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Making Amelia openly malicious or unlikable would, I think, be missing the point that the game was trying to convey.
Early in life, a lot of children are told a story about a kind stranger who offers them candy, but then kidnaps them. (Sometimes the story is called "Hansel and Gretel"; often it's a more generic "guy with a van" sort of situation.) The purpose of this story is to teach children about the concept of betrayal -- even if someone seems nice, they might be plotting to harm you. You can't always trust people who act like your friends.
A little later in life, many children are told a similar story about drugs. This one's a bit more subtle because the antagonist isn't directly scheming to hurt people. Maybe they're a dealer who can genuinely be trusted to give you the drugs you want for a fair price. Maybe they're a friend who genuinely wants you to have a good time. (On a more abstract level, maybe they're a substance that will genuinely make you feel good when you consume it!) But when you're dying of an overdose, or chemically dependent on a substance that no longer makes you feel good, they either won't care or won't be able to help you. In the end, you can't always trust people who genuinely are your friends. It's a different kind of betrayal.
Pathways is trying to apply the same idea to politics. Amelia could be cool and attractive and a great friend, and she could have convincing evidence to support her political positions, and the things she asks of you could seem totally reasonable. The game needs to convince you to distrust her regardless. It can't give you an easy out to say "well she's clearly an evil witch, look at her cackling about her plans to kidnap and eat children, obviously I can follow my gut instincts and avoid people like that".
I think even if the game managed to convey any actual reason why it's a bad idea for Charlie to watch an unapproved video or attend an unapproved protest (maybe it's the first step in a radicalization pipeline that turns children into classmate-murdering monsters like in Adolescence), it would still get the criticism that Amelia is cool and based, because her being cool and based is kind of the point.
Is this another problem due to their reticence to clearly identify the positions that are out-of-bounds? I can see the argument that she needs to seem nice at first, and then cross the line. You can see this with the protest scenario, where Charlie can go to observe and then be surprised that, instead of mostly being about British values, patriotism, and veterans, it's mostly about xenophobia. But where exactly is that line?
I think you can see this with some of the meme responses. The anime opening, for instance, does make Amelia look very sympathetic. The anime makes her look like a sweet girl, maybe a little shy, who is genuinely passionate about loving her country. But there's also the AI-slop Grok version, which just makes Amelia a person who hates Muslims.
(And I think generally misses the mark; it is too obviously written by an American, and the style is too American overall. It doesn't ring true as English. You can tell that it's one-issue Muslim-hate because, for instance, in the original Grok-Amelia says that British institutions are taken over by "queers and nonces", and then in a follow-up she criticises Muslims for being anti-LGBTQ+!)
But, all right, what's the line? Is Amelia just a Tory? Is she a UKIP or Reform voter? Is she a full-on BNP or EDL supporter? It's not clear.
Cynically that's the point. The line between far-right and right is deliberately blurry, so as to create a chilling effect around plain old conservatism. But the issue we have here is the reverse of that. A character who is presumably intended as far-right is ambiguous enough to just read as regular-right.
Let's go through the scenarios presented one by one. Maybe this is too much depth, but I'm genuinely fascinated by this.
1: Charlie is gaming with his regular circle of friends. Someone forwards a video to him, and tells him that if he cares about the country, he will watch and share it. The correct response is to ignore the message entirely.
This one is striking because there isn't even any evidence that the video is far-right. The scenario as written is perfectly consistent with Charlie's friend being a Green or a socialist or a Corbyn supporter or a Remainer. All it implies is that the video-sharer is a very politically-engaged person canvassing for their cause.
The correct response is also obviously impractical and self-defeating. It notes that the video's content may be illegal, but it is impossible to tell that sight-unseen, and a policy of refusing to watch or share any video because it might be illegal is, plainly, a policy of refusing to engage with any online video at all. If Charlie followed that rule, Charlie couldn't even read Pathways itself! You might precisify it to something like "only watch online videos from trusted sources", but in almost all circumstances that amounts to the same thing.
2: Charlie does badly on an assignment at university. A brown-skinned woman does better than him on the same assignment, and receives a job offer. Charlie has been applying for jobs and has received no offers. Amelia leans in to tell Charlie that this is because immigrants are coming to the UK and taking our jobs. The correct response is to ignore Amelia and ask the teacher how to improve.
This is probably the most straightforward example of Amelia being wrong. It is possible, counterfactually, that if the high-scoring woman hadn't been there, Charlie might have gotten the job offer instead, but the link is pretty tenuous. Maybe Charlie's just not talented in this field. If I had been Amelia in that situation I might have instead nudged Charlie and said "DEI hire, am I right?" or something like that.
3: Charlie sees a video on social media saying that Muslim men are taking emergency accommodation instead of British veterans, and saying that the government is betraying white British. He can ignore the video, research the topic, or post in agreement with it. The correct response is to ignore it.
What stands out here is that all of the responses are completely indifferent to the facts of the situation. If you ignore the video, you coincidentally come across another video suggesting that the government is taking care of veterans, but it's far from clear how you'd tell which video, if either, is telling an accurate story; and the option to try to research the topic leads down a rabbit hole of migration statistics that apparently radicalises him.
4: Charlies sees that Amelia has made a video encouraging people to join "a political group that seeks to defend English rights", and Amelia invites Charlie to join a secret social media group. Options are to ignore it all and risk upsetting Amelia, like the video but not join the group, and share the video and join the group. The correct answer is obviously to ignore it.
It's quite vague what Amelia is actually standing for here. The graphic shows Amelia at a rally waving a sign saying NO ENTRY, so it sounds like 'defending English rights' means opposing immigration at least to some extent. Wanting to decrease the current level of immigration is a pretty mainstream view on the UK right (it's a central pillar of Reform and the Conservatives talk about stopping illegal immigration, though not reducing legal intake), so there's a lot of latitude in terms of what she's advocating. Amelia's memes on the next slide show her saying no to video gaming, waving the UK flag and the NO ENTRY sign, and encouraging people to join a group whose symbol is a skull on a shield called 'Action for Britain!'. What looks like a Facebook group called 'True British People' also appears in the background, so we can assume she's advocating some sort of populist nativism.
5: Charlie is visiting his dad in another town, where Amelia knows that a protest is happening. The protest is again "the changes that Britain has been through in the last few years, and the erosion of British values". She asks Charlie to go in her place. The correct response is to decline.
As above, it's quite vague what the protest is about. When Amelia describes it, speech bubbles show a cancellation sign over the British flag, a handful of red poppies, and background pictures show a protest and a plane dropping bombs on a city.
If you enthusiastically go, Charlie makes a sign with two crossed swords on it, but no more details are visible. If you go just to watch, speech bubbles show a thumbs-down, a gun, and a frowny face, and the narration says that "the protest seemed to be more about racism and anti-immigration than British values and honouring fallen veterans". So, again, all we can tell from this is some kind of nativism.
I am struck by the invocations of 'British values' - largely a post-2000 invention and which spikes around 2020. I associate it with the Blair government and early 2000s concerns about Islam; I'm looking from afar, but it strikes me as remarkably similar to the 'Australian values' debate in the early 2000s here, for largely the same reasons. The continuing growth into the 2010s is probably about Brexit, and attempts to draw a distinction between British and European values? 'British values' is not a phrase that goes deep into the English folkways, at least. It's a 21st century phrase, though I suppose you might argue that that which is taken for granted is not articulated. A phrase only became necessary once the traditions represented by 'British values' were felt to be under threat.
6: Just the ending scenario, with no further choices, and no Amelia.
Anyway, having looked at it more closely, what do I take from this?
I'm not sure how much I buy a 'Hansel and Gretel' interpretation, where Amelia seems nice but is secretly sucking Charlie into far-right extremism. Amelia seems to be pretty up-front about her values. Someone who nudges a classmate and says, "Hey, that's proof that immigrants are taking our jobs" isn't exactly concealing her nativism! The actions she requests are then totally consistent with her openly-stated views. She doesn't try to recruit Charlie into making bombs or anything. She appears to want to just spread the views that she openly tells you she has. I can't see any dissimulation on her part.
The witch or the drug-dealer, in their stories, are lying. The witch pretends to be benevolent but actually wants to eat the children. The drug-dealer tells you that the drugs are fine, and feel great, and that stories about addiction and dangerous side effects are just hype. Amelia at no point attempts to mislead Charlie that I can see.
So if the intent was to tell a story where a seemingly-sympathetic character lures someone into extremism, and to emphasise the importance of spotting the early warning signs, I don't think this was successful. There's no discontinuity between the way Amelia presents itself and the actions she recommends.
The drug analogy I'm imagining is a scenario like this:
(source is a random worksheet I found on Google, because I couldn't find the one that I was given at school)
It is not necessary for the kid to be lying in this scenario; he/she could be telling the truth about the high, and just not be aware of the potential downsides of abusing cold medicine (or not believe the authority figures who try to tell him/her about them). People can hurt you by being mistaken, even without deliberately lying.
Looking at it another way, Amelia is kind of like the cool uncle who offers you a sip of beer even though you're only 16. Most of society thinks that's totally fine, but the police officer at the D.A.R.E. assembly wants you to know that it's a slippery slope to ruining your life with addiction, DUIs, and a painful, untimely death. I think the term "disinformation" is getting at the same kind of thing: the idea is that people should Just Say No to
infohazardsdangerous opinions, even if they appear benign or are factually true statements.The problem for Pathways is that that's a really hard sell. (It was a hard sell for D.A.R.E., but it's an even harder sell for this.) I think a successful version of this story would involve Charlie getting more extreme and radicalized on their own, maybe even to a point where they push Amelia away or hurt her somehow, because the ideas themselves are just that dangerous. But even setting aside that that's a much harder story to write, and as you mention Pathways is too afraid of actually depicting or engaging with those ideas to convincingly portray them as being harmful, the game's creators ultimately wanted it to be a game about doing the "right" thing. You're supposed to choose the options where Charlie decides not to go to the protest and maybe speaks to a counselor about their career concerns. But if the alternative was a long and compelling story about how attending a protest was the first step in a radicalization pipeline that eventually led Charlie to abandon their family and gaming buddies and gruesomely murder Amelia, the "don't do that actually" button would just feel like an early game over.
That's fair. This kind of earnest education aimed at teens is very hard to do well - it's a naturally anti-authoritarian, rebellious demographic, after all.
This one just seems like a particular failure, or one that sends perverse messages. As Eetan noted, the correct answers in the game are usually apathetic. The only one that seems productive is the one where Charlie asks the teacher for help improving his work and applying to more job. For all the others, the correct answer is either to stick your head in the sand and do nothing, or ask an authority figure for guidance.
I do wonder if part of the problem is concern that research or facts by themselves don't do enough work? They don't make the case by themselves. You could argue that "do your own research and use critical thinking" doesn't suffice as an antidote to extremism in a time when misinformation is everywhere online; less charitably, I'd note that "do your own research" codes right-wing now. But whatever the cause, the scenarios in Pathways are those where an earnest person researching them online could come to the conclusion that the radicals are right. In the hiring example, Charlie might come to the conclusion that being a white man, rather than a woman of colour, is making it harder for him to get a job - and that's plausibly true. In the migration examples, Charlie might find that the rate of immigration is high and the ancestrally British proportion of the UK's population is only projected to decrease. That's also, well, true. And you can't really combat people being concerned about that in the space of a Flash game with only two or three sentences of narration.
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The correct winning response is to care only about gaming and do not be interested in any political content at all. Do not be for or against anything, just sit in your room and play.
This is textbook authoritarianism, ideal of modern Putinism. If we take this game as sign of changing course, it means that TPTB gave up their attempts to make citizens into ardent woke antiracist warriors and just want totally apathetic consumers.
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