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:
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.
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
: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…
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
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?
Yeah, they made him a weird pacifist utopian who was against revolution
Company of Heroes 2 which portrays the USSR as evil for conscripting its people to fight in die in a “pointless” war to… checks notes …defend itself from an army hellbent on waging a war of extermination against it. But that’s just low-hanging fruit.
For something more subtle, I’d say most games that lament the “Evils of Humanity” feel pretty reactionary. The idea that something bad is inherent to humans (war, crime, bigotry, corruption, etc) and we just have to learn to accept it, without any other investigation into the matter. One game that comes to mind is Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux where
spoiler
the new ending has the main character turn immortal and get stuck into an endless cycle of needing to purge the Dark World over and over again because humanity cannot stop its self-destructive tendencies. Keep in mind that this is supposed to be an allegory for climate change.
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.
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.
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
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:
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 :) :) ;)
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.
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…
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
Idle clicker game where you :gui-better: capitalista
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.
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.
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 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.
Punching the reporter is framed as cool/justified. Twice.
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.
Mass Effect always had a “screw Batarians, am I right?” attitude, framing them as both pathetic and yet vaguely menacing. Real ur-fascist hours.
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.
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.
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
