the whole thing about videogames and violence makes me think about old conversation i had with a friend, years ago

we were just talking about mass effect and what would we do if somehow we can go to space.
i said i wanted to be someone who studies language & culture of aliens or maybe building interspecies relation. my friend said he wanted to command a warship against aliens.
i asked,

why would you go to war against aliens?
he said, first contact would probably go bloody anyway bcs we wouldn't know how to communicate with each other.
i said, that's exactly why i want to study their language/culture, so we can build a friendly relations with them

the way my friend approached the hypothetical situation of first contact with aliens made me upset but i thought it was just an aggressive cishet men bullshit about conquest & discovering new lands.
the more i think about though, what he described was just....colonialism in space

this is not strictly a videogame problem, i think this is a problem with the (western) sci-fi genre as a whole.
the human vs alien theme, the thing about alien invasion movies looking like white people fear of what they're doing to global south will happen in turn to them etc

countless sci-fi media have conditioned us to think that aggression, conquest, and violence are normal

sure, videogame doesn't immediately turn us violent or teach us how to fight/use weapons etc but it affects us, affects the way we see certain things.

this is one of many reason why news about s/pace/X makes me upset. we're going to bring violence & exploitation to space

that's just about sci-fi & space.
we haven't even talked about how videogames and movies about war is literally used by us military (among others) to recruit people.

idk how to conclude this thread. i am not against having fun with videogames (and any other media) but i just want us all to think critically about media we consume and how we are (consciously or not) affected by it also how it affects the way we interact with real life issues