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.
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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
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…
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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 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.
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.
Sim City 4 has the player actively valuing rich residence over poor ones and they have to set taxes lower for rich residents.
There’s a similar class system element in one of my favorite city building games, Foundation, where higher level citizens need more luxury goods and better property values to be satisfied compared to the low level serfs that you can pretty much exploit to your pleasure as long as you have a strong church presence. I love it though, it’s an interactive peer into the political economy of the feudal period. The end game is the beginnings of a proto-capitalist society and I’ve seen complaints from players online that it’s nearly impossible to manage the logistics of the economy after that point but that’s great because in real history this creates the need for bureaucracy to manage those logistics rather than relying on a centralized power figure like under feudalism. It’s a really fun little educational tool in its own way. Honestly my biggest complaint is that the game is fully gender neutral for which jobs you assign the peasants too which I feel like is a miss if you’re trying to show how the economics of the medieval period worked. Maybe the creators aren’t being that intentional tho
It’s funny in both situations the games correctly display the horrifying economic stratification present in our economic systems but because the Sim City devs live under liberalism their brains are drenched in liberal ideology so they see these disparities as either good or “unavoidable” but either way immutable and natural to how economics should work
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.
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 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.
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
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…
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.
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.
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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?
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ok understandable
chess
Monarchist “great man” trash.
