I can think of some obvious examples to start with, but my subtle but insidious nominee is Fable III. Fittingly for a pretentious grifter like Molyneux, the game requires you to raise a specific amount of gold or your kingdom is destroyed and you get a bad ending. The goalposts are moved by the game if you raise money in ways it doesn’t approve of, and it is simply impossible to reach the fundraising goal in any way that isn’t at least Enlightened Centrist levels of evil, the kind that lanyard-wearing neoliberals giggle about. That’s right, you need to be at least this evil or your kingdom is destroyed. So deep and really makes you think about the hard decisions that are made by the ruling class, doesn’t it? :zizek:
The Last of Us 2
Neil Druckmann was raised in Israel and has stated that the game’s “cycle of violence” theme is modeled after his understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The game both-sides the conflict between the main factions, making you switch perspectives between the two main characters repeatedly.
The ending of that game for me was a drudge. I was invested so I kept playing, but emotionally I just wanted it to be over and I had a feeling very similar to watching someone self destruct their life and knowing you can’t stop them. I felt pity and sadness and frustration. Apparently that was not the intended effect:
“I landed on this emotional idea of, can we, over the course of the game, make you feel this intense hate that is universal in the same way that unconditional love is universal?” Druckmann told the Post. “This hate that people feel has the same kind of universality. You hate someone so much that you want them to suffer in the way they’ve made someone you love suffer.”
I suspect that some players, if they consciously clock the parallels at all, will think The Last of Us Part II is taking a balanced and fair perspective on that conflict, humanizing and exposing flaws in both sides of its in-game analogues. But as someone who grew up in Israel, I recognized a familiar, firmly Israeli way of seeing and explaining the conflict which tries to appear evenhanded and even enlightened, but in practice marginalizes Palestinian experience in a manner that perpetuates a horrific status quo.
“cycle of violence” theme is modeled after his understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict
understanding
:chesus:
I mean, the “worst” are the ones that have natsec money behind them and are insidious propaganda tools, see Call of Duty. The only reason there shouldn’t be a push to have that series halted completely is that it would be incredibly alienating to normal people. Otherwise, there’s rich history of outwardly reactionary games to choose from. Freedom Fighters is Red Dawn if it didn’t suck. 2044 AD is literally the femnazi game.
My personal least favorite’s probably Ronaldo’s ending in Devil Survivor 2. The writer’s brains are so steeped in liberal ideology. In this ending, the MC uses demon shit to create heaven on earth. Not “angels strip you of humanity and you worship YHVH all day”. They outright call it a paradise where everyone lives for each other, where people live for each other, basically skipping to whatever would come after communism. It’s presented with being on the same level as the ending where some blueblood loser (who starts off with magical shit) rules over a world of constant violence and death. The good ending is restoring Tokyo to the way it was, except your friends are personally better off in specific situations, I guess.
Sounds like how the most recent Evangelion series ended. :desolate:
well at least that has an excuse
the excuse being that they were always gonna be shit, and existed because of a combination of Anno’s hate and desire for more tokusatsu merch. Sure, they were cynical and empty, but don’t you want Anno to own the original Kamen Rider Cyclone?
I figured the old endings did enough, but even they weren’t enough to shut up the “Rei is the perfect waifu because her virginity can be taken over and over again and you can reset her virginity with each clone” terrifyingly creepy members of the fandom that existed even back then.
Riskiest click I’ve ever seen on Hexbear. :bugs-no:
ok understandable
The entire battlefield 4 campaign is you helping the guy who tried to do a colour revolution in China lmao. Like that’s the plot, trying to free the guy. Which results in war with China ofc. Also you take in a boat of refugees from Shanghai of all places onto your aircraft carrier, those poor people probably had a much better standard of living over there than they’ll ever have in the USA.
Bonus points for Call of Duty black ops II, where you help the Taliban to fight against Russia, and help the apartheid supported UNITA forces to fight the MPLA. You literally fight for the Taliban and apartheid South Africa proxy forces.
:jesus-christ:
I straight up had to put down black Ops II on the first mission at a friend’s house as a South African when I realised you’re playing for the apartheid forces in Angola committing war crimes. You even use APCS from the apartheid army…
Also the Modern Warfare Reboot, which (beyond the whole “Highway of Death” controversy) tries to paint a US-aligned Middle Eastern
collaboratorfreedom fighter as having gone “too far” because he used chemical weapons in that one flashback.Which is pretty hypocritical for the protagonists who regularly do heinous shit on a regular basis in the vein of getting the job done, and never having it blow up in their faces.
Yeah COD in general is cheating for this kind of thing, just horrible
I’m surprised no one here has mentioned Assassin’s Creed yet. All conflict in history stems from two competing ideological sects of callous murderers who wanton manipulate populations into doing their bidding and for some reason one side in this conflict is supposed to be the moral superior of the other. Also some of the supplemental material is batshit and basically just a way for the devs to denote certain historical figures as good or bad depending on what organization they belonged to. All other conflicts are secondary to the overarching philosophical differences of two sects competing for magical thingies.
At the same time those games have probably the most sympathetic portrayal of Marx in a western piece of fiction, so there’s that.
they made marx a lib which is argubly worse
Yeah, they made him a weird pacifist utopian who was against revolution
Tbf I think he was criticizing propaganda of the deed anarchists, it’s a big factor in the split of the first internationale.
Right, a lib.
…no, banishing anarchists from the first internationale didn’t make him a lib
Intensely lib, in a manner that has not been successfully conveyed until Ubisoft got their hands on him.
You guys really haven’t read a lot of Marx’s correspondences, have you?
Oh I mean easily what springs right to mind is Call Of Duty. I mean the games are literally made in cooperation with the department of defense and are drunk off the american exceptionalism with real might makes right fashy undertones. I find almost directly responsible for the hero worship we have for special forces in the USA, as most of these games have you working as a spec ops goon.
Which one of those propaganda pieces pretending to be games had evil South Americans steal a doomsday weapon from the United States (only evil in their hands of course), but when your elite black ops tacticools seize it back, you save the day by using the same doomsday weapon on those scary evil foreigners? :amerikkka-clap:
Oh I think that was one of the ghost games, I think? Wasn’t it an orbiting rail cannon or something?
The unionized neurons in my brain were going to go on strike if I paid any more attention than I did, so you tell me. :kombucha-disgust:
Yeah I wouldn’t know, the only CoD games I played for the first couple WWII ones and Modern Warfare 1, that was enough for me.
OOooo look at the poor widdle north amerika sooo weak and demoralized by the evil brown man… :( :( :( :( will you help us save them?? would you still love us?? :((( ??? you probably wouldnt :( :( :( or would you :) :) ;)
So glad the only COD I ever played was the first level of Finest Hour, where you’re a Soviet soldier killing Nazis in Stalingrad
It’s all downhill from there.
WaW us pretty good, but the rest, yeah…
I still can’t believe the “No Russian” thing was a real thing, what the fuck was that. That was some CIA conditioning bullshit I swear to god
chess
Monarchist “great man” trash.
bioshock 2 communism is when you do the borg and no one matters, also the collectivist is portrayed way less sympathetically than the libertarian nutjob
The Bioshock series in general is full of ideology that gestures in directions but never quite gets there. Bioshock 2 is probably the worst culprit because it was made by the B-team and they seemed to just want to flip around the story from the first one to get a product out. The first game was laser pointed at how much of a dipshit Ayn Rand was and it’s probably the most coherent one. 2 is somehow aimed at criticizing both socialism and that particular kind of John Stuart Mill utopian liberalism and it just falls apart. Utopia is when nobody has free will except there’s a dictator lady over the radio who tells you what to do.
I think the first game actually came off slightly in favour of libertarians by portraying them as principled
i’m not sure what you mean, since the libertarians betray every single one of their principles the second anything goes wrong. Andrew Ryan even nationalizes Fontaine Futuristics once he starts getting pulverized in the market. The hypocrisy goes even further to the point the libertarians create a person who has no individual will of his own, then goes even further by using pheromones to control people against their will. All of this despite Andrew Ryan’s constant talk about the great chain and glorious free individual and blah blah. I’m pretty sure the devs are libs, but they at least had a keen sense that libertarian policies are effectively indistinct from wacky fascist dictatorship.
What would an ideologically good game look like?
- Guerilla: First person shooter where you play as a guerilla army against imperialists. Campaigns could include playing as the Viet Cong, Yugoslav partisans or in the Cuban Revolution.
- Organizer: Tycoon-style game where you play as a union organizer. You start out in a chuddy workplace where everyone is drenched in false consciousness. You start out by winning small victories, organizing and eventually unionizing. The game doesn’t stop there though, the struggle to organize continues until the entire capitalist system has been dismantled.
- City planner: City builder game from a working class perspective where you have to build a livable and sustainable city. The game will penalise car-centric infrastructure and single family homes for anything above village size. The options for transit infrastructure are detailed and offers many different options.
- Great Patriotic War: It’s WWII. You kill Nazis for the Soviets.
- Bolchevik: RPG set during the Russian revolution and civil war.
Idle clicker game where you :gui-better: capitalista
This Land Is My Land if it hadn’t been made by a shithead.
City planner: City builder game from a working class perspective where you have to build a livable and sustainable city. The game will penalise car-centric infrastructure and single family homes for anything above village size. The options for transit infrastructure are detailed and offers many different options.
You just described Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic.
Reverse Factorio. The world is covered in a giant machine. Tear bits of it off to make flower pots, raise the few plants that can grow in this polluted environment, build up an ecosystem.
Real :no-copyright: hours!
I like the idea of a city planning game that rewards a higher floor on material conditions in its entire supply chain, free time, and environmental sustainability, then watch various forms of socialism naturally become the only way to win.
Minecraft’s villager and pillager colonial mechanics is weird.
Also, having an entire race of long-nosed greedy merchants is kinda sussy considering Notch’s political views
I think he was gone and the dev team had disavowed him before that feature was released
XCOM: Chimera Squad. 👏 More 👏 xeno 👏 SWAT 👏 teams 👏
All problems can be solved by kicking in the door guns blazing. Don’t have any evidence? Don’t worry, if you bust in and kill everyone, maybe you’ll find some!
We’ve fought long and bitterly against our subjugation. Now that humanity has access to literal space-age technology, we can grow as a united civilization to great heights!
Wait, it’s just the same as before but with aliens? Okay then…
I’ve been replaying Mass Effect and there’s literally a side quest where a bunch of biotic “terrorists” have taken a chairman from the Alliance hostage. Specifically because he voted against reparations for L2 biotics, being an L2 biotic requires implants which cause insanity, mental disability, and crippling pain. So Shepherd is literally sent in as an agent of capital to kill them, and you don’t have anyway to express any sympathy to the biotics. The paragon path is literally just telling the biotic leader that you won’t kill him if he lets the chairman go, and whooooa as soon as you convince the leader to stand down, the chairman has a change of heart. This stood out to me cause it’s just a small side quest, but the series both sides genocide and has you actually commit genocide in 2. The Batarians, despite the series trying their best to paint an entire species as xenophobic slaver/terrorists, are victim to multiple war crimes committed by the player character. The game has created a situation where there are ‘good’ aliens (the council races) and ‘bad’ aliens (batarians/vorcha/krogan) and the lives of the ‘bad’ aliens matter significantly less than the good aliens. You get hordes of vorcha and batarians to kill, and dialogue and story reinforces the fact that it’s okay. There might as well be calipers in the game. It’s honestly kind of fucked to play through.
Mass Effect always had a “screw Batarians, am I right?” attitude, framing them as both pathetic and yet vaguely menacing. Real ur-fascist hours.
Mass Effect has also always been ridiculously US centric and thus pro US military when it comes to depictions of humanity as a whole. It goes for all races, but if you’re a civilian you’re usually depicted as either useless or just conniving evil, and we should listen more to the military. Take the council or Udina, they’re all just useless pencil pushers who want PROOF that something is happening before they want to act, luckily we have Colin Powell… I mean Admiral Anderson there to back you up.
This isn’t even touching the ideological nightmare that is the spectres.
The SpecTRe program is so good for storytelling purposes as it gives you a reason to do whatever you want while also giving you a strict mission guideline to do.
But it’s not a great thing to have when you really think about it.
Punching the reporter is framed as cool/justified. Twice.
The way the Batarians have been portrayed, from the very start, has always rubbed me the wrong way. Shepard, who is portrayed as a force for good (even his Renegade path has him framed as “crude but effective”), derisively tries to justify the Batarians being outcasts when talking with a terrorist leader speaking about their grievances. Even the goody-goody Paragon options doesn’t have anything to convey sympathy. Then comes Mass Effect 2 where Zaeed, the veteran of a fucking PMC, is portrayed as having a moral compass since he refused to let Batarians (“Goddamn Terrorists”) join the Blue Suns when he lead them (as opposed to his greedy partner). They’re so obviously a stand-in for [designated bad guy in the global periphery], even incorporating some of the DPRK (being a “Hermit Kingdom” and all).
Also, another thing about ME is that class conflict seems to never be brought to the forefront, despite the Galaxy being a crapsacharine neoliberal hellhole where corporations and their mercenary companies run amok, and poverty is still an everpresent problem. It’s effort to be a “dark” science fiction setting just end up making it Capitalist Realist as fuck.
The more the Batarians get genocided the nicer they become lol
It’s heavily implied in 3 that they’ll become good aliens after their entire civilisation was destroyed.
100% true, they literally get subjugated to goodness, which is literally what they did to the Krogan.
“I’m sure the Palestinians will stop hating us once we bomb/displace/starve them this time”
Mass effect is reactionary trash. The entire premise of the game is that you’re an ultra-cop who can do anything he wants and fuck the law. The whole Krogan genocide is a great replacement narrative.
I’ll add one more for now. I will never forget that back in Civilization II, the corruption mechanic that most civilizations had to deal with in the modern era could be bypassed simply by choosing “democracy” as the game describes it over its competitors. We never have corruption in US-style “democracy” do we? :amerikkka-clap: Also, inventing capitalism has absolutely no downsides and is only a boon, though to be fair all capitalism does on its own is allow you to convert your people’s labor into additional money which checks out. :marx-hi:
Rise of Nations lets you pick between “consensus” (Republic, Democracy and Capitalism :agony:) and “totalitarian” (Despotism, Monarchy and Socialism) governments, which give you different bonuses. This is how the game describes both:
“Consensus governments are dedicated to the economical and scientific development of a nation. Their Patriots offer production and defense bonuses and provide healing to nearby units and buildings.”
“Totalitarian governments are devoted to military development and warfare, benefiting nations fielding lots of units and often waging wars. Their Patriots are oriented to offensive warfare and always give the benefits of a Supply Wagon (eliminate attrition and provide supply for artillery units).”
Been thinking a lot about the ideology of Chess recently. The game goes back to ancient India and was designed to teach young men about army tactics. So in a way it was a bit like how COD prepares young men to join the military.
It changed into it’s modern form in Spain, where it traveled with Islam and was adopted by the spanish. I believe the original pieces represented infantry (pawns), cavalry, chariots(bishops) and elephants (rooks). The “queen” was then male and considered the “advisor” and moved like the king. Just as Isabela became the most powerful queen in the last 500 years of Europe, the advisor was changed to queen and the became the most powerful piece. Pawns also got their ability to become queens, which, being called “promotion” may be a reference to the original role as “advisor” but may also reflect a king’s ability to marry anyone and therefore make them a powerful queen. It was also during this time that the diagonal piece was named the “bishop,” representing the power of the church and flanking the monarchy, closer even than the knights to the king and queen.
This is all to be expected, I guess. What I find insidious about the game is simply the “black vs. white” color scheme. Could it have been lost on the Spanish that their skin color was lighter than the Muslims they fought? Is it lost on modern players that the white pieces are superior to the black (white has the advantage of going first and therefore is more likely to win)?
Another subtly insidious aspect is the widespread understanding that the computer knows better than humans. People who are good at chess are thought of as smart, therefore, even smarter is an AI that can beat the best players. Because the rules of chess are simple and the goal of checkmate is concrete the AI has an exact purpose and can be trusted to seek that purpose. The AI is therefore “always right.” This might produce in players a habit of deferring to computer generated models, forgetting that in real life the purpose and limits of a computer program can vary wildly and are set by it’s creator
This is all to be expected, I guess. What I find insidious about the game is simply the “black vs. white” color scheme. Could it have been lost on the Spanish that their skin color was lighter than the Muslims they fought? Is it lost on modern players that the white pieces are superior to the black (white has the advantage of going first and therefore is more likely to win)?
Careful with applying modern American interpretations of race to medieval Spanish history. Ain’t very historical materialist.
It’d be a good research topic though.
The Civ series is basically Whig History: The Game.
Bioshock Infinite.
The city of Columbia was built as a haven for the ruling class of 1800s America. Complete with a white underclass and, of course, slaves. It was built by a scientist who discovered a new technology and was to serve as a floating World’s Fair showing the world how great and advanced America is. Pretty okay premise if done right. Many opportunities to talk about real history and draw comparisons to today. The city is politically divided among several factions, which isn’t a fleshed out mechanic in the game due to development issues. But you have a cult that worships John Wilkes Booth and hates Lincoln for ending slavery. You have people who are hyper religious and treat the Founders as religious prophets. You have normal upper middle-class people who are tuned out to the politics. You also have the revolutionary group Vox Populi who are trying to overthrow Columbia’s government and install actual democracy. Again, some great ideas in there for good stories based in real history. But then somewhere towards the end of the game it makes the Vox Populi just as bad as the imperialist, racists, sexists, zealots. When you start the game there is a couple being physically abused for miscegenation, in front of a cheering crowd. Yet the black lady trying to stop it is bad because her and other workers killed some cops and are pushing the middle class white people out of the city. It’s total “both extremes are really the same” kind of thing. And to make the revolutionary leader bad they write her to kill a baby or something? It’s been a while I can’t remember if she tries to kill Elizabeth or just Comstock. She was also going to use Columbia’s weapons and invade NYC to liberate people on land too. But that’s bad because NYC in the late 1800s/early 1900s was good.
Some people might bring up the development troubles as a reason the story got so simplified into horseshoe theory. But there are early gameplay videos from before the troubles started that show Vox Populi implying they want to sexually assault Elizabeth. So they meant for them to be bad from the beginning. The only real thing that was different was that Comstock was supposed to me more nuanced. So the people’s revolution of communists were pretty much always a political cartoon and they had to jam the right wing factions into one guy. Instead of getting the subtleties of “cleanse all the immigrants” from many different factions, we get it from one guy. Thanks 2k/Irrational.
Ken Levine is a fucking hack and always has been. Keep him away from games.
