I think it's time we as a society let go of this 7,000 year old tendency to place all blame for people suffering from how a society is set up, on individuals. Don't you think we can find a way to do that without taking away people's agency?
For example, I can find news articles from the 1600s where people lament how "the newest generation just doesn't want to work anymore."
So, we've tried pinning it on individuals for a while, it's clearly not the right angle. What else might be? Could it be that the systems analysis is on the right track?
100% agree - I usually use obesity as a simple example to make the point: "Our society became obese in a span of 50 years, how amazing that so many individuals lost their willpower!" Maybe there's a little more to it than that, eh?
The reason why blaming individuals is so popular is because everything else is ultimately some degree of obfuscation. The most problematic part of bureaucracies of all sorts (be they government or corporate) is the ability to arrange a structure so that nobody is at fault.
Even systems analysis, if such a thing could be done cleanly would reduce to "It is the fault of <X> who is capable of changing things for not doing so.".
Whose "fault" was it? If we had a quantum supercomputer and video from every angle I bet we could calculate the first person to panic and start running. Have we successfully de-obfuscated the situation and found our culprit? I'm not sure, after all, two people away was a person about to panic as well, in fact they would have in exactly 2 seconds after the first person if the first person hadn't... In fact everyone on the crowd was on edge and on the verge of panic, hence why the crush was able to happen at all. So in that sense it's not really obfuscation to do a systems analysis on crowd dynamics to figure out why the crush happened.
And now hold on, whether we want to blame the individual that kicked off the panic or everyone in the crowd for not keeping their cool, is it fair, reasonable, or accurate to assign blame? These people hopped on a train and went to a Halloween party - surely it's reasonable to expect that on such a day, crowd control measures would be in place to keep them safe. After all, society keeps them safe from other things they don't really need to worry about - separating cars and pedestrians, keeping the water clean, flushing away their poo. Isn't it reasonable for them to assume that roads would be designed wide enough to accommodate a lot of people? That there'd be multiple exits? If so, then it's the fault of the bar for not communicating the tight pedestrian situation, or doing crowd limiting. Er, well, not just one bar, but the 20 that are in that area. Also the chief of police for not setting up proper crowd control, and the traffic commissioner for not instructing the chief to do so. Or mayor. Actually maybe the city planner for allowing such narrow areas to develop into popular bar areas at all. No not the city planner in 2022, the one in 1985 when they were rebuilding that area after the war.
I think especially in the western world there's a habit, maybe borne of western hyper individualism, to always try to find the individualist angle. "Well maybe people should take more personal responsibility for their safety!" And if people want to live that way I think they should be allowed to. Far away. Remotely, on farms or something lol. For those of us that prefer living more dense lifestyles in societies, I think it makes a lot more sense to take a systems analysis approach to these kinds of problems with reasonable good faith baked in.
Often it's not obfuscation, often situations simply are complicated to where it's impossible to blame the individual without contorting into strange value systems.
If so, they deserve it.
There's still plenty of good games, esp. in the indie sphere, that aren't like the modern live-service-shit.