face” (1983) and, unlike the film, MH triumphs in the game. The plot and gameplay forces the player to kill. What does “gameplay” mean? — it is impossible to bypass the story quest in an ethical way: there are no alternatives or script tricks that would allow you to finish the quest or go to another one without killing. Adjacent to the Mafia series.
2. The Call of Duty series: bad. Everything is obvious here, the game is involved in militarism and is entirely about homicide, but I want to note something else, how the game shapes the male social role of “warrior” through the title, in it we have the word “duty”, that is a typical example of a simulacrum is the imposition of responsibilities invented by evil people on a man. A man has no duty to fight and kill others. Men may not be the target audience for this game, but just seeing the title and the military preview will give you a infusion. Close to the Mount & Blade series.
3. Hitman and Assassin series: bad. Dedicated to contract killers, assassins. They romanticize homicide and promote mercenary. MH in these games do not face problems of conscience and morality, it seems that they are the same “workers” as everyone else, they do their “job” and receive money or other preferences for it. In terms of criminality, it is related to GTA.
4. Sea of ​​Thieves: bad. Gamers play the role of pirates, that is, bandits of the 15th century, the gameplay is appropriate. In addition to murders, there are items related to “dark rituals” (as it is called in the game itself), in particular, one of those items is called “Blessing Skull of Athena”, which connects the fictional universe with the ancient Greek reality; reminiscent item: “witch doll”, refers to the infamous voodoo doll. There are also “animal cages” in the game for kept various kinds of animals, but do we understand what kind of metaphor this is? — slavery. Related to World of Warships.
5. Skyrim: bad. According to the plot, the player must perform a bloodletting ritual to open the lock.
6. Terraria: bad. Progression through the plot requires the use of a voodoo doll, directly or indirectly, while this action kills one NPC. The elements of divination and sorcery are a black niche, and cannot be in the player’s gameplay, the same as non-Christian religions, they can only be presented in an antagonistic way. To top it all off, there is a “demon heart”: a usable artifact that benefits the player by expanding item slots. In the field of ethical gaming, it is impossible to imagine that evil brings benefit, it is illogical and unacceptable: you cannot call black on white. Also, the game has a provocative visual: there is a realistic image of internal organs, for example, an open heart in Moon Lord (the game Transistor has a similar defect, where one of the final bosses is a heart (in the metrodvania Grime, parts of the body are placed in the scenery of the environment)). Minecraft has the same problem (pagan elements with a positive view), but it cannot be called bad, it is questionable. There, in the endgame, the player receives (optionally) a totem, holding it in the hand of the MH acquires a certain benefit.
7. Alundra (1997): bad. The plot requires MH to worship the local gods: Alundra is taken to the temple, the priest tells his story and asks him to kneel down and pray with them to the idols. The player can refuse, there is a “choice” (yes-no), but it has no effect, the dialogue is repeated until you agree to the offer.
8. Trine: questionable. One of the game characters (his involvement is mandatory): thief (triumphator like MH in GTA). There is a pagan element: at a certain point in the story, the player receives a hammer with a description that reveals that this weapon is “blessed by the god of thunder”. The plot tells about the dualistic, heretical Manichaean “balance of forces” of good and evil, which seemingly balances the universe, but in fact, evil is justified in this way, on this basis the infamous “bad people are needed too”.
9. Sid Meier’s Civilization series and the like: bad. Despite the fact that the game reflects historical reality, it does so unconditionally, without conclusions, without alternatives, e.g. for the development of your civilization, it is necessary to develop the military, to have soldiers at your service, to intervene in conflicts. This approach is especially dangerous in the setting of the future, because it normalizes the future of violence.
10. Heartstone: questionable. One of the game characters represents evil (a warlock) and the game mechanics are arranged in such a way that sometimes you get cards of this character, and you have to choose: to use them or not, the latter will complicate your situation. In addition, in the announcements of add-ons, the developers said at least twice about “selling the soul”, in mass culture this phrase most often occurs in the context of selling the soul to the devil, this is an unacceptable allusion, and in general, jokes on this topic look at least suspicious: is the developer friends with the head?

All games can be divided into three broad categories according to ethics: bad, questionable and good.

Bad games are those in which progress through the plot is blocked by an unethical element: a quest, an event, or the need to use some inappropriate item. Also, these are games based on misanthropy, for example, military style: military action games (Counter-Strike, Worms, Jackal, Angry Birds) and simulators (World of Tanks, Top Gun, War Thunder), military strategies (Star- WarCraft, Dune, Cossacks, chess), or metaphysical: Dungeon Keeper, physical: Manhunt, mythical: Vampire: The Masquerade, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. In 2026, what began to appear in wide public access (on Steam) were no longer even games, but practically full-fledged military simulators, such as Ukrainian Fight Drone Simulator (UFDS). This is a drone-operator training environment that, for example, not only supports specific military control consoles, but explicitly recommends them for “gameplay,” so that in real conditions (in war) the user would not have to retrain. Projects like UFDS or America’s Army constitute direct propaganda of violence, the weaponization of games, and recruitment. This is a crossing of red lines and should be regarded as child-killing, since this mental weapon is aimed primarily at kids. The setting does not matter, the fact that the events of the Heroes of Might & Magic series take place in a fantasy universe does not reject the military principles of the game, in which the player is a warlord, he gathers an army, fights, captures castles. Unethical events include, in particular, aggression against Christianity, for example, in Fallout 2 there are two bad NPC with the names Big Jesus, Lil’ Jesus, as well as a weapon (knife) with the name Little Jesus; in Cyberpunk 2077, one of the NPC utters (in English voicing) a blasphemy. In Disciples 1, during the installation stage of the game, the player is asked to accept the terms of the license in the form of signing a contract with the devil. Sometimes you can judge a game by the development team, the responsible company, e.g. in 2020+, a post appeared on Blizzard Diablo III’s official twitter on the occasion of the game’s anniversary, calling for the devil to come to this world.

One of the tasks in Postal 2 is to “pee on dad,” specifically on his grave.

A questionable game has unethical elements but allows you to continue without them, although this usually complicates the gameplay. There are many of them, for example, in The Sims 4 there is a voodoo doll, but you can not use it, in the ARPG Torchlight, the first skill of the summoner is summoning imps (in Terraria, the second set of the summoner also summons imps), but it can be ignored and developed in the following, in a series of city-building simulators SimCity has tools of genocide: controlled meteorites, radiation and chemical contamination, meteorological and seismic weapons, which, however, the game does not force to use, in Prison Architect there is an electric chair for the death penalty, but the player decides whether to equip his prison with it on his own, in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. In Shadow of Chernobyl, the sequence of quests is not connected, you can skip them (one of the first tasks is homicidal), just go to the next one. In the 3-in-row Bejeweled 3, there is a Zen mode, in which the player is given concise instructions with the suggestion to listen to mantras and binaural rhythms, which is not only a propaganda of pseudoscience (just like talking about astrology), but also an unchristian element. In this way, questionable games present the player with additional obstacles, which, however, can be perceived as a challenge.

Good games do not prevent the player from reaching the final credits, do not force him to act against his conscience, do not tempt him to go to the dark side, and do not promote questionable ideas, paid for, or just hype, which the developers push for additional likes while at the same time not realizing that they are popularizing false ideas thrown into the infofield with a specific purpose. Such story games as Fallout 1, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, although they have many ethical problems, but thanks to their variability, they can be completed ethically without much difficulty: without killing and looting. It is also important to remember that these games are from a compromised developer, so you need to treat them carefully, analyze them especially carefully. Gothic 1 plot does not require killing anyone. In Portal 1–2, aggression is essentially absent. Open world games like Skyrim, Morrowind can be played outside of the story. I had a challenge to explore all locations in Skyrim, which I completed without a homicide. But a good ethical game is not necessarily ethical, of all the examples given, except that “Portal 1–2” can be called completely ethical. By the way, in “Mario” the brick blocks are the enchanted inhabitants of the kingdom, that is, by breaking them, Mario in a certain sense kills his countrymen, or scatters their ashes.

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This article translated from Ukrainian by AI.

Violence in games, in particular murders, have gone through a considerable “evolutionary” path. At the dawn of video games, it was difficult to distinguish between sprites, low-quality graphics, and some kind of violence. Certain small elements, for example internal organs, were generally impossible to depict more or less clearly, and red blood in most cases was not visualized. The first games were more metaphorical than realistic. To see, for example, the same blood in it, you had to use your imagination. But since the beginning of the 00s, the situation is changing. The detail increases with the degree of violence. Then started talking about bans for children, introducing cruelty (adult) ratings, banning games entirely in certain countries. The player begins to witness realistic brutality, true violence. The body of the characters now does not consist of 2–3 square sprites, but of thousands of polygons, the model is endowed with real physics, for example a ragdoll, so it not only looks “like the real thing”, but also acts and moves like that.

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SubscribeIn fact, no matter how human-like a virtual model looks, it is a virtual model, the same is true of AI: no matter how advanced it is, it will not succeed in achieving humanity (intellectual (self-awareness), or emotional), although many argue about this and not only on amateur platforms, somewhere in social network comments, but also among developers and scientists. It comes to the point that proposes to implement “rights for robots”, and this is only because they are outwardly similar to people. Here I want to draw a parallel: greater realism requires thinking about the nature of things. When we talked to a chatbot that knew how to insert the name of the interlocutor into its random phrases and all, no one had questions about the rights of this chatbot, but when this chatbot acquired neural network artificial intelligence and passed the test Turing, the attitude towards him has changed. And on the contrary: when we played in the console of the first generations, no one thought about the age categories of games, but with the growth of realism came censorship.

Extending this sequence, we will come to a complete visual immersion in the virtual world with the help of a 3D headset or a brain implant, and in that the world models of the characters will hardly differ from the real ones, even tactilely. What’s more: the characters will be replaced by player avatars. It will resemble a daydream, a hallucination. This is a theory that does not need proof, in the scope of this article we only need it for inferences.

Let’s make this inference. Let’s imagine a child playing, say, ‘Contra’ on the NES, at first glance nothing unusual happens in this scene, the fact that the game is military, we will omit for now. In ‘Contra’, the characters shoot with unusual ammos, balls or lasers, the opponents are man-like, the main characters are commandos, that is, members of a military organization. Now let’s imagine another child (or an adult, it doesn’t matter) from the future, this child plays a similar action game, but is endowed with all the qualities of modern technological progress: 100% photorealistic textures, a full set of sounds and animations, there is a tactile perception. The laser in this game does not break the enemy NPC into 10 balls that fly in different directions, as in ‘Contra’, but burns a hole in him, exposing the internal organs, spraying everything with blood, provoking a dying cry and shuddering agony, or cuts off a limb, releasing vessels and internal tissues, bones.

We do not draw a conclusion yet. There is a controversial phenomenon of depicting children in games, usually developers avoid this topic and do not add child-like characters to games with gameplay that allows to harm these virtual children. Sometimes developers remove children from their old games, this is what happened with ‘Fallout’: the gaming culture since the late 90s has developed in terms of ethics so much that it forced an old game to be revised due to players who deliberately killed children… But that’s a game from 1997, you can imagine what kind of primitive visual is there, and when will the visual be indistinguishable (conditionally) from reality? A person who spends several hours in a row doing nothing but killing photo-realistic children, and doing it with varying degrees of brutality, what is this person doing? Relaxing? is it ok? The logic of the indifferent ones says — it’s normal, what’s the difference, when those children don’t exist, they’re just pixels. This is true, but the person who commits virtual infanticide is real, his emotions is real from this action. Also pay attention to the reaction of the public and the developers: if everyone truly perceived games as nothing more than entertainment, why was there a need to remove children from the game at all? Why in the original Carmageddon released in the same year, 1997, players could drive to crush people on the sidewalks, only for the developers later to replace them with zombies with green blood and robots spilling black oil instead of blood? Because in some countries, the killing of even virtual humans was deemed unacceptable, and the game was banned. How should such caution be interpreted: as amateurism, obscurantism, or high morality?

We do not draw a conclusion yet. Not so long ago, news began to appear on the network about gamers offended by the uncultured perverted behavior of players in meta-universes, the offense consisted mostly of tactless gestures and conversations. But meta-universes are only on the doorstep of existence, the future interactive will include tactile sensations, as M. Zuckerberg said, for example, the implementation of this technology does not matter, the main thing is the trend. If now the offense is limited to relatively minor actions, then in the future virtual sexual violence (virtual rape (as an act or intention)) will provoke real feedback. Here, even the indifferent ones will not be able to turn everything to “just pixels”, because there is a tactile connection.

This is the base, but there are many other dark aspects of the human soul that somehow find points of attraction in games and are drawn to them. In ‘Fallout: New Vegas’, the player can become a vulture cannibal and eat human corpses. In ‘Hitman’, the player kills people for money. In ‘Counter-Strike’, the player becomes a terrorist and plants explosives. Many military games offer the player to kill in a variety of ways: by bombing from airplanes, from ground vehicles, with the help of firearms and melee weapons, by commit genocide. There are games with elements of torture and mutilation (‘Tormentor’). There are games where the main character is essentially an anti-hero belonging to physical or metaphysical evil.

Now we can draw a conclusion: it is false to consider such “points of gravity” of cruelty as useful, to justify their existence by the famous “blow off steam”, as if a person suffers stress during the day, and in the evening sits down at the computer and starts killing everyone, unleashing aggression on virtual dulls. Aggression does not need to be released, it needs to be eradicated, the urge to violence, perversion, needs to be eradicated, not released, what is released, not eradicated, tends to fill up again. Accordingly, such a method does not make a person better as a whole, and in general, the thesis about “blow off steam” is contradictory, especially when it is considered within the limits of competitive online games, where the “steam” circulates in a vile vortex and spoils the mood, and even the psyche of everyone nearby, and even tangentially (when you look at this waste from the side).

A person who allows himself all these virtual crimes cannot be considered reliable in principle. I don’t want to say that games like ‘Counter-Strike’ or ‘Contra’ arouse the desire to kill, but they certainly prepare for homicide: they provoke a militaristic consciousness, especially if you play it from childhood. A person becomes vulnerable to the propaganda of violence (the army). Correlates the actions that take place in the game with the acceptable and theoretically possible actions of reality (this is true for military games in particular): a couple of missiles from “Apache” at terrorists (as in Urban-Desert-Jungle Strike) becomes a reasonable decision. Homicide is normalized in the worldview of such a person. Under certain circumstances, such a person believes, homicide is permissible, for example, during wars. But he misses the fact that wars themselves are the reason for the normalization of homicide in human consciousness. The one for whom homicide is unacceptable will never fight. High culture forms principles, in particular respectful and decent behavior in society. Instead, high culture is formed by Christianity.

Evil people actively make use of every available tool of violence propaganda, primarily to influence children, shape the youth, recruit adults, and entrench their deranged narratives. This has always been the case — nothing really changes except for the number of tools in the kit. For a detailed account, see the 85-page study by LingvaLexa, “A New Weapon of Influence: How the Kremlin Uses Video Games to Promote War,” (on Ukrainian) which documents examples of brainwashing in the game development sphere current up to 2025.

Another study on Moscow’s propaganda in video games (on Ukrainian) was conducted by the company Games Gathering. It spans 22 pages and examines 50 games across different time periods, from the 1990s to 2025.

How would you treat a person if you found out that he spend, for example, up to 5 hours a day on virtual infanticide, sexual abuse or torture? And not in 8-bit games, but in modern or future ones. If you are embarrassed by this, then consider the same situation against the background of previous consoles, you should see that there is essentially no difference, because it is not about graphics, not about virtuality, not about the ‘unreal’ of games, but about a person, because if he want he can visualize graphics of any level in his imagination, and if you know that he plays unethical (crazy) games on an 8-bit console, how do you know that he is not imagining all that craziness simultaneously?

Ethical gaming is a tool of self-discipline, it is a sharpening stone for ratio, it is the cultivation of deep complex aesthetics, philosophical attentiveness and Christian vigilance. Ethical gaming evaluates the game not by its form, but by its essence, focusing on ideological, connotative, symbolic, and other aspects that reflect the author’s intention. Everyone has heard: you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, it’s the same here — you need to understand the content of the game in order to form an accurate opinion about it. The principles of ethical gaming allow you to see the root of the game, understand its foundations.

Unethical things in games are just as annoying as bugs in the code. It’s bugs. If the nature of error in code is technical, then the nature of error in game ethics is cultural. High culture does not allow manifestations of distorted reality or low ideas that come from bad education, insufficient self-awareness, or evil will.

Reality determines consciousness, and if reality is twisted, so will consciousness. There are dozens military games for children, and this is perhaps the most striking example of the primitive, manipulative ersatz culture of savage civilization, with the help of simulacra and hyperreality, it cripples human perception by legitimizing distorted images of true reality, for example, ideas of dignity, bravely, courage: savages associate with an image a man-soldier-warrior, romanticize war, mark pacifism and cosmopolitanism to unacceptable, obliges fictional duties and form beneficial social roles for themselves. Even more, they even try to appropriate Christianity for themselves, they cling to the words of Jesus about “laying down one’s life for the friends”, moving it into the context of war, which is a fundamental mistake, because firstly, Jesus did not speak of murder but of self-sacrifice, and secondly, He fulfilled this commandment by dying on the cross without killing anyone. Christ also spoke about those who take the sword — they will perish by the sword. So, savages have no reason to remember Christianity in their savagery.

The principle: not doing in your imagination what you wouldn’t do in IRL, allows you to civilize the virtual space, make it friendly, and therefore really useful. Playing online within the limits of gaming ethics will never lead to butthurt, which means it will bring benefits — relax and positive emotions. Ethical games perfectly fit escapism: reality is intense, fierce and aggressive, a good game allows you to hide from that oppression even for a short time, while a bad, unethical game, on the contrary, continues the terror of reality in the field of virtuality.

Today, ethical gaming is a utopia and a challenge. When I played ‘Silent Hill’ (1999) I bypassed child-like mobs, why did I spend x2 more heals, and such RPGs as ‘Fallout’, ‘Gothic’, ‘Skyrim’ I passed without a homicide and it is really not easy but surprisingly interesting. I even tried to play ethically in ‘GTA’, but I did not progress beyond the first few missions. In games where unethicality is partial, as in Terraria, I did not use unethical elements, such complication of gameplay is equal to selecting Hard in the options. Interestingly, the child-like mobs present in Silent Hill are already a reworked version of even more realistic child models. Here is an episode from the game’s development history:

When Silent Hill was being prepared for release on domestic and international markets, it encountered serious difficulties with censorship approval. The Grey Child monsters were redesigned twice for the North American market and three times for the Japanese and European markets before the game was finally approved for sale. In the trailer presented at E³, two variants of child-like creatures appear as they were originally conceived.

The first variant resembled naked small children, standing three times shorter than the protagonist; they could be killed. The second variant was more reminiscent of Noppera-bō (a character from Japanese mythology): twice as tall as the first, aggressive, and armed with knives.

The developers were forced to replace the first type with non-aggressive, semi-transparent shadows that cannot be harmed (Larval Stalker). The second type remained aggressive, but was altered several times at the request of censorship authorities in order to resemble children as little as possible. As a result, the shortest models of this monster became semi-transparent (Stalker), while the flesh-and-blood models changed color from pink to gray-green, grew taller, and received distorted heads.

Even this final version was not approved by European and Japanese regulatory bodies, so it had to be replaced with a variation that bore even less resemblance to the original designs: low, brown monsters almost devoid of heads, lacking human proportions and wielding enormous claws as weapons (Mumber).

However, even this proved insufficient, because the very context — a school — intensifies the association. In such a setting, any small mob will inevitably be perceived as a child. Therefore, it would have been preferable either to remove interaction between mobs and the protagonist in this location altogether, or to depict them in a clearly “adult” form.

A completely ethical game is a stress-free game, there are very few of them, I can name Portal 1–2, city-building simulators, ETS, farming simulators, logic and board games (but not chess).

Ethical gaming is self-sufficient, it works equally well within globality and locality, it is a personal Christian tool that can be shared like fire. The more this fire becomes, the brighter, warmer and cozier it will be for all of us.

Developer’s guide. How to use the principles of ethical gaming in your games

1. Avoid dangerous topics (military, homicide, violence of any kind, deviance, crime, metaphysical evil, non-Christian religiosity) entirely when it comes to positive imagery. For example, it is impossible to imagine a positive image of a soldier, a bandit, the devil or his servants (physical or metaphysical) within the framework of ethical gaming, this is absolutely unacceptable. These topics can be present only in a negative way, for the sake of criticism.
2. Don’t make your game a platform for propaganda. If your game is original and an expression of your creativity, and not an ordered element of someone’s propaganda, stick to common sense and do not follow the lead of hyperreality creators, whose goal is to distort reality in order to form a virtual superstructure for the moderation of collective consciousness. This advice is tangentially related to the rule of “calling a spade a spade”, i.e. not speaking black on white. For example, there are precedents when the real historical realm is edited through aggressive and sometimes racist propaganda of “equality”, when within of the historical game, in the field of European culture, the European ecumene, Europeoids are unjustifiably replaced by Negroids, this is an example of a simulacrum that turns ideas of equality into absurdity.
3. Do not include usable models of real weapons: modern or old ones. If possible, there should be no weapon against the man at all, but if there is, then it should not act like a real weapon. In principle: the weapon must not kill humanoid characters, it can teleport them, immobilize them, deprive them of consciousness, or subdue them in another non-lethal way. This is the case, for example, in Earthbound on the SNES.
4. Avoid red blood, especially in non-humanoid characters. Everyone has a fear of blood, and in addition to triggering this phobia, the sight of blood decreases sensitivity to violent scenes. We should not take such scenes indifferently, mundanely, because it is a step towards normalization and a precedent for repetitions. Why did I notice the non-humanoids? Because we perceive them through the prism of xenophobia — as aliens, at the same time the red blood “relates” them to us, thus the opponent, the villain, becomes someone close, this is an unwanted association that blurs the border between good and evil (when it comes to a non-humanoid antagonist).
5. Do not depict internal organs. This is a moveton, a trigger for sensitive people, and an outdated artistic tool from antiquity (for example, in the “Iliad”, the intestines are exposed and blood everywhere), if at all it can be called “artistic”. An example of unnecessary, unsubstantiated depiction of internal organs can be seen in the bosses in ‘Terraria’: the brain, the eyes, and the worst Moon Lord, who has an open heart. By the way, in the Chinese edition of this game, the bosses are redrawn to an acceptable style.
6. Don’t call black white. Approaches to the construction of interactive and plot elements must be based on logical foundations, otherwise cognitive dissonance is introduced when, for example, in the ‘Terraria’ again, the player can use an element of evil (the heart of a demon) for his own benefit (good (expansion of item slots)), or a voodoo doll (evil) to advance the plot (progress, good). Dissonance negatively affects critical thinking, it becomes difficult for a person to determine causal relationships, he is confused in conclusions, cannot resolve moral dilemmas, does not distinguish between sophisms and does not notice alogisms. Dissonance is chaos, it makes a mess in the head. Logic organizes reasoning and brings order to the head.
7. Do not offer the player the side of evil. In any form, evil is a man’s adversary, and he must not be like him. Many games have the choice of an overtly evil playable character, such as ‘Heartstone’ where you can “become” a warlock, ‘Heroes III’ has a hell faction with devils you can recruit into your army, ‘Diablo III’ has a shaman, a spirit follower, a pagan anachronism, and in ‘Path of Exile’ a witch, in the ‘GTA’ main hero of series — a bandit. Sometimes not only the essence of the character is important: what is in his arsenal of skills and tools, but also the form: what he is named or looks like. That is, it does not matter how decent the character’s skills are, if he belongs to the hellbender class and vice versa, he is an equally bad character, he can only be an antagonist of main hero. It is known that a man likes to associate with the heroes of the arts to which he joins, accordingly, if these heroes are bad: the association will be formed incorrectly, since evil is not inherent in a man. Incorrect associations distort self-view, self-analysis, and this, in turn, gives rise to a number of existential troubles. A man, as one of the ancient Romans said: seeks happiness and meaning. There is neither happiness nor meaning in evil.
8. The player should always have a choice. In ‘Morrowind III’, there is a series of quests from the Mage Guild in Balmora where you are asked to collude with one NPC and cheat another NPC, failing which your progress in the guild will stop. Similar story with the Fighters Guild quests in the same place, the 2nd quest requires killing two quama egg thieves. This is an example of an unethical game (an unethical element of the game), the player should not compromise his conscience for the sake of the game. In the ethical edition of ‘Morrowind’, these quests should not exist at all, or they could be varied for educational purposes, where the cheating (murder) option would end the quest in failure.
9. Don’t make loot boxes out of corpses. V. Hugo in “Les Misérables” unfolded the picture of the battlefield after the massacre: corpses are scattered throughout and “vultures” are walking among them, those who collect valuables from the corpses: clothes, watches, jewelry, etc. Hugo calls those looters marauders, and in fact it is correct. Today you will not find an RPG without such marauding, it is so tightly intertwined with the genre that no one even notices it, not to mention the considerations regarding the problematic of the phenomenon: there is a corpse, there is loot. But undressing corpses is shameful. This is contrary to culture. If you leave the option of “looting the corpse”, then at least make it a “trap” (moral) for the sake of learning: such actions should be marked as unacceptable. The same is true for buildings and houses. In a well-thought-out RPG, looting at someone else’s location is considered theft, for example in ‘Morrowin III’, ‘Skyrim’, if you steal something in someone else’s house, you will be charged with a crime; sleeping in someone else’s bed is also prohibited, that is, using someone else’s things without permission, as well as breaking into someone else’s house.

Ethical gaming helps isolate the ideological nature of play, for a fuller understanding of the content we consume or create, and calls for thoughtful consumption and creation, not mindless.

Some examples of unethical games you can see here.

Here we build list of ethical games, you can volunteer.

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This article translated from Ukrainian by AI.