Cons: No scoring system this time.
Pros: Everything else, including the length of the game. Short & Sweet, Anonymous, thank you!
Personally I don't care whether the Earth & the natural environment for humans is doomed to collapse or not. The important thing is that people exercise freedom & compassion hand-in-hand, not one at the expense of the other, which is in the heart of what Recovery wanted and is better attained now that this part is here. The author's writing has made the transition, with this entry, from Depression to Acceptance.
7.75/10, just a smidge higher than that of Recovery. :) We're on the right track!
On May 16, 2022, an anonymous author uploaded Recovery, a world created to deliver a philosophical essay about the state of a world wracked by global warming, a global pandemic, economic inequality and more, and what we can do about it. On May 17, 2022, the day it was officially published on the Museum of ZZT, I published a review of the world that I wrote to deliver a lengthy rebuke of the essay's message that the solution to these problems is effectively to do nothing at all and let these problems fester until nothing more can be done about them, under the assumption that the rising complexity in the needs of human civilization will cause its inevitable collapse in its attempt to meet them no matter what its people do. This is a premise I found particularly foul, to the point of describing it as "actively harmful to human civilization", because this world, proposing the quick and easy solution of doing nothing and letting it all rot even as it ridicules quick and easy solutions in the other direction, had the gall to describe itself as "activism". In the middle of it all, I described the phenomena of "doomscrolling" and "doomposting", the respective rapid consumption and publication of bad news beyond the audience's control enabled by social media platforms such as Twitter that would blind them to problems they can solve, and suspected that doomscrolling had fueled the creation of Recovery.
A little over six months later, the same anonymous author released Revokery, an eight-board world representing a 180° turn from the gloom of the previous 22-board world. Throughout its short length, the author explicitly confirms what I had suspected by admitting that the views expressed in Recovery were the product of doomscrolling. It didn't just blind them to problems that could be solved; it blinded them to anything that didn't match the notion that doomscrolling built in their mind about the state of the world. In admitting to being unduly influenced by a mentally-destructive habit, they prove the effect that a platform like Twitter has on its userbase with how easily it is exploited by bad actors pushing socially-destructive causes. This was especially appropriate at the time of Revokery's release, as it was published weeks after Elon Musk purchased Twitter for USD$44 billion, and proceeded to run it straight into the ground with his extraordinary incompetence, his vain attempts to save money on a money-losing enterprise, and his direct courting of the extremist right-wing slice of the site's userbase. This had a direct influence on Revokery, producing a board that directly compares Elon to Rameses III to make a point about how descriptions of the end of the world throughout history tend to be written by the wealthy upper-class seeing their world collapse in the face of their empires being brought down by lower-class rebellion. Ultimately, it recognizes that we don't have to spend every waking hour of our lives engaged in activism to heal this world; we just have to live, like we always have.
Revokery is still a world to skip, as its full understanding requires you to have previously read Recovery, which I do not recommend. It is also, however, a short but effective demonstration of self-reflection in recognizing how a bad influence can take over one's mind. Self-reflection is critical to living, and indeed, looking at the past and present and seeing how we can do better is the point of genuine activism. And in the end, helping each other live better lives in this crazy world, whether it's involvement in a group fighting to help the world, or just a simple donation (of anything, not just money), is what activism is all about.
