Title. Need some examples of games that had lefty politics and leanings and weren't too ashamed to hide it. Platform/country of origin is irrelevant. I know about FF7's support for ecoterrorism, and even the nuance about the people caught up in the middle, and there's plenty of games that take an anti-corporate stance, but that can be easily brushed aside.
I'm specifically interested in this era as it's when games first acquired the ability to become fully immersive in their narratives with the adoption of multimedia melding into the core gameplay loop via the use of full motion video, voice acting, detailed images and so on.
Reminder: all games are political; even abstract puzzle games.
Yeah what do you expect from G*mers. What grabbed me so much as a pre-teen with MGS was how in-depth it's politics was, from anti-nuke discourse to genetic engineering and philosophical questions about fate. At the time, like so much media was still doing gung-ho america good, capitalism good, schlock.
The quote: "There's no such thing as an anti-war film." is as true about Starship Troopers as it is about Metal Gear.
It honestly has a lot to say about the way we fetishize war and special forces crap...but it also falls prey to indulging in the same thing it criticizes or even parodies. Kojima's schtick is to basically illustrate and frame special forces shit and military hardware with almost pornographic titillation and then sort of do an about face and say: "isn't it weird and kinda fucked up we're all so godamn horny about this stuff"?
Textually the series is antiwar, anti american foreign policy, and even ostensibly dissects the myth of the one man army super soldier....but it still relishes in presenting those things as cool as fucking possible.
That's why I love that scene from Snake Eater where BB obsesses over the 1911 handgun Eva gives him.
Yeah it falls into the same traps that "anti-war" movies fall into.
Absolutely*, and the fact that in/around that same scene you can leer at her chest isn't coincidental, especially given what we find out later. A lot of the series' fan service is, on some level, not entirely gratuitous. Its still quite often indulgent, but there is usually a thought behind it.
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Oh absolutely. I don't disagree at all. In fact I think part of what makes Metal Gear and Kojima's vision so compelling is that he on some level either understands or (more likely) shares the American fetishization and romanticization of violent warfare and the way its tied up with super/action hero narratives and media tropes. Part of what I find so interesting about the series is that its ostensible hero and "main character" Solid Snake is actually usually characterized as a complete dupe and tool for the establishment while its villains are instead idealists with grander ambitions who actually drive a lot of the forward momentum of the story Snake is trying to stop. That gets even more explicit as the series shifts to Big Boss.
Precisely something that I observed as well. Other games did not even slightly hesitate to make use of multimedia in their narrative to present an uncritically enthusiastic view of the US, capitalism, NATO, military intervention, and anticommunism generally. I recall Westwood's Command and Conquer Red Alert has some batshit insane politics (In the original C&C the GDI's Carter ofhandedly refers to Gavrilo Princip as a "madman who started WW1"), and EA's Soviet Strike and Nuclear Strike titles also had uncritical support of US military intervention, to the point that it had a voiceover where an actor puts on a comical Bill Clinton impression as a shady government official gives him the Other Kennedy Assassination Tape shakedown while explaining they were the ones actually in charge despite his protestations. And this was presented as a good and necessary thing in the complex geopolitical world of post-Soviet collapse, alongside re-intervening in Vietnam, North Korea, etc.
All the above was, of course, presented in cutting edge fashion with fully voiced real actors, computer graphics, stock footage of real combat and so on. Hardly a text box with white font over a blue background.
Yup that's the kind of shit I'm talking about. I should also mention Fallout and it's consistent message about war being bad in the original games.
I still play Nuclear Strike occasionally! And yeah you're spot on about it.
I'm trying to remember if Syphon Filter had any particularly bad politics and I can't remember. I remember that in SF2 the bad guy is, spoiler alert, ultimately the US government.