Living under authoritarian regimes is both relatively boring and normal AND incredibly corrosive to the human soul. These things can absolutely co-exist.
This is why everyone needs to resist authoritarians, even people who privately assume they’ll be just fine.
The damage this causes across generations (even if the regime is short lived!) is so hard to grasp if you haven’t lived with it. It touches every aspect of life. It makes trust impossible, and without some level of trust and a belief in the possibility of justice, *nothing in society works.*
The first time I saw it I seriously considered making a similar game for moderation using actual content (ie not the more abstract way Moderator Mayhem went with) to provoke the same understanding of how corrosive a force it is, but the fact it legally couldn't include the worst stuff would blunt it
And I do think MM is a great game that gets its point across wonderfully! But that point is more about the difficulty of the problem (which is also a good point to convey, don't get me wrong) and less about the cost to the people who do it, which is really really hard to convey to people.
I almost do regret that "tricking people into seeing goatse or getting rickrolled" is less of a thing now, because when it was more common it was a good, though still imperfect, analogy for the level of hypervigilance the job instills in you
Hypnospace Outlaw has an interesting case where you're tasked with tracking down the source of a shock image, but the game is rated T so the shock image is just weirdly-shaped fleshy bits
there's a tweet by @writnelson.bsky.social about how he pitched it to @jaytholen.net like "okay, so obviously we can't do this directly, but you know how it is the first time you catch a glimpse of goatse?"
they put a lot of really clever work into the writing and design to create a culture *based on* the 1990s Internet without taking anything directly *from* the 1990s Internet (which also keeps it from being just a nostalgia-driven flashback)
