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For Pathways, I think people tend to assume malice instead of incompetence, incompetence instead of indifference, and indifference instead of malice. Let's take a closer look.
For incompetence, you have to look no further than the introduction, literally the second screen of the “game”, which contains the phrase “hearing something hurtful while gaming”, but as soon as you click the Next button, the word “hurtful” changes to “racist”.
People on the internet called this out as devious subliminal programming, but of course the more likely explanation is that the script changed at some point, and someone simply forgot to change the text on some of the slides. There are a lot of other places where the game just looks shoddily-made; suggesting incompetence or indifference, rather than something more nefarious.
For the second part, indifference, I notice that the “game” very much resembles the type of mandatory training employees of large corporations must take on an annual basis. If you've ever done these you surely noticed they have three things in common:
The desired answer is always obvious, e.g. “The CEO has asked you to prepare the slide deck for tomorrow's shareholder meeting. Quarterly sales have been really great and the stock price is sure to go up when the news is made public. What should you do now? (a) Use your savings to buy as much company stock as you can (b) Call your friend who is really into investing; he'll be grateful for the tip (c) Keep your mouth shut because sharing material non-public information is illegal”. Here you can guess the correct answer without knowing anything about the law.
The most correct answer is often overly safe, while the wrong answers can be surprisingly benign, e.g. “You noticed your coworker Alice has lost weight over the holidays. What should you do? (a) Compliment Alice on her weight loss (b) Tell your other coworker Bella that if she didn't pig out at lunch all the time she could look like Alice too (c) Say nothing, since commenting on people's appearance is not appropriate in the workplace.” Here answer (a) would be totally normal in a smaller workplace, especially if Alice has talked about her attempts at weight loss before, but in a large corporation you're in the danger zone when you mention anyone's appearance for any reason.
The scenarios are surprisingly diverse. You would expect the wokescolds in HR who mandate these trainings to make the straight white male the villain every time, but in reality that's not the case. For example, sexual harrassment training will have a woman slapping a man's ass, racial sensitivity training a black guy making disparaging remarks about hispanics, diversity and inclusion training a homosexual cracking an inappropriate joke about straight couples, and so on; pretty much the exact opposite of what you would imagine the most typical interaction that causes someone to be sent to HR.
This may seem surprising if you assume the goal is to train people (i.e., improve someone's performance by transferring knowledge and teaching practical skills); after all, how can you improve when the answers are so obvious that you barely hvae to think about them? However, in reality that's not really the goal of these trainings: they only exist to legally cover the company's ass.
They have two purposes: they provide fodder in case they want to fire someone (for whatever reason). And they allow deflection of blame in case inappropriate behavior happens at the company. If a victim of sexual harrassment sues the company, they can point to the ineffective mandatory trainings to “prove” that the company did everything in their power to prevent it from happening, and they are not liable for the misbehavior of individual employees. The C-suite doesn't care how much inappropriate behavior goes on at the company; they only want to make sure they won't be held accountable for it.
It's like hanging a sign reading “management is not responsible for your belongings” which is much easier than actually taking responsibility for keeping them safe, and allows management to dispose of belongings at their discretion.
Now it all makes sense. The questions are easy so that nobody can complain the rules are too difficult to understand and follow (usually, you literally cannot fail the training: if you pick the wrong answer you get to try again). The acceptable answers are narrowly defined so that there can be no discussion about borderline scenarios: your remark about Alice's weight loss was clearly unacceptable no matter your good intent. The scenarios are diverse, so that straight white males whose behavior is meant to be kept in check cannot complain that the training was biased against them or singled them out specifically. Of course this doesn't mean that the company is really going to hold women, blacks, and gays to the same standards as men, whites and heteros; the beauty of rules like this is that they can be applied selectively: you only bring up the off-color joke someone made at the Christmas party after you've decided to fire him, even though it will rarely be the reason for the firing.
So how does this apply to Pathways, which isn't a corporate training and doesn't have legally binding effect? I suspect Pathways is simply made by the same people who usually make those corporate trainings (the bland art style is a big giveaway) so they simply fell back to their usual modus operandi.
They made Amelia a woman because they didn't want to make it look like they were targeting straight white males (the most obvious demographic to be recruited by British nationalist groups). They don't care if this makes the training less effective in changing anyone's behavior, because the creators don't get paid for the effectiveness of the training. They get paid to make a “game” that consists of N slides and covers talking points X, Y, Z. They made the bare minimum effort to meet their obligations and called it a day.
Now to the malicious part. From the government's side (who pays for this), I also don't think they care if the game changes anyone's behavior. The goal of this game is to normalize the authoritarian actions taken by the government against citizens who watch the wrong videos or express the wrong political opinions online.
In the game, Charlie, a college student (that's 16-18 years old in the UK, I believe), has to “ask a trusted adult” before watching a video on a site recommended by his friend; an absurd expectation of a 16 year old. The obvious choice of just watching the video leads to the admonition that “downloading or streaming certain content can lead to a terrorist offence conviction”. This seems to serve no purpose except to train the populace that the government arresting people over watching videos online is reasonable and appropriate. The game was never intended to deter a Charlie from downloading the video, just to make sure that others don't riot when they convict him as a terrorist later.
After all, everyone played the same game in school, so they know that the appropriate way to respond when someone links you a video is to run to your mommy, not watch it on your own and make up your own mind with a blatant disregard for counter-terrorism legislation. Instead of being outraged about what happened to Charlie, they just count themselves lucky that they haven't been caught watching videos without parental approval themselves (which is what everyone always does, obviously).
To summarize, Amelia isn't a more effective antagonist not because the authors were clueless on how to make her less appealing to the chuds, but because the goal wasn't to actually put teenagers off white nationalist views, which would be too difficult to accomplish anyway. The game was ordered to legitimize authoritarian action against those who sympathize with white nationalist views.
It's not even clear that the current backlash is detrimental to the goals of the game. The sheer number of Amelia remigration memes being posted online can be used to justify even tighter control over the internet (look at all those white supremacists!) and people repeating the absurd phrase “downloading or streaming certain content can lead to a terrorist offence conviction” helps to normalize UK citizens being arrested for simply watching politically incorrect videos online.
Another example of the "indifference" on display here is that Pathways refers to the protagonist Charlie using they/them pronouns. Some commentators like Asmongold took that at face value, like the creators of the game made Charlie non-binary as some sort of woke diversity-oriented casting decision.
When in reality, the game lets you pick between a boy character and a girl character for the protagonist, and recording alternate versions of voice lines costs more. A more clever writer could've worked around this problem by avoiding third-person pronouns for the protagonist altogether, but "they" is good enough for government work.
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