Does anybody else get unreasonably annoyed at the vast majority of rpg games that are feudal societys on a surface level but are actually capitalist societys under a thin vineer. I was trying to play pillars of eternity but became incredibly annoyed at the frist quest of the game revolving around a mill which is in a lord's domain but is privately owned and operated and which the townsfolk sell their grain to in exchange for currency (to later buy back with the same currency). I had to put the game down right there.
I think a lot of the time it's an outgrowth from developers feeling the need to have a commonly circulated currency. Although the answer in my opinion isn't to faithfully recreate feudalism but to create a unique social formation for the conditions of the world, I've always loved the eberron campaign setting for that reason.
Imo it literally that the writers can't imagine anything else.
People are so capitalism brained that they can't conceptualize anything that isn't basically capitalism. Feudalism is just medieval times capitalism.
What do they serfs do with the grain they grow? Well ofc they sell it would else could they possibly do. Where do they get their grain to eat? Well they buy it at the store duh
Ironically, the Telvanni in Morrowinds are openly based on ancaps and are the most feudalist of any group in eldar scrolls in terms of structure.
The Telvanni do follow the NAP. If you make too much of a nuisance of yourself a wizard will fly along and blow you up. Don't do anything that will annoy the wizards. There are no other laws.
I always liked that Telvanni architecture didn't have stairs because everyone who was important could fly and everyone who couldn't fly wasn't important. Nothing says "Slave Society" quite as hard as the masters simply levitating out of reach of their slaves.
what in skyrim? the economy seems entirely unthought through, like not enough thought to even default to capitalism
That’s true, but the elves, particularly the Ayleids
The Ayleids are irrelevant here because they lived in what is now Cyrodiil and were brought down by a slave rebellion. Ironically you are being very racist by bringing up the Ayleids when the conversation was about the Falmer that the nords committed genocide against.
Ironically you are being very racist by bringing up the Ayleids when the conversation was about the Falmer that the nords committed genocide against.
:shapiro-gavel:
It bugs me too. It's interesting how you can tell exactly what an author does and doesn't know based on how they write, and as expected 90% of people writing games don't really know much about economics so they just plug in things from the modern world and expect it to work.
One defense of the commonly circulated currency thing though is that designing and implementing something more complex would be a lot of work for something that isn't very fun. I think boiling cash down to gold pieces is fine, but it would be nice if a game world made it explicit that you only deal in gold because you're constantly traveling and that most people think that that's a bit strange.
I can kinda agree with the currency thing, The only system I've ever seen that works well is having a reputation with a faction that acts a currency with each faction , I also have seen games where your explicitly trading shavings of precious metals themselves and not a currency.
My favorite "currency" is the bullets in Metro, since being able to shoot your money is an interesting piece of worldbuilding and an interesting gameplay choice.
Metro's bullet currency was such a great idea. It hammers in to your head that the technological mastery of the past is gone and it's never coming back. All you have to show for the past is shiny brass cartridges that might save your life, either because they can kill a Nazi before he can kill you, or because you can trade them for food and shelter. It's as far from a fiat currency as you can get. Every military grade bullet is rare and precious entirely because of it's utility, and the state of the world is such that no one would think of hording ammunition that could go to the rangers that defend the station from mutants and Nazis.
Oh damn that's an interesting take and not subtle at all, twenty bucks though it goes over plenty of weeb heads though. Still gonna have to give this game a look though haha
Yeah reactionaries and chuds don't handle their treats being "politicized" even though p;enty are cool with outright fascist fantasies and games. Then again makes sense that lots of these spaces have such chuds in them due to needing disposable income to fuel such hobbies. Still good on ZUN for flipping the bird to such folks and telling them their ideology is rotten
Pillars of Eternity is deliberately set in an early modern-equivalent era, during the world's dawn of capitalism. It's not supposed to be strictly feudal. A better object of criticism would be Skyrim.
Your right that Pillars of eternity probably isn't a particularly good example it just stuck out to me so much because the first actual quest of the game revolves around a moral dilemma that doesn't make much sense. The currency isn't as out of place as it would be in a medieval setting but the operation of the mill that way is still very strange.
It's a lot more obvious in the second game, as it's almost entirely about feuds between Caribbean-analogue trading companies
The second game is also interesting as the fantasy expy of Polynesians have totally different concepts of ownership and exist into some form of communes but sadly the devs had brainworms and so had to create some parts that didn't really mesh and also had to include colonial exploitation.
The caste system they had was inherently exploitative, but it worked until they had to fully centralize in their larger cities and capitalists began to infiltrate the society through trade.
I agree it could've been done better, but the worse parts of their society only pronounced themselves post-colonization which is, yeah I agree, at least a sort of an interesting thing to explore.
It's above average world building at the very least, if by what are obviously lib writers lol
Similarly, I hate when there are science fiction stories that have no reason for the characters to be engaging in capitalism. Like we're all on a research vessel in space with one scientific goal of finding a suitable planet for life yet we still have to worry about money for some reason.
Eve Online's setting is incredibly bleak for this reason. Millions of inhabited worlds over thousands of star systems, faster than light travel ... and the only goal of anyone's life is to work for or own a capitalist corporation. The only thing you can do in the game is make money. There's no lore anyone cares about. There's no story you'll actually read the flavor text for. There's nothing to do than find some way of making money so you can find ways of making more money. Like a million years in the future.
The only thing you can do in the game is make money. There’s no lore anyone cares about. There’s no story you’ll actually read the flavor text for. There’s nothing to do than find some way of making money so you can find ways of making more money. Like a million years in the future.
I... don't know about that. I was never neurotic enough to play, but I read a few blogs and write-ups on various moments within the game. There was definitely an evolution in both the composition of players and play styles. There was plenty of in-game politics, factionalization, espionage, feuding, and personality-driven conflict.
Also, lots of meta stuff. There was drama around the exchange rates and interactions with developers. Drama between the players outside the game. Drama with bugs and exploits. Drama with the rise and fall of the game's population.
There were definitely design limits. You couldn't land on a planet and explore the xenobiology for thirty years. You still needed certain raw materials to build out your kit, and joining a corporation made that process much smoother. But its like saying "I can't pull over and get out of my car, run off into the woods, and become a lumberjack in Truck Simulator" or "I can't not-pick-up-stuff in Katamari Damasi". If you want to play Minecraft instead of Eve Online, just do that instead.
Elite dangerous is like this too but in a first person scenario. Sure you can do exploration type shit and get a ship and go off into the unknown but in the end all you are doing is mapping planets and selling that map data. Either that or be a space trucker. lol
The new It's Not Just In Your Head talks about this for nearly two hours lol
videogames as an ideological training wheels, explains why g*mers are so reactionary
the 2010 three kingdoms series is way better for that it's an adaption of a book actually written under feudalism. It's in chinese but there are subtitles and it's free on the internet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNHnX4xsplo&list=PL33A390995E9A7F00
it's also pretty well made as it's a classical piece of culture, like the Chinese equivalent of a Shakespeare play
the pretenses of “fantasy realism” were bogus
How could an oxymoron do this?
the system was glaringly capitalistic and the fighting over the Iron Throne was more or less a corporate hierarchy struggle rather than the intricate network of allegiances and vassalhood that feudalism entails
I don't know about that. Some of the best moments of the series involved characters struggling with the feudal webs and snarls formed in prior generations. Everything from the Baratheon Succession to the Red Wedding to the Daeneryus slave-coup to the Revolt at the Wall involved characters exploiting (or falling victim to) allegiances and dogmas they'd failed to grapple with prior. Most of Arya's arc involved traveling through the gritty underbelly of the feudal system and witnessing what keeps it rolling along. It's no coincidence that her foil is The Hound, a shameless flak for the predominant ruling family, who routinely pulls her aside and delivers hard truths.
Past that, I'd argue that modern day corporationism has far more in common with the feudal system than we like to give it credit. Especially as the volume of real capital consolidates under fewer and fewer hands, while smaller businesses become subservient to larger ones... the comparison between GoT and Modern Day Capitalism only gets tighter the farther away we move from Martins last book release.
I really just wish we could get more fantasy writers and developers to read Graeber’s Debt. I understand that players are not gonna learn a number system that isn’t base 10, but you can absolutely integrate a unique monetary system into the story
Edit: imagine a loyalty system in which spending the king’s coin will gain you prestige with the lord, but label you as a dog of the king to the peasantry. And if you don’t spend the coin you need to learn to rely on a gift economy in which repayment of favors is never asked but always expected.
a gift economy in which repayment of favors is never asked but always expected.
In modern times, this is known as "Minnesota"
yeah I've both done that and know people who do that just by having accidentally falling into it
You need money to pay your giant mercenary army in M&B. You get money from rents on your fiefs, trading goods for currency, or ransoming nobles. You use almost all of your money keeping your giant mercenary army paid so you can fight off all the other factions that want to take your stuff. You go to war so you can get money to pay your army to go to war. It's great.
You go to war so you can get money to pay your army to go to war. It’s great.
:very-intelligent:
What I like of mount and blade is to be able to just be a merchant going from place to place earning money and paying the custody. But the battle AI is horrible, let me control my troops like in Total War goddamit
I shouldn't have played through 5 and new dawn back to back, because despite New Dawn being so much more aesthetically interesting, I was just so tired of the mechanics by that point
This bugged me tf out in this new steam game called Potion Crafting. People line up to your counter and you brew potions of course; you can haggle with them on how much you sell them for, even when the person clearly needs a healing potion for a sick relative or whatever. Ingredients are self-replenishing since they grow in your backyard, and others you have to buy from vendors.
It’s a fun time. As you add ingredients to your brew, your potion “travels” on a map and you slowly discover more potion effects. Different ingredients have different travel paths, which leads to new combos. Visuals are nice to look at.
It’s an early access game, but the dev seems responsive to the community so far.
The actual Witcher books are explicitly neoliberal, but the games are not.
So there is that.
What does "explicitly neoliberal" mean in a world with it's own political realities?
https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftistGamersUnion/comments/eygf7z/is_the_witcher_a_centrist_bootlicker_in_the_books/
Could you elaborate on that? I didn't get that feeling but I read them back when I was a lib so I might have missed something.
On plane. This is a good discussion.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftistGamersUnion/comments/eygf7z/is_the_witcher_a_centrist_bootlicker_in_the_books/
I recall in Witcher II you would find all kinds of different coinage. The game would reduce it all to local currency for simplicities sake, but when you picked it up from the world it would be in all kinds of different pennies, guilders, sovereigns, and what have you.
