Plenty of games, especially strategy and simulator games, have game mechanics related to politics or economics. From Recettear’s “Capitalism Ho!” to Hearts of Iron 4’s focus trees, political descriptions can be added to flavor game mechanics, and because different game devs have endless variation in personal worldviews, these additions can be absurdly bad at times. Even if the mechanic itself is good, it can have dunk-worthy labelling. Post the worst that you can think of, even if they come from an otherwise great game.

I’ll start: In Civilization VI, different government types you choose have different slots for policy cards, which let you select political policy bonuses for your civilization. In the modern age, two of the government types you can choose are “Democracy” and “Communism”. Already this is liberal drivel conflating Communism with non-democracy and “authoritarianism”. But the policy slots for these governments are even dumber, as Democracy gets more “diplomatic” and “economic” policies, and Communism gets more “millitary” policies. Famously, America and the west (clearly what Democracy is inspired by) never destabilized the world with arms manufactoring and invasions, I guess.

  • barrbaric [he/him]
    ·
    1 day ago

    Hearts of Iron (3 and maybe 4) had the political triangle between democracy, fascism, and communism

    HOI4 doesn't have the triangle, instead measuring country alignment based off of whichever party has the largest share of the "ideology pie chart", but it does keep the democracy/fascist/communist definitions. It also says that Democracies can't declare wars unless certain restrictions are met to represent "public anti-war intersts", but Fascists and Communists can declare whatever wars they want. This is of course ignoring that, IIRC, the USSR didn't actually declare any offensive wars during the period.

    Sim City, Cities Skylines (and 2) assume cars as a default

    This is a funny one because there's an anecdote out there somewhere of Will Wright working on Sim City 1 (or maybe even Sim Town?) and designing it around cars but not being able to figure out parking lots because they'd just wreck the city. The "solution" they came up with was to just not have parking. Genius!

    • keepcarrot [she/her]
      ·
      21 hours ago

      If my car disappeared when I wasn't using it... In workers and resources I wind up having a few cars here and there, but my parking lots are tiny and infrequent. In Tropico I just forget about them until the Capitalists ask for them.

      I think a lot of brainworms in HoI4 comes in the little niche fascist nation mechanics, which I avoid playing so I'm not familiar with them. It does wind up sorta justifying Stalin's "paranoia" though by having a Trotskyist (I think) rebellion if you don't engage with it. I think conceptually I prefer HoI3's more fluid mechanics (rather than HoI4's event based ones), but they are less accessible and do come with a lot of assumptions about ideology and production baked in.

      • barrbaric [he/him]
        ·
        19 hours ago

        HOI4 literally added a "Stalin's Paranoia-ometer" in one of the most recent DLCs lol.

        • keepcarrot [she/her]
          ·
          17 hours ago

          Yeah, and it justifies the paranoia because if you don't, trotskyists show up