and this was the response from tumblr support:

someone At Tumblr @support looked at this, presumably read it in full, and decided that it's fine but maybe they should put a content label ??? content warning for bigotry ???

If I'm being completely honest, I just don't think I'm the right person to ask about it because, while I do have a bunch of thoughts about the underlying political implications of the gameplay structure of dungeon games, I'm not particularly inclined to try to fix them.

I have accepted that a lot of the elements of dungeon games whose underlying implications I find to be ideologically questionable are the exact same elements that make dungeon games fun for me from a gameplay perspective. The entire shtick of PCs in a dungeon game is essentially "get rich by plundering Uncivilized places and bringing that wealth back to Civilized places", and some of the most fun gameplay happens when you lean into that job description. The entire dichotomy between "wilderness" vs. "civilization" where Civilized places are small havens of safety in a sea of untamed wilderness, which is dangerous and unexplored and waiting for brave adventurers to plunder it and extract wealth from it which they then bring back to a Civilized place is like. Dripping with settler-colonial implications no matter how you slice it, and yet it makes for a very satisfying baked-in gameplay loop.

Simply put, a lot of the things that make dungeon games fun for me as *games* come from things that, at the core, don't align with my real-world politics, and will never align with them even if I were to try to spend all my creative efforts trying to hammer them into that shape. And I'm fine with that. It's not even like dungeon games are unique in that regard. You could say the same about like. The vast majority of shooters. Or survival crafting games. Or like almost every single action movie I have ever enjoyed. I choose to simply acknowledge this and sit with that discomfort rather than spending my creative efforts trying to square that particular circle.

One of the things I find the most fun about dungeon games is when a dungeon is inhabited by at least two groups with conflicting goals, because of its potential for dynamic, emergent situations. But this is a gameplay element that kind of inherently requires the places that the PCs break into in search of treasure to be already inhabited by sapient creatures.

I don't have much experience with dungeon games, so I can't offer any specific advice on that genre, but there are games in other genres that do this well. the first that comes to mind is disco elysium. no matter what you decide harry's politics are, he's still a cop, and that makes him an enforcer of capitalist rule. people distrust him Because He's A Cop and he has power over them. the drunken spree he went on that made him lose his memories was only possible because he's a cop, and nobody could stop him. rather than trying to make a detective game with Good Politics, they made a game that actually engages with the conventions of the genre

I think the hundred line also does this well with the trpg genre. rather than trying to justify why the main characters are fighting the war so that the player can enjoy playing the game without feeling bad about what they're doing, they actually lean into the themes of genocide and settler colonialism common to other war games. parts of the story feel extremely uncomfortable to play through, because the things we do as the playable characters are vile, cruel acts of war that are unfortunately all too common in the real world

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

That’s IT.