If your world view is shaped by elementary school level logic.
If your world view is shaped by logic that is build to justify wrongdoing, on which capitalistic world is basically build.
Systems impose orders and templates and people follow along one that fits the most, and cannot operate outside the system at all. However, the orders and templates are all marketing, branding and PR, perception management. A good marketing campaign can buy almost anything and exert considerable influence to change things but is more often used to enforce the status quo.
System now exist. People impose orders. System is metaphore, that define existing established relationships between people, and nothing more.
People are making choice how to act, not system.
From the moment Gob has given the mind to man, the man makes a choice between good and evil, and man bears full responsibility.
Not system, and not predetermination - a conscious choice of the person.
Nothing more natural than an oppressive authocrat like Stalin to make such a statement (if true) which enforces the status quo's conviction that the order is unflawed and thus any flaw in execution lies 100% in individual responsibilities, without any motivation to question the integrity of the orders and the templates it enforces and any kind of consequence.
He was talking about faults, because if somewhere happens something wrong or bad, there is definitely someone who didn't done his job to prevent this.
What, on West people are no longer imprisoned already for failure to perform their duties? The captain who sank his ship and the passengers for example?
Good life you have there!
Also, I'm trying to imagine such dialog in army - you did not fulfill my order soldier! Sir, it was flawed and unjust, sir!
Hilarious thing isn't it?
The same person, acting in different institutions or under different incentives, will act in different ways.
True, because this person would be acting in different institutions or under different incentives, and I never claimed the opposite. Btw what does this have to do with our subject?
That's a pretty simple truth. One supported by both an extensive body of theory (from rational choice to more modern institutionalism) to a vast sum of empirical fact. Both statistics and qualitative interviews show isomorphism and similar structural adaption in agents regardless of where they act - organisations, government bodies, private businesses etc.
Yes, such theories has been a high demand after World War II because entire Europe was helping Nazis in one way or another, not saying about Germany, and it is natural demind of society, and it's completely understandable request of society, it is so called public order.
In the end, and in fact, it is a denial of its guilt and its responsibility, resulting in wording "soldiers were not guilty, they received the order".
There is only one little thing that ruin all this science-like denial - there were always a people who didn't obeyed such orders, who chose death, possibly agonizing death.
I remember from some article about suppression of identity, there was example, that in concentration camp overseers often tried to break a man, in some one took two prisoners, and told to one of them that he should bury alive other one, or he would shoot him. Prisoner refused. Then overseer told this to second prisoner, and he agreed.
You see, there is no "system", there is only personal choice.
In the case of events like Gamescom, the damning cocktail consists of underpaid, overworked, uneducated "gaming journalists" against a powerful, wealthy industry and its horde of PR "bullet sponges" all mixed up in an event designed to blind and downplay the role of said journalists. In the case of game criticism at large, it gets a little more complex and more agency is at work; most gamers and by extension game journalists being infatuated with little besides childish things and far removed from the critical literacy of other art forms certainly remains a deciding factors here. The demand even for a populist, mainstream reviewer with integrity - the aforementioned "Roger Ebert of gaming" - simply is not there.
The greatest contemporary gaming journalist - bar none - is George Weidman, and he is decidedly niche despite his credentials being far above average for the industry, his production values being surperior, his method broad and appealing to all audiences and his content steady.
He simply has two things working against him: being nuanced, and being an adult. Especially the latter is an instant killer in the business.
In any case, I stand by the editorial as relates to gaming "events," even if leaving the conclusions as "systems did it" was a bit lazy of me (and in the context of Codex material, perhaps not wordy enough). Even now, 3 years after writing it, working as a professional journalist and doing critical, investigative stories on a national level for Public Service media, mining anything constructive from a venue like Gamescom would be a fool's errand for me.
Don't worry, it is just internal logic of capitalism in relation to business processes - fool a buyer and get his money!
Simple as axe.
