Seriously. Every form of entertainment has baked-in political assumptions, and that definitely includes #ttrpg . You might choose not to examine them, but this is an active choice on your part, and you don’t get to pretend that your entertainment is “free of politics”.
You can tell what someone’s politics are by what they consider political.
I was astonished at some of the Steam reviews of Outer Worlds after playing it. People proper pissed off that their experience had been ruined because there’s a female side character with an optional side quest where she wants a date with another woman. Like how thoroughly filled with hate do you have to be as a person, to be fine with all the mass killing but suddenly get a moralistic high horse about a fictional character going on a dinner date you don’t approve of.
Sad that Steam are making a comment of their own by allowing those reviews to stay up.
How DARE you make your game try to reflect reality.
Steam definitely has a libertarian streak, seemingly. I wish I had started switching over to GOG a lot sooner.
“Politics” or “the way one sees the world”?
Because I’m pretty sure there’s a language disconnect regarding worldview.
A dev has their game reflect their worldview, and a social curmudgeon experiences political rhetoric cognitive dissonance, illustrating the incongruency and the fact that they are, indeed, a tool. ARRGHHH MUH FREEDOMS
What’s the political assumption of pong?
I mean I don’t disagree with the sentiment, the moment something has world building or a story or goals that relate to real life non-abstractly, there’s at least a political assumption, potentially an intentional statement. And people just don’t notice when it conforms to their world view. But politics free entertainment can exist, even if being able to engage in that entertainment necessarily requires some sort of engagement with real politic systems.
Though the most memorable games tend to be the ones very intentionally making statements anyway.
Closest I’ve got, which I’m surprised nobody has mentioned, is the very concept that entertainment is a worthwhile pursuit, and that we aren’t made solely to work. Pong serves no functional utility, which is a statement unto itself.
That said, it feels a bit like a cop out to me, from what that quote is supposed to mean. I’d be content to rephrase it to “any sufficiently complex entertainment has politics in it”. For example, I feel like this could almost certainly be said about stories in general, but I’d struggle to find the politics in many simple children’s books, besides “children should be read to”. Although the more I think about it, teaching all children to read was once quite political.
That’s a false argument your are making here.
First : it’s a TTRPG group. You can’t have TTRPG without world building, story goals, etc.
Second : Pong is not a TTRPG. AFAIK.
Third : In case you don’t know, people who tend to say “no politics in my gaming” (like gamergaters) actually do a very political statement as for them “being black” or “being gay” or “being a woman” etc. is often seen as “politics in [their] gaming”.Sure, you can try to argue with the words, but it’s not just words, they exists in a context and the context is that it’s a fascist dog whistle.
The statement was “every form of entertainment”. Tbh tho yea i didnt really notice it being rpgmemes so it wasnt super relevant, that statement was surely not just meant for ttrpgs tho.
I fully agree you can’t have a ttrpg without political assumptions
Pong represents the slow but inevitable march towards socialism
Glancing at Wikipedia for any Pong discourse. Found a likely example. Turns out Pong had a bug (read: feature) that contributed to its place as the first commercial success in video games. Quote,
the in-game paddles were unable to reach the top of the screen. This was caused by a simple circuit that had an inherent defect. Instead of dedicating time to fixing the defect, Alcorn decided it gave the game more difficulty and helped limit the time the game could be played [per payment]
So, Pong established the concept of video games systematically favouring the rich. Are we there yet, is that political enough?
There is still no political assumption in the game itself. Of course the moment you consider the means of acquiring it, everything touches on politics, even going to the forest and throwing a random stick, because forests existing is politics, them being accessible is politics, and you being allowed (or not) to throw a random stick is politics. That doesn’t make the concept of “throw stick at target for fun” political.
Alright yes, if you deliberately draw a circle around a portion of your entertainment and say “this is the part I like because it’s not political!” that’s still a political choice, which is the entire point OP is making, ICYMI.
Everything is political, even the choice to isolate one thing as non-political. The fact is that politics are only escapable if you’re privileged to be the kind of person who gets to say “shut up about politics, I’m trying to play Pong!”
Yeah generally when talking about a thing you draw a circle around the thing, that’s how that works. My glass from ikea isn’t making any political statement or assumption in its design as a finished product (unless you consider presumed size requirement for a beverage container to be political, though inherently nothing about it even states its purpose, so even that is doubtful) the process behind its design, manufacturing, and sale very much is political as fuck though.
Okay, well I’m drawing a circle around how much more interesting it is to talk about politics than whatever this was.
Ghost of Tsushima:
A Samurai and several of his battle-ready female companions try to reclaim their island after Mongol invasion.
I remember thinking “did they really have female warriors and lords back then who called the shots and fought alongside the men? I like the message, but a bit of realism would be nice…”
And then our brave stoic rugged Samurai literally prostrates himself in front of his lord/uncle at every opportunity constantly grovelling and professing how unworthy he is and how he seeks only to serve, and then I’m thinking “oh yeah… the stoic Samurai is a trope, they were either small militias or snivelling arms of the state.”
So I’m okay with realism being bent if it means I’m not constantly questioning the values of my main character.
Actually it’s hard to keep politic out of RPG.
In game, politic is what makes the game more than just killing random person you know the Princess who want to escape a political marriage, the advisor looking to become the lord, the church and and the merchant guild trying to gain influence ? All of that is politics. and all of that is what makes your campaign fun.
In real-life, like any other social activity especially if you get wider than a closed circle, politics get involved, your club need to talk with the mayor to get a slot in the municipal culture centre or rent a room in a school. Moreover, RPG tend to have a bad reputation and be not correct according to conservative which make it even more political than tons of other RPG, if you let church and right-winger tell you which hobby are acceptable you won’t be able to play RPG
only conservatives ever think about this, same goes for movies/shows with “too much inclusivity, and diversity”
I absolutely want politics in gaming. Without it, we’d be stuck in the arcade era. Sure, sometimes I also like to zone out on puzzle games which are largely devout of it. Imagine The Witcher 1 without politics, is there even a game there?
they want something that won’t challenge their preconceptions one iota. they don’t care about artists crafting a story, they want slop that confirms their biases.
I love politics in gaming, I loved Fallout 3, NV,4 (I still enjoyed it but to a lesser extent), Cyberpunk, and Outer Worlds 1/2. I love it when a game has multiple factions, I love when you get to really understand the politics of a fictional world, and I love stories involving politics.
“i don’t want politics in my games” is an insane thing to say when the biggest franchises for decades have been games about wars. All art is inherently political, but come on. War being apolotical? Literal babybrain. No, politics is when woman and black and I suppose
Exactly! Almost everything in our lives that matters ultimately is reliant and depends on politics and policy. When people say “I don’t really care about politics,” what they are really saying is they don’t like thinking at all.
I’m very curious what political message shapez is sending. It’s a factory building game that takes place in a seeming void where magical shapes appear out of nowhere and then simply get thrown into what appears to be a black hole there’s no particular discernible story or message just a fun puzzle
Politics in gaming is awesome, ham fisted writing and design wrapped up in an opinion lecturing the player so it breaks the universe ruleset is crap and does more damage to what ever message you were trying to push.
Sadly a lot of socially important messages are pushed as a selling point by people who don’t really have the background to fully create a bridge that speaks to People.
This is the same for a lot of creative work our artists are increasingly coming from privileged and protected backgrounds that we’re losing the depth and edge of the art. Indie games as usual are the standard games like Star dew address so much about humanity in a beautiful way.
I play crusader kings for the plot not the politics😄
Feminism ruined video games means i cant play a video game without thinking about it from a feminist point of view lol
All I want is more nice unpolitical games like Bioshock or Wolfenstein
And not the woke nonsense of having female or PoC main characters.
People do not all have the same working definition of “politics”. Many people seem to use it to mean “overt content about contemporary issues”, but that’s not really a good definition.
If your game has sentient creatures with agency and desires, it has politics.
For example, if your game has a king, there’s politics. Having the people accept monarchy is a political statement. It’s not as hot-button as, say, having slavery, but it’s still political.
You might not be surprised if your players react to a world with chattel slavery by trying to free the slaves and end that institution. The same mechanism may lead them to want to end absolute monarchy. They see something in the setting they perceive as unjust, and want to change it.
A lot of people are kind of… uncritical, about many things. They don’t see absolute monarchy as “political” because it’s a familiar story trope. They are happy to accept this uncritically so they can get to the fun part where you get a quest to slay the dragon. (Note that the target of killing the dragon rather than, say, negotiating or rehoming it is also political)
People then get frustrated because they feel stupid, and they’re being blocked from pursuing the content they want. They just want to, for example, do a tactical mini game about fighting a big monster that spits fire. They don’t want to talk about the merits of absolute monarchy or slaying sentient creatures.
It’s okay to not always want to engage in the political dimension. That doesn’t mean it’s not there. If someone responds to the king giving you a quest with “wait, this is an absolute monarchy where the first born son becomes king? That’s fucked up” they’re not “making it political”. It already was political.
If you present a man and a woman as monogamously married in your game, that’s political. That’s a statement. If you show a big queer polycule, that’s also a statement. The latter will ping the aforementioned uncritical players as “political”, because it’s more atypical, but both are “political”.
Some of this can be handled in session 0. But sometimes you learn that some people in the group have different tastes and probably shouldn’t play together.
