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:
Red Alert is pretty bad as the Soviet Union gets hit hard with the villain bat.
Outer Worlds is also bad. Present a capitalist hellscape with anarchist and communist factions, and everything other than mild succdem stuff fails.
the USSR in red alert is a villain in the same way Dr Robotnik is
sure they’re the bad guys but like, they absolutely rock
The Soviet campaign in Red Alert turned me!
I mean, they’re the more fun faction, but they are also depicted as imperialists who love killing civilians.
Also, it makes Einstein into a lib.
True.
Red Alert 1 having Stalin as some expansionist warmonger is hilarious if you actually, you know, read history.
They should have gone for Trotsky instead. Even if that would be a hyperbole of his ideology, he would at least fit more.
chess
Monarchist “great man” trash.
The Civ series is basically Whig History: The Game.
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.
In Shadow Hearts: Covenant, you pal around with a goddamned Romanov.
And fight the ancient sorcerer Lich version of Grigori Rasputin from the 90’s cartoon. The presence of a talking bat in this game is coincidental and completely unrelated.
Portrayal is endorsement, so Disco Elysium is obviously a nazbol centrist hyper-capitalist game.
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.
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…
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 :) :) ;)
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
I love the Wargame series, and its sister series Steel Division manages to avoid a lot of the most common myths about the Soviet Union circa World War II, but god damn does Eugen Systems have serious brain worms.
Here are the campaigns in Wargame: Red Dragon:
- The South Korean dictatorship opens fire on a student protest, sparking a massive wave of unrest. This prompts North Korea to invade, and you play as the Americans who push back the Northerners and defend the dictatorship that was literally just massacring college students.
- The Soviet Union invades China in response to China attacking Vietnam. You play as China, and lead a counterattack that captures Vladivostok, successfully defending the Khmer Rouge.
- The time has come for Hong Kong to be handed over to China, but after Den Xiaoping makes a somewhat flippant remark to Margeret Thatcher, she decides that she doesn’t want to give up Hong Kong after all. You play as the Br*ts and fight to maintain control of your colonial holdings.
- The Soviet Union of 1984 grows paranoid about an impending American/Japanese attack to take some disputed islands, and launches a preemptive invasion of mainland Japan.
- The CPSU successfully coups Gorbachev right before he dissolves the Soviet Union. Despite the Soviet Union barely hanging on after the defection of several Eastern European republics, North Korea decides that this is the perfect chance for reunification, and kicks off the Second Korean War.
Earlier games in the series posited a Soviet invasion of Germany across the Fulda Gap. It’s like someone made a list of every single thing that the Cold Warriors were wrong about and made fanfiction of them actually being right.
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.
Skyrim is interesting because the main political conflict in the game is actually quite similar, at least aesthetically, to the modern day radical Democrat vs Republican conflict in America. The Empire are shiny and nice, they rule by law, they open up trade and in Skyrim they are literally puppets to fascists. The Stormcloaks are openly racist to elves, they celebrate the founder of their kingdom who committed genocide against the local elves, and they’re fighting for national independence in order to enforce their reactionary beliefs. I don’t think its purposely written like this, but I think it is accidentally quite good writing about a hopeless political struggle between two reactionary forces. There is no real good ending, the closest you can get is a temporary truce to kill the dragons before the war starts back up again.
:frothingfash: SKYRIM BELONGS TO THE NORDS :frothingfash:
If you’re a non-Nord, especially an Argonian or Khajiit, you get to be “the good one” among the :frothingfash: and the dialogue treats you as such: Dragonborn Uncle Ruckus.
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 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.
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.
“I’m sure the Palestinians will stop hating us once we bomb/displace/starve them this time”
100% true, they literally get subjugated to goodness, which is literally what they did to the Krogan.
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.
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.
Mass Effect always had a “screw Batarians, am I right?” attitude, framing them as both pathetic and yet vaguely menacing. Real ur-fascist hours.
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
Dishonored.
Don’t get me wrong, I love all the Dishonored games (Death of the Outsider is my favourite), but there is a deeply liberal undercurrent to the series.
Both mainline games are about getting rid of the bad aristocratic tyrant and replacing them with the “good” and “rightful” heir to the throne of Dunwall. The most telling part of this is the conflict between the Abbey of the Everyman and any supernatural covens/gangs like the Bridgemoore witches or Daud’s Whalers.
Both the Whalers and the witches have specific complaints within society; the Whalers are comprised of former gang members and disenfranchised labourers radicalised by the inequality in Dunwall, whereas the Bridgemoore witches are a radical feminist movement. Conversely the Abbey of the Everyman is a calvinist cult that carries out brutal crackdowns of anyone perceived to be a witch. Despite this the Abbey of the Everyman is consistently framed as being terrible but still the lesser evil. The Overseers essentially fall into the “woke” liberal defence of policing, “Yeah sure they’re bad, torturing and murdering randos and all that. But what are you gonna do if a witch turns up and starts killing people? That’s why we need more Overseers and they need to be increasingly militarised.”
When Delilah Copperspoon takes control of Dunwall and thus the Empire of the Isles, the Bridgemoore witches begin committing mass murder on the streets because… I don’t know they’re the baddies.
Time and time again the series shows any attempt to change the status quo resulting in pointless bloodbaths and mindless chaos, a status quo that need I remind you is a combination of Dickensian squalor and the Spanish inquisition.
Any changes that happen for the better, happen within the confines of the system. The miners union is the one group that is shown to be uncomplicatedly good, but even they are ineffective in timelines where the duke owns the mine because the union is only using peaceful protest. A kinda washed down vision of historical labour struggles.
The series is deeply critical of the aristocratic class. Every entry in it depicts them as selfish hedonists who’ll bleed a beggar to death if they think it will get them a good high at best, and brutal eugenicists willing to let a disease ravage the population in order to get rid of “undesirables” at worst. But this criticism falls weak when the right answer time and time again is always “replace the bad toffs with good toffs”.
The system isn’t a problem it’s the people, in other words.
House Flipper just serves to normalize the idea of housing as a commodity. In a vacuum it is not the worst game, in fact it is quite competent though.
