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.

  • Straight_Depth [they/them]
    hexagon
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    edit-2
    3 years ago

    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.

    • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      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.

    • Haste_Hall [he/him]
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      3 years ago

      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.