#frostpunk

(Specifically a hard one designed to make you face failure, like Dwarf Fortress or Frostpunk.)

You see, it's easy to judge Higher Beings from our cushy position as mortals, but could YOU do any better?? Before commenting on their hubris or obsession with the "greater good," try building your own doomed civilization and contemplate what that does to your perspective. I guarantee 'For The Greater Good' will become your mantra; your only source of comfort as you're placed within impossible situations.

Dwarf Fortress is helpful in understanding a Higher Being's detachment, because while this game is famous for simulating unique and complex personalities, values, and desires for every single one of your citizens, you'll find you always begin to perceive them as faceless ants once your population grows beyond what you can keep track of. Mind you, Dwarf Fortress is also the single most complex video-game ever built, so there's a bit of a learning curve to get into it.

Frostpunk is helpful in understanding a Higher Being's amoral decisions in the name of the "greater good." It's a game about trying to keep the last dregs of humanity alive in an apocalypse, the lines we cross in desperation, and the balance of ethics versus survival. Will you put the children to work or let them idly play, even as labour shortages risk your species' extinction? This one is much more accessible than Dwarf Fortress, but it's also crushingly bleak.

Indeed, as someone who has dabbled with these games, when I look at the Pale King and Grandmother Silk, their actions are immediately familiar to me:

The Pale King managed his kingdom like a beginner to the genre: he cared for his people, did his best to lead them, made some alliances and some enemies, and naïvely tried to harness volatile resources better left alone. When his kingdom started to fall, desperation made him swallow his morals. He began to sacrifice more and more as calamity spread and citizens suffered, until like most new players faced with so much misery and an inevitable desth, he gave up and secluded himself from his creation.

Grandmother Silk managed her kingdom like a veteran of the genre: coldly viewing everything as a resource, including her people. She engineered a societal machine based around risk mitigation and control. While the Pale King sought to keep his people happy to maintain longterm stability, Grandmother Silk built a system that didn't rely on happiness to function. While the Pale King relied on alliances and assimilation when dealing with other Higher Beings, Grandmother Silk saw them as unpredictable variables and systematically destroyed them to ensure her kingdom never faced something like the Radiance. While the Pale King allowed any bug to ascend to authority, Grandmother Silk gave power only to the Weavers she directly controlled, ensuring no illegal institutions like the Soul Sanctum could rise and begin leaching off her people. When some of her Weavers rebelled, she eradicated all but the most loyal, and developed the Haunting to ensure no citizen within her kingdom would ever rebel again.

In the end she achieved a perfectly self-sufficient and sterile environment that was completely under her control and could persist theoretically forever. While objectively evil, her actions mirror a common phenomenon in colony sims where veteran players will effectively 'solve' the game using strategies so monstrously amoral and frighteningly optimal that the developers never anticipated them.