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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Portrayal is endorsement, so Disco Elysium is obviously a nazbol centrist hyper-capitalist game.
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…
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.
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
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.
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 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
chess
Monarchist “great man” trash.
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.
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.
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.
This Land Is My Land if it hadn’t been made by a shithead.
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
Hearts of Iron: Nazi whitewashing. Nazi fantasy simulator. Goddamn fucking Nazi fanbase.
Europa Universalis: Colonial Nazi simulator with religious persecution button, Pogrom button, slave trading button, honestly more offensive than HOI because all the atrocity is extremely normalised and in fact optimal play
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.
