I play a video game called Tropico, where you start an island colony from nothing, and build it up into a financially sustainable island, through working, importing & exporting goods.

At first you start off with a few islanders, with specific skills for the work you need them to do. They have needs: shelter, food, entertainment, health, transport, good working conditions. I sort of care of them, in that I pay attention to their needs, because I need them until the population increases, to power new money making industries.

At the end of the game, you reach population cap. You’re on an island, run out of room, depleted natural resources, and you need to make more money. At that point people become a problem. You need to get rid of the ones you don’t want. First few games I loved my islanders and cared so much about their virtual lifestyle happiness I lost the game. Later I discovered a tip to win, and it’s just a game so why not, I can buy a drone device to put in the centre of town. It has a positive function so it’s accepted by society; at first it kills criminals. Later, it also weeds out and kills the people with the lowest approval rating for my El Presidente, making room for new, more compliant and skilled immigrants.

I don’t think I would do that in real life where I feel compassion for my fellow human beings, this is just a video game and I am playing by the rules to win that game. No-one actually suffers or dies. But I appreciate I have the capability for taking that cold logical action within me as a human being, justifiable in the cause of money and winning, with things I have no empathy for such as video game people. As do we all, it’s part of human nature we hopefully choose not to cultivate. Unless we become CEOs or government politicians, we’ll thankfully never know.

Power corrupts. Life imitates art. Thankfully the drones wouldn’t work in reality, people would reject them. The El Presidente would theoretically need some war or natural disaster, child control, or better – to get the population to remove *themselves* somehow…

In other news, here comes that new high speed 5G data network rollout, so we can watch more animal videos to soothe our thoughts, woohoo! 😉 I’m sure that’s entirely unrelated to this post… Right?