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Spoilers for Wasteland 3

The first moment I knew that Wasteland 3 was something special was when Blood of the Lamb played during the battle with the Dorseys on the dam; the second was when this NPC eloquently criticised punitive justice.

The game backs her up in a later secondary mission:

Imagine that I've written a fully fleshed out essay about when video games make dickish, tangibly rewarding choices as easy as clicking a button, meaning that:

On the one hand, doing the right* thing - i.e. not torpedoing the trading outpost and willingly depriving yourself of the adamantine reward - only pays off in terms of moral satisfaction, which may very well be entirely undeserved since the trading post's inhabitants exist only in your imagination, not even alluded to in the flavour text

On the other hand, the game makes a point that it is often much easier to be a dick, and being a moral person will require genuine effort of you. You'll have to be motivated by something beyond material rewards or social status, since everyone in this setting 404s if you so much as consider talking to "the rabble", and it's more likely that your kindness will be seen a weakness

Maybe I'm just too committed to the RP.

In March 24th of 2008, Latin America faced a significant problem: the newest DVD release of popular cartoon series Ben 10 had been released, and it did not feature a Spanish dub. This limited access to the majority of the population, since most of them did not speak English. It was a real problem, I swear. Many people were affected! One child in particular suffered most of all… Me. It was me. I was the main victim of this crime. Seven year old me was absolutely obsessed with Ben 10 and I watched the DVD episodes on repeat most days. When I got the season 3 disks, I was confused to see that they did not have an option for translated audio. However, they did have Spanish subtitles available, and I had the determination to continue watching the show on loop. The result of this was watching every episode of season 3 and then later 4 over and over, day after day, listening to English audio while simultaneously reading Spanish subtitles. At some point, one simply starts understanding what they’re saying. 

The image of a child learning a new language out of sheer determination to keep watching one particular cartoon show is pretty funny, which is why for the most part I only bring it up to get a laugh out of people. Going deeper into it, though, it is not hard to see that it actually ended up being a pretty important event in my life. It’s not that the experience of listening to the explanation for how Ben 10 suddenly unlocked Upchuck of all aliens to eat a giant robot in the season finale had a profound impact on me, though the season’s Ghostfreak arc did fuel my continued obsession with the show. It’s that it’s hard to imagine how different of a path my life would have taken if I had never learned to speak English. This is, of course, almost entirely due to the Internet. 

I’ve almost never been in a position where knowing English has been necessary offline, but online it’s a different story, with basically every popular website requiring you to be able to at least understand English, even if not fluently speak it yourself. Without access to this mass of information, I would be a very different person right now, considering that being limited to only what I learned from people and institutions around me would leave me with significant gaps in knowledge. I may have questioned less about how this society works and what is expected of all of us. I would imagine my political views, while still strongly anti-colonialist, would emphasise anti-capitalism less. 

A more personally dramatic change would likely be my lack of exposure to the concept of being transgender. Queer topics are simply never discussed in Puerto Rico, unless by way of disparaging comments and jokes. I would likely still know next to nothing about them had I never learned English and gone online to stumble across information by myself. I might still be occasionally wondering what’s wrong with me in the rare moments of introspection before returning to my default state of running on autopilot, which went on for years which I now genuinely struggle to remember most of. I would also never have met the people that went on to become my friends. What would have happened had I graduated high school in that state and had no one left to talk to, to confide in, to ease my loneliness with? What would have happened had I never met Shahnaz, the person I’m closest to in this entire world, who knows me better than anyone and is the only one I trust to talk to about my deepest issues? They’ve shaped my life in so many ways that it feels impossible to imagine a version of myself that never knew them, never knew her.