>>10That reminds me of the fact that there were a number of arcade video games authored in the USSR and (obviously) sanctioned by said nation's government. They were, unsurprisingly for such consummately bureaucratically-catalyzed commodity, highly derivative of basically everything else on the market. And even more predictable, the specific content of those games were educationally-presenting, apparently intended by the Soviets to be strength-training and hand-eye-coordination exercises over general recreation, according to some article a read online without checking citations. Good fer yer helth.
I think what's especially interesting is that the games were disconcertingly sanitary and kitschy. I saw a video of one game where you controlled a bear collecting butterflies or whatever; that's in stark contrast to the violent content of its Western/Eastern counterparts: Space Invaders and Pac Man. Kind of funny in retrospect. Although, that's almost always the case for many of the "think of the children" moral crusades that aim for the pedagogic jugular on whatever art young people are into. I think that's what makes me so frustrated when people insist media like video games should be censored for moralistic pretense: that's what autocracies like the USSR and China do. China literally still does that, in fact, such as when the Communist party expunged depictions of death in PUBG. Countries that hate their citizens don't want their citizens to consume media which depicts the horrors of life. Why? Is it because they don't want their citizens to think dysfunction isn't inevitably ubiquitous in any society, including the one they live in? Is it because they don't want art that can reciprocate the adversities they experience in their own lives for fear that it might equip them with the ability to express their experiences? How anyone advocate for flagrant, haphazard restrictions of commodity and pretend like your not a parasite to the fundamental spirit of the Western World? People have always lamented avant-garde, during Impressionism, Modernism, pomo, because it's disconnected from the proletariat, essentially; but that's literally what oppressive governments have always pushed for with socialist realism/communist realism. Nobody ever thinks about the ethical implications of what they say.