Yes I know that fascism measurehead is a playable ideology in Disco Elysium, but presenting fascism as with its integral ugly reality, glaring contradictions, and unsustainable death drive is a pretty leftist (and correct) way of portraying it. de-encyclopedia

  • ProfessorAdonisCnut [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    48
    ·
    1 year ago

    Cyberpunk 2077. The setting is perfectly competent cyberpunk, with all the capitalist reality heightened to the point of absurdity, but V is the fucking ur-chud.

    You’re in an extreme late-capitalist hellworld; the climate and most of social order is collapsing beyond repair. Your character’s reaction to this is to be a mercenary whose principle preoccupation is their own legend. Your connection with humanity at large is limited to a cobbled together network of a handful of people who morally vindicate your every action. Your story is mostly about the trail of bodies left behind by a quest to do nothing but save your own life. The most pure version of your final arc is to eschew entirely any form of collectivist solution in favor of dialing up the rugged individualist power fantasy to 11 with a on-person guns-blazing assault on a Japanese corporation (alternatively there’s now an expansion where you can sell out and be offered to become a fed because of how cool you are).

    All of this while maintaining a pretense of being a morally neutral person just driven by common sense and your second amendment-given right to self-defense from hordes on interchangeable sheeple.

    • windowlicker [she/her]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      this annoys the living shit out of me every playthrough i do. no matter what options you choose, its always about V’s constant sense of self-importance and becoming a “legend” while casting the anti-corporate and anti-capitalist sentiments as crazy (you can lean into silverhand, but i feel like V’s dialogue options always imply that silverhand is a little crazy for believing what he believes. and by no means is he a great person, but if i was in the cyberpunk universe i would be on the exact same page as him regarding action against the corporations.)

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      I’ve knocked on the Become A Legend Of Night City™ plot motivations of the cyberpunkerinos before, but you summed it up perfectly.

    • TheWorldSpins [any, undecided]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I mean the game is set in fucking hell, half the freaks you kill kidnap people (mostly women) off the street to chop up for parts on the black market. Also for VR snuff porn. Communism was pretty much snuffed out in Russia even though the Soviet Union exists. China is also kinda fucked, Maoism was never embraced it seems according to the wiki.

      Shame about the new DLC ending.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        “The world is shit, even trying to improve it somewhat is naive, and everyone in it with any meaningful agency is probably an asshole” settings leave very little room for me to care about what the fiction is portraying. I’m glad I didn’t buy in to it.

        • TheWorldSpins [any, undecided]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          I get that. Nihilistic grim dark shit is really overused in media. Personally I didn’t buy into any message the game was or wasn’t trying to push, because Cyberpunk 2177 would just be endless deserts, ruins and skeletons. I just find the established setting and lore interesting in a dark way.

          • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            6
            ·
            1 year ago

            Personally I didn’t buy into any message the game was or wasn’t trying to push, because Cyberpunk 2177 would just be endless deserts, ruins and skeletons. I just find the established setting and lore interesting in a dark way.

            I personally find the message and the setting inseperable, or at least too much trouble to be worth the effort. For me, if the central narrative is repulsive, it stains everything else I may otherwise be doing. There’s plenty of pop-nihilistic edgy fiction settings out there to choose from if I wanted that.

              • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                4
                ·
                edit-2
                1 year ago

                I enjoy a wide range of fiction, but my problematic (yet all-time) favorite is Frank Herbert’s Dune series. It’s dark, tumultuous, full of vast and difficult-to-fathom massive political movements that span the stars, but it isn’t just ripe for change, it is dangerously ripe for change that does come and does change everything, in good ways and bad.

                There are very bad people in it, there are misguided people, there are people with true and actual messiah complexes, but there are also deeply sympathetic and heroic people. It’s a complicated struggle, much like the world we live in, just expanded into the far future.

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      Your story is mostly about the trail of bodies left behind by a quest to do nothing but save your own life.

      If only. As you insinuate, it very readily becomes a story about not even saving your life but just glorifying yourself before you die.

  • BelieveRevolt [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    35
    ·
    1 year ago

    Way too easy answer: Ethnic Cleansing

    Slightly less easy answer: I think Postal 2 is the ur-chud game. Even as a teenager the racism, misanthropism and overall edgelord content was way too much for me, and it’s all covered in that supposed plausible deniability :smuglord: “Well, it was your choice to do that edgelord shit. The game allows you to play it peacefully” shit that chuds love so much because it’s essentially another version of the smuglord “I never said the welfare queens in my story were black. Sounds like you’re the real racist here” deflection.

    Off topic, but I do think there’s an interesting game to be made with the whole “the player chose to do these bad things” narrative mechanic, which you could say Spec Ops: The Line and Undertale did to various degrees. Of course, Postal 2 was never going to be that game since it was made by sophomoric edgelords.

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      19
      ·
      1 year ago

      I came here to mention Postal 2. I still think the premise is kind of clever, in that you’re never truly forced to act violently and you can escape every confrontation without harming anyone if you know what you’re doing. That could probably be done better though, but I personally have a soft spot for games that use the player’s frustration as a mechanic.

      But it really does communicate the American reactionary mindset. It’s racist, it’s smug, it presents a world where other people are aggressive and horrible for no reason. You fight against leftist-coded protestors at various points. It presents mass murder as a cathartic solution to problems. The developers seem like they’re chuds as well, like deep in the weeds variety. They put that Milo Yiannopoulos guy in a DLC, voiced by himself.

    • KittyBobo [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      18
      ·
      1 year ago

      I enjoy those types of games but stuff like SWAT 4 and Ready or Not where you’re the hyper-competent police who are the only thing saving the sheeple from drugs, politicians, and corruption. And if you happen to kill a civilian then you get an Oopsie-Daisy sticker on your performance sheet.

      • envis10n [he/him]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        1 year ago

        Zero Hour is similar in that you play as a counter-terrorist agent and it focuses on tactical play. I’ve never shot a civilian in the game, but it certainly makes it seem like there will be big consequences for doing so. I usually don’t make it past traps setup by the enemy because I’m blind and step into the wires

    • jaeme@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      I’ve played postal 2 as well and there is a very good reason why the only things that come out from that game is the “sign my petiton” level and Gary Coleman (as well as Rick Hunter’s performance as the protagonist which most likely is why the game was popular in the first place).

      The rest of the game is a time capsule incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t a white teenager just after 9/11. Maybe it has some little value that way.

      • WIIHAPPYFEW [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        1 year ago

        The rest of the game is a time capsule incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t a white teenager just after 9/11. Maybe it has some little value that way.

        Say what you will but no other game is as pure a distillation of the mid-2000s cultural miasma

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      1 year ago

      Slightly less easy answer: I think Postal 2 is the ur-chud game. Even as a teenager the racism, misanthropism and overall edgelord content was way too much for me, and it’s all covered in that supposed plausible deniability “Well, it was your choice to do that edgelord shit. The game allows you to play it peacefully” shit that chuds love so much because it’s essentially another version of the

      “I never said the welfare queens in my story were black. Sounds like you’re the real racist here” deflection.

      Off topic, but I do think there’s an interesting game to be made with the whole “the player chose to do these bad things” narrative mechanic, which you could say Spec Ops: The Line and Undertale did to various degrees. Of course, Postal 2 was never going to be that game since it was made by sophomoric edgelords.

      I enjoy Civvie11 videos on Youtube but I can not sit through even his abbreviated playthroughs of that edgelord trash. I don’t even try to anymore.

  • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    34
    ·
    1 year ago

    Don’t think there is an equivalent to Disco Elysium really, but there are lots of games where what you do is claim other people’s stuff for yourself, take it by force and kill everyone who stands in your way, which is the essence of chud ideology. Many games have “individual power over others” as their main appeal.

    • fuckiforgotmypasswor [comrade/them,any]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      24
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      i dont know what the fuck i just saw when i went to whatever eyesore of a sub that “brigade incoming” link took me to, but the top comment is a snapshot of your comment and them attempting to dunk on it as though communism is literally about killing people and just taking their stuff wonder-who-thats-for

      i forgot that this is literally as deep as chud analysis goes, also i’m sure they have no fucking idea who the owned were but if they’re talking about the romanovs, fucking lol and also yes-comm

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      23
      ·
      1 year ago

      “You are the chosen one of epic destiny and the main character. Everyone else is a disposable NPC.”

      In some ways, chuds caught up in “simulation theory” are trying to make the chud equivalent of Disco Elysium in the offline world, every day. scared-fash

      • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        1 year ago

        “You are the chosen one of epic destiny and the main character. Everyone else is a disposable NPC.”

        Exactly, and this kind of stuff is fun in games. Power is fun and makes you feel good. I like feeling like the chosen one of epic destiny when I’m playing warframe or world of warcraft or whatever.

        But that doesn’t make a very good political ideology

    • invalidusernamelol [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      Honestly, most RTS games are basically fascist. Not like explicitly ideologically, but because the only thing you can do in them is build up a war machine and kill. There’s no option to not build up an army and kill all your neighbors for territory.

      Still love playing AOE though.

      • Leon_Grotsky [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        1 year ago

        There’s no option to not build up an army and kill all your neighbors for territory.

        Not completely true, since AoE II (not sure if another game had it before AoE) there has been the “Wonder” victory condition. You can look at it as “defending your wholesome chungus enlightened monument of civilization from outside hordes” but that’s still a different reactionary fantasy from the Manifest Destiny war machine.

        • invalidusernamelol [he/him]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Fair, but no one ever goes for a wonder victory unless they’re playing with noobs or kids lol. It’s too difficult to pull off against someone who knows how to play the military strategy.

          And again, I don’t think AoE is necessarily fascist, but the playstyle it asks in competitive mode kinda pushes you towards that type of thought. Not unlike games like Call of Duty or anything except in RTS games you’re controlling a society instead of an individual which makes it a bit different.

  • Tachanka [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    34
    ·
    1 year ago

    I have never seen a fascist game with good writing. And by fascist I mean like full fascist. Yes libs can write OK sometimes. And yes scratch a lib etc. etc. But if you look at the most infamous /pol/ type games it’s all shock value “kill [insert marginalized group]” simulators and Machiavellian grindset zero sum strategy games.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      33
      ·
      1 year ago

      The fascist idea of good writing is “says what the reader already wants to believe, and says it with a lot of words.”

      • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        32
        ·
        1 year ago

        not only do they lack imagination, they have a different conception of what art is supposed to be. Art is meant to be purely surface level instructive slop meant for immediate consumption and then disposal. Its aesthetic value comes from only how closely it communicates a reactionary worldview. Look at all the very bland movies the Nazis made, where the plot is always something like a nice German man has a nice German wife and they’re very normal. Look at modern American country music and how banal it is.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      28
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      The cryptofascist chuds that already linked to this thread on Reddit, according to another reply here, suggest that you’re right. yea

  • HiImThomasPynchon [des/pair, it/its]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    29
    ·
    1 year ago

    Planet Alcatraz

    You play as a space marine dropped into a prison colony planet to thwart a faction that has developed nuclear weapons. All the non-marine factions in the game are racist caricatures. It’s really fucked up.

    • LaGG_3 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      34
      ·
      1 year ago

      This. It’s pretending to be a realistic portrayal of a historical period, but all that means is no PoC and you’re a commoner who can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

        • NotARobot [she/her]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          14
          ·
          1 year ago

          I like what they were trying to do but it gets annoying really fast when you fight more than one enemy at a time. And one could say that the point is that you are are an ordinary commoner and can’t fight more than one person at a time without great difficulty but if that’s the case then why is the relatively easy solution most of the time to kite them so the AI forces itself to line up and let you take them on one at a time.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      31
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      It had a toxic as fuck fandom and lots of “historical accuracy” pretenses that amounted to us-foreign-policy because the accents were all over the place and it got some downright fundamental details laughably wrong (yeah, kill one of a noble’s guards and you’ll totally just go to jail for a few days), but I wouldn’t call it comprehensive chuddery.

    • CA0311 [they/them]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      1 year ago

      when i first heard about it i was really excited for it because it was described by a few different sources as being inspired by darklands. when it came out and i read more about it I decided not to play it, it would be so sick to have a new darklands but chuds have claimed “historical accuracy” in the medieval era as their own and it sucks.

    • GoebbelsDeezNuts [any]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      My friends highly recommended this game to me.

      Once you get to the first little town area a guy is talking shit about the king. Your friends overhear him and decide they’re gonna lynch him and you should help.

      Your dialogue options are basically:

      “Yeah fuck that guy lets do it.”

      or

      “Fuck that guy, but I have shit to do.”

      I uninstalled immediately.

  • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    ·
    1 year ago

    Someone else already said Postal 2, which is probably the best example here. That one is a game made by white nihilistic reactionaries for teenagers of a similar mindset.

    The only other socially conservative game I can think of are most city builders, if that counts. They’re kind of both lib and chud at the same time. Their entire operation is premised on there’s a single, correct way to plan a society that is stable in perpetuity. And it’s premised on most people being a permanent consumer class who mostly drive cars and only complain when they don’t have public utilities. Also everything’s assumed to work around car infrastructure. Also police stations have to exist or society collapses.

    I’ve never seen a city planner game directly involve issues like systemic racism. It’s assumed to not exist. The Tropico games kind of have class revolt, but it’s really simplistic and more of a function of how low/high wages are. I guess not all city builders are conservative. Tropico and Frostpunk are kinda different

    • Helmic [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      18
      ·
      1 year ago

      Sim City and Cities: Skylines are made with very neoliberal assumptions of how cities work, especially the former. Prison Architect applies a lot of the same logic to a dorflike, where the “good” prisons are supposedly reforming people through prison labor and the cops are always on their best behavior - or you can run a brutal death row hellhole to fulfill a chud’s radicalized revenge fantasies.

      But iunno if there is really specifically a Disco Elysium of anything, it’s like a step removed from a visual novel with light RPG elements. It’s such a dense game of text that is very direct about what it is about, and there just aren’t many games that are that overtly political and that challenge the player to reflect on their politics. Straight up fascist literature tends to be less thoughtful, basically violent fantasies that double as examples of praxis, calls to do violence. Their games tend to be even less sophisticated - Kingdom Come: Deliverance is an imagined (all white) past, the Postal games are just about killing people, the devs who made Hatred went on to make more bigoted shit. They’re mostly just games that have a fascist mentality rather than games that’ll sit a chud down and make them really think about fascism.

      Which is good, obviously. The best RPG many critics have ever played is communist, this puts us at a unique position culturally.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        Sim City and Cities: Skylines are made with very neoliberal assumptions of how cities work, especially the former.

        SimCity railroads you into wanting gentrified yuppie McMansions everywhere as some sort of win state.

    • SkeletorJesus [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      15
      ·
      1 year ago

      Also everything’s assumed to work around car infrastructure.

      Wasn’t it City: Skylines that had an extremely realistic simulation of traffic flow that showed what a fucking shitshow car infrastructure is? IIRC they had to add a mechanic where cars magically disappeared if they got stuck for too long because making a car-centric city was miserable and inefficient.