This advice includes a lot of absolutes. For example: "People play games to feel good about themselves...A sudden reversal of fortune is only exciting or dramatic when it happens to someone else. When it happens to you, it's just a bummer." But life isn't absolute. https://twitter.com/elektrotal/status/1313586275392208899

Many people do play games to feel good about themselves. Many people do want a power fantasy and to have a sense of control they don't have in their real life. Many people want escapism...and all of that is good! But it isn't universal. None of these absolute applies to me.

Or at least we need to question what it means "to feel good about themselves." I often play not to feel good about myself...in terms of feeling powerful or have things go my way or to have control or mastery...because I am not my character. So I play for other reasons.

I play to experience a wide range of things vicariously...including betrayal and reversal of fortunes..I play to see how this particular character would respond to different situations...positive or negative. I want to explore. How does this character respond to helplessness?

And Sid Meier is a video game designer...and some of my most memorable video game experiences have been betrayals and reversals of fortunes and gotcha moments. Especially if it surprises me...because I'm hard to surprise. If you can get me fairly? I'm all about it!

Bioshock, Knights of the Old Republic, Silent Hill 2, Dragon Age 2, so many games...especially in Survival Horror, and Point & Click adventures or walking simulators don't do what Meier said all people want. But some people do want to end up crying at the end of a game.

Some people do want to sit there and think. Wow. I just got kicked in the head by this video game. People want different things. Some people want Dark Souls. Some people want Dream Daddy. Some people want Luxor 2 or Dreamfall.

It seems to me that the tendencies towards absolutes betrays just how difficult it is for some people to actually embrace diversity and intersectionality...because when not poked to think about diversity...there is a tendency to flatten everyone into one person.

And doing that will leave a lot of people out.