Fun Size Episode 78 – Video Game Dr. Mengele

This month, we’re joined again by Dave Brouillette, and talking about the pixelized Stanford Prison Experiment that was The Sims, and how eventual boredom can turn a gamer into a cruel capricious god tormenting their own imaginary people. We dig into real and fictionalized depictions of evil from Orson Welles in The Third Man to a documentary about former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara to the subway murder of a homeless man in the middle of a mental health crisis. Are these things an inevitable part of the human experience, or are they only inevitable because we’ve built a world around greed, competition and personal ambition that incentivizes these outcomes?