I’ll go first. Mine is the instant knockout drug. Like Dexter’s intramuscular injection that causes someone to immediately lose consciousness. Or in the movie Split where there’s the aerosol spray in your face that makes you instantly unconscious. Or pretty much any time someone uses chloroform.
It’s been a minute, but I thought the audio logs showed that it was just people fucking each other over and doing morally shitty things WAY before everyone went crazy.
Also, the lack of regulation allowed the drugs to be created and allowed it to be distributed to the level that it was. You could come up with different methods for the same disaster, but that doesn’t undermine it. It still caused this disaster and was seemingly preventable.
Also, you could argue that absolutism is the real evil. I think in the second one they tackle socialism. I didn’t play much of it and the timeline in comparison to the original confuses me. Buy it kinda implies that going to the extreme with no safeguards is problematic.
The second one was even worse, IMO. It was so heavy-handed with its moral lessons. I suppose it’s not entirely unrealistic since many IRL socialist movements ended up horrible to the point of absurdity, but I was still rolling my eyes often when I played that game.
I agree that a good lesson would be that absolute certainty in any ideology is what leads to disaster but my impression is that that lesson is more sophisticated than what the developers had in mind.