this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2026
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A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme.
An Internet meme or meme, is a cultural item that is spread via the Internet, often through social media platforms. The name is by the concept of memes proposed by Richard Dawkins in 1972. Internet memes can take various forms, such as images, videos, GIFs, and various other viral sensations.
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It's actually funny, I could never play Fallout & Fallout 2 as an evil character because it made me feel bad. At the same time, I'd fire up Carmageddon & Carmageddon 2 and just mow down everything that walked or drove with utter glee. I'm sure there's a psychological explanation for this dichotomy, but I sure don't know what it is, and I'm in no mood to make guesses.
Carmageddon is a respawnable, resetable, impermanent world.
Its a toy.
Fallout 1 and 2 are not, or at least not as much or not as easily... they are deterministic, event driven, complex, and permanent.
Its a story.
You don't tend to care too much about if some random team mate of yours dies in a team based shooter like Battlefield or COD.
Generally, they're all randos you'll never see again, despite being actual human beings on the other end of a screen.
You tend to care a lot if its one of your soldiers in XCOM or Xenonauts or one of your crew from ShadowRun Returns or Fire Emblem.
They're literally fictional characters, sometimes barely even actually characterized, but, you have history with them, shared struggles.
Your brain tends to care more about things that are harder to replace, decisions with irreversible results.... morality kicks in when we realize permanence is at play, that consequences actually exist.
... thats a long way of saying I do not know if there is a specific psychological term for all this, lol.
EDIT: Loss Aversion?
Man I could play Carmageddon 2 for hours. I miss that.
Some of the missions weren't great, but otherwise it was a fantastic game. I do prefer the first one, personally, but the second one had some awesome power-ups.
Maybe premise of the game + suspension of disbelief?
It might be something to do with the emotional attachment. We humans will bond with and empathise with basically anything, and we get rewarded with happy brain chemicals when we cooperate and build trust, so we tend to try and do it when the option arises.
In carmageddon they dont register to us as real people, they're just fun shaped targets that spit out points, and we like it when we're told "well done"
I’ve never played carmageddon but I’m guessing you can’t benefit or “form relationships” with fun shaped targets.
Not really, but maybe. Humans are properly weird. Theres always one