While I understand where you’re coming from, you’re trying to project a story and moral philosophy onto a game that is completely bereft of a plot line. The entire plot is “you crashed on a planet. Survive and escape.” No more, no less. The plot literally doesn’t have room for moral philosophy or “you were really the bad guy all along” plot twists, because there is no plot to contain those themes. If you want to role-play that in your world, feel free to do so. The game is a sandbox with simple cause>effect consequences, not an A>B>C storyline.
The meaning behind that cause and effect is left up to the individual players to interpret however they’d like. You say that the lack of self-awareness is what makes the game problematic, but I would argue that the individual players are the ones responsible for that. Because the game doesn’t assign good or evil to the individual actions. The player’s actions simply change the world in some way, (like adding pollution to the air), and the player is left to deal with the consequences of those changes, (like being attacked by natives as the pollution spreads and causes them to multiply).
Saying that the game is bad because it’s missing those themes is like saying that Gary’s Mod is bad because it doesn’t force players to grapple with the realities of being a god that is able to make, unmake, and manipulate reality at will. The game is a sandbox meant for creative thinking within the rules of the game, not a narrative meant to inspire moral philosophy.
While I understand where you’re coming from, you’re trying to project a story and moral philosophy onto a game that is completely bereft of a plot line. The entire plot is “you crashed on a planet. Survive and escape.” No more, no less. The plot literally doesn’t have room for moral philosophy or “you were really the bad guy all along” plot twists, because there is no plot to contain those themes. If you want to role-play that in your world, feel free to do so. The game is a sandbox with simple cause>effect consequences, not an A>B>C storyline.
The meaning behind that cause and effect is left up to the individual players to interpret however they’d like. You say that the lack of self-awareness is what makes the game problematic, but I would argue that the individual players are the ones responsible for that. Because the game doesn’t assign good or evil to the individual actions. The player’s actions simply change the world in some way, (like adding pollution to the air), and the player is left to deal with the consequences of those changes, (like being attacked by natives as the pollution spreads and causes them to multiply).
Saying that the game is bad because it’s missing those themes is like saying that Gary’s Mod is bad because it doesn’t force players to grapple with the realities of being a god that is able to make, unmake, and manipulate reality at will. The game is a sandbox meant for creative thinking within the rules of the game, not a narrative meant to inspire moral philosophy.