I can think of some obvious examples to start with, but my subtle but insidious nominee is Fable III. Fittingly for a pretentious grifter like Molyneux, the game requires you to raise a specific amount of gold or your kingdom is destroyed and you get a bad ending. The goalposts are moved by the game if you raise money in ways it doesn't approve of, and it is simply impossible to reach the fundraising goal in any way that isn't at least Enlightened Centrist levels of evil, the kind that lanyard-wearing neoliberals giggle about. That's right, you need to be at least this evil or your kingdom is destroyed. So deep and really makes you think about the hard decisions that are made by the ruling class, doesn't it? :zizek:
The entire battlefield 4 campaign is you helping the guy who tried to do a colour revolution in China lmao. Like that's the plot, trying to free the guy. Which results in war with China ofc. Also you take in a boat of refugees from Shanghai of all places onto your aircraft carrier, those poor people probably had a much better standard of living over there than they'll ever have in the USA.
Bonus points for Call of Duty black ops II, where you help the Taliban to fight against Russia, and help the apartheid supported UNITA forces to fight the MPLA. You literally fight for the Taliban and apartheid South Africa proxy forces.
I straight up had to put down black Ops II on the first mission at a friend's house as a South African when I realised you're playing for the apartheid forces in Angola committing war crimes. You even use APCS from the apartheid army...
Also the Modern Warfare Reboot, which (beyond the whole "Highway of Death" controversy) tries to paint a US-aligned Middle Eastern
collaboratorfreedom fighter as having gone "too far" because he used chemical weapons in that one flashback.Which is pretty hypocritical for the protagonists who regularly do heinous shit on a regular basis in the vein of getting the job done, and never having it blow up in their faces.
Yeah COD in general is cheating for this kind of thing, just horrible
I swear that game was designed to "prime the pump" for that Bolivian coup
Yeah, that game is so full of overt propaganda, it's ridiculous. This line from the main character about the rebel group speaks volumes, though:
"I tell you, I'm not comfortable working with Pac Katari and the rebels. Their ideology always ends up with more bodies in the ground."
Just totally said without a hint of irony. It's almost laughable.
pretty sure blowing up non-narcotics infrastructure would only increase the countries reliance on the narcotics trade economically.
If there's one thing America cannot abide, it's governments that are complicit in the creation of narco-states:wonder-who-thats-for:
I'm surprised no one here has mentioned Assassin's Creed yet. All conflict in history stems from two competing ideological sects of callous murderers who wanton manipulate populations into doing their bidding and for some reason one side in this conflict is supposed to be the moral superior of the other. Also some of the supplemental material is batshit and basically just a way for the devs to denote certain historical figures as good or bad depending on what organization they belonged to. All other conflicts are secondary to the overarching philosophical differences of two sects competing for magical thingies.
At the same time those games have probably the most sympathetic portrayal of Marx in a western piece of fiction, so there's that.
Yeah, they made him a weird pacifist utopian who was against revolution
Tbf I think he was criticizing propaganda of the deed anarchists, it’s a big factor in the split of the first internationale.
…no, banishing anarchists from the first internationale didn’t make him a lib
Intensely lib, in a manner that has not been successfully conveyed until Ubisoft got their hands on him.
that's the only Ass Creed game I like only because I like games about going to different tropical islands with sailboats
Black Flag was a great game with writing that genuinely made me incredibly emotional. Its been a while since I've finished it, and I wasn't as critical with my thinking, but out of every Assasin's Creed game I've played its the only one where I've ever been invested in the main character.
Don't get me started on Unity. Legit love the gameplay, but it is the most disgustingly liberal thing imaginable. Just an overtly anti-revolution and openly pro-monarchist game
"Am I a tech bro libertarian? Am I a fascist okay with slavery?"
:same-picture:
Choose who will rule the Mojave!:
- Joe Biden
- Hitler
- Elon Musk
- [just write up some headcanon ending]
I would say "descended" is apt given that an independent Mojave is essentially ancap.
Only one of those factions, the fascists, present a real change to the wasteland. It's lib shit
Doesn't it feel great to see neoliberalism conquer all and continue to corrode the planet and everyone that lives on it? :so-true:
"Blue jeans and rock and roll" is a meme from the twentieth century about American cultural hegemony, particularly in the context of the cold war.
The civ games have always been extreme amounts of liberal, especially since the entire game mechanic relies on a Pinker type "everything is constant improvement and advancement" narrative. The franchise was started in the early 90s and very much shaped by the outcome of the cold war. I remember they explicitly made Communism a useless government style in Civ2 outside of a WW2 type scenario (max waste and corruption, so that your economy, production and science will be shit and you are doomed to fall behind if you stay communist too long, but max militarism, so you can still recruit huge hordes of soldiers and your people will not be unhappy about total war). All the game mechanics in the modern era were strongly premised on Liberal Democracy = peaceful and prosperous and your people will hate you if you ever contemplate a war of aggression, Communism = cruel dysfunction that relies entirely on war mongering and oppression to operate.
Then there's Alpha Centauri with 1984 Animal Farm chicom. At least the union guy is cool.
I am willing to give Alpha Centauri a pass, because even though it is kind of blinded or hobbled by the authors liberalism it was kind of trying to gesture at some transcendence and something beyond the End of History. But yeah the Chairman Sheng-Ji faction just being horseshoe totalitarianism is very cringe. And the downside to the explicitly communist/syndicalist faction is "bad at science because me don't tolerate free thought" is also very liberal.
And the downside to the explicitly communist/syndicalist faction is “bad at science because me don’t tolerate free thought” is also very liberal.
I think it's more because they're dumb blue collar factory workers, which is of course also very liberal.
Oh I mean easily what springs right to mind is Call Of Duty. I mean the games are literally made in cooperation with the department of defense and are drunk off the american exceptionalism with real might makes right fashy undertones. I find almost directly responsible for the hero worship we have for special forces in the USA, as most of these games have you working as a spec ops goon.
Which one of those propaganda pieces pretending to be games had evil South Americans steal a doomsday weapon from the United States (only evil in their hands of course), but when your elite black ops tacticools seize it back, you save the day by using the same doomsday weapon on those scary evil foreigners? :amerikkka-clap:
Oh I think that was one of the ghost games, I think? Wasn't it an orbiting rail cannon or something?
The unionized neurons in my brain were going to go on strike if I paid any more attention than I did, so you tell me. :kombucha-disgust:
Yeah I wouldn't know, the only CoD games I played for the first couple WWII ones and Modern Warfare 1, that was enough for me.
OOooo look at the poor widdle north amerika sooo weak and demoralized by the evil brown man.... :( :( :( :( will you help us save them?? would you still love us?? :((( ???? you probably wouldnt :( :( :( or would you :) :) ;)
I agree that Call of Duty has probably some of the worst ideology out there, as unsubtle as it is. It's still worth mentioning and has been highly successful propaganda. :disgost:
Yeah there's absolutely nothing subtle about these games, it screams it's message in your face. There's probably some galaxy brain G*mers out there though who'd say oh the CoD series is very subtle propaganda, you can just ignore most of it :agony-yehaw:
The first Black Ops game has you participate in the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Vietnam War. When the education system in the US fails to cover more recent history (or any history in depth at all), the Black Ops games fill in the gaps with bogus facts and ideology. Making the Cubans and Vietcong look like bad guys inspired a new wave of anti communism among chuds and children.
So glad the only COD I ever played was the first level of Finest Hour, where you're a Soviet soldier killing Nazis in Stalingrad
I still can't believe the "No Russian" thing was a real thing, what the fuck was that. That was some CIA conditioning bullshit I swear to god
bioshock 2 communism is when you do the borg and no one matters, also the collectivist is portrayed way less sympathetically than the libertarian nutjob
The Bioshock series in general is full of ideology that gestures in directions but never quite gets there. Bioshock 2 is probably the worst culprit because it was made by the B-team and they seemed to just want to flip around the story from the first one to get a product out. The first game was laser pointed at how much of a dipshit Ayn Rand was and it's probably the most coherent one. 2 is somehow aimed at criticizing both socialism and that particular kind of John Stuart Mill utopian liberalism and it just falls apart. Utopia is when nobody has free will except there's a dictator lady over the radio who tells you what to do.
I think the first game actually came off slightly in favour of libertarians by portraying them as principled
i'm not sure what you mean, since the libertarians betray every single one of their principles the second anything goes wrong. Andrew Ryan even nationalizes Fontaine Futuristics once he starts getting pulverized in the market. The hypocrisy goes even further to the point the libertarians create a person who has no individual will of his own, then goes even further by using pheromones to control people against their will. All of this despite Andrew Ryan's constant talk about the great chain and glorious free individual and blah blah. I'm pretty sure the devs are libs, but they at least had a keen sense that libertarian policies are effectively indistinct from wacky fascist dictatorship.
I got that impression. It really seemed like you were supposed to like and respect Andrew Ryan
I never bothered to finish Bioshock 2 because the fact every level had 2+ escort missions made it extremely frustrating for someone with no FPS skills. I got about halfway through I think. I don't know if the way the antagonist is portrayed during the first and second acts of the game is ever subverted, but assuming it doesn't you're absolutely right. Andrew Ryan was portrayed as a greedy, misguided but principled man in the first game. In the second game Lamb is just a 1984 red fash tankie who wants to take everyone's free will away!!!
Uh Lamb is more like a shrink that mixed Freud, Jung and a lot of drugs cough Adam. It’s…pretty fun ngl
I'll add one more for now. I will never forget that back in Civilization II, the corruption mechanic that most civilizations had to deal with in the modern era could be bypassed simply by choosing "democracy" as the game describes it over its competitors. We never have corruption in US-style "democracy" do we? :amerikkka-clap: Also, inventing capitalism has absolutely no downsides and is only a boon, though to be fair all capitalism does on its own is allow you to convert your people's labor into additional money which checks out. :marx-hi:
Rise of Nations lets you pick between "consensus" (Republic, Democracy and Capitalism :agony:) and "totalitarian" (Despotism, Monarchy and Socialism) governments, which give you different bonuses. This is how the game describes both:
"Consensus governments are dedicated to the economical and scientific development of a nation. Their Patriots offer production and defense bonuses and provide healing to nearby units and buildings."
"Totalitarian governments are devoted to military development and warfare, benefiting nations fielding lots of units and often waging wars. Their Patriots are oriented to offensive warfare and always give the benefits of a Supply Wagon (eliminate attrition and provide supply for artillery units)."
I haven't watched the video but it really sucks how every city builder treats crime as a symptom of not covering your city in police departments.
So much of SimCity since its start has been insisting that gentrification is a good thing and more cops means less crime.
My :LIB: years included making "perfect cities" in SimCity that were basically the same bleak techbro hellscapes constantly being pushed right now as escapist fantasies in the desert, on some :epstein: island that labels everything after cringe crypto memes, on the ocean, under the ocean, or some interplanetary colony.
Ultra gentrification, police everywhere, no (recognized) crime, no (visible) poverty, the only problem being very very high property values, which :LIB: me griped about because it was brought up by citizen surveys as a complaint. "Why is this a bad thing?" :galaxy-brain:
Bioshock Infinite.
The city of Columbia was built as a haven for the ruling class of 1800s America. Complete with a white underclass and, of course, slaves. It was built by a scientist who discovered a new technology and was to serve as a floating World's Fair showing the world how great and advanced America is. Pretty okay premise if done right. Many opportunities to talk about real history and draw comparisons to today. The city is politically divided among several factions, which isn't a fleshed out mechanic in the game due to development issues. But you have a cult that worships John Wilkes Booth and hates Lincoln for ending slavery. You have people who are hyper religious and treat the Founders as religious prophets. You have normal upper middle-class people who are tuned out to the politics. You also have the revolutionary group Vox Populi who are trying to overthrow Columbia's government and install actual democracy. Again, some great ideas in there for good stories based in real history. But then somewhere towards the end of the game it makes the Vox Populi just as bad as the imperialist, racists, sexists, zealots. When you start the game there is a couple being physically abused for miscegenation, in front of a cheering crowd. Yet the black lady trying to stop it is bad because her and other workers killed some cops and are pushing the middle class white people out of the city. It's total "both extremes are really the same" kind of thing. And to make the revolutionary leader bad they write her to kill a baby or something? It's been a while I can't remember if she tries to kill Elizabeth or just Comstock. She was also going to use Columbia's weapons and invade NYC to liberate people on land too. But that's bad because NYC in the late 1800s/early 1900s was good.
Some people might bring up the development troubles as a reason the story got so simplified into horseshoe theory. But there are early gameplay videos from before the troubles started that show Vox Populi implying they want to sexually assault Elizabeth. So they meant for them to be bad from the beginning. The only real thing that was different was that Comstock was supposed to me more nuanced. So the people's revolution of communists were pretty much always a political cartoon and they had to jam the right wing factions into one guy. Instead of getting the subtleties of "cleanse all the immigrants" from many different factions, we get it from one guy. Thanks 2k/Irrational.
Ken Levine is a fucking hack and always has been. Keep him away from games.
The worst thing is that this was retconned in the dlc into, I shit you not, daisy being convinced to willingly get herself killed for doing that because the twins wanted to black pill Elizabeth for unspecified reasons, probably just so they could be the only multiverse gods.
Dishonored.
Don't get me wrong, I love all the Dishonored games (Death of the Outsider is my favourite), but there is a deeply liberal undercurrent to the series.
Both mainline games are about getting rid of the bad aristocratic tyrant and replacing them with the "good" and "rightful" heir to the throne of Dunwall. The most telling part of this is the conflict between the Abbey of the Everyman and any supernatural covens/gangs like the Bridgemoore witches or Daud's Whalers.
Both the Whalers and the witches have specific complaints within society; the Whalers are comprised of former gang members and disenfranchised labourers radicalised by the inequality in Dunwall, whereas the Bridgemoore witches are a radical feminist movement. Conversely the Abbey of the Everyman is a calvinist cult that carries out brutal crackdowns of anyone perceived to be a witch. Despite this the Abbey of the Everyman is consistently framed as being terrible but still the lesser evil. The Overseers essentially fall into the "woke" liberal defence of policing, "Yeah sure they're bad, torturing and murdering randos and all that. But what are you gonna do if a witch turns up and starts killing people? That's why we need more Overseers and they need to be increasingly militarised."
When Delilah Copperspoon takes control of Dunwall and thus the Empire of the Isles, the Bridgemoore witches begin committing mass murder on the streets because... I don't know they're the baddies.
Time and time again the series shows any attempt to change the status quo resulting in pointless bloodbaths and mindless chaos, a status quo that need I remind you is a combination of Dickensian squalor and the Spanish inquisition.
Any changes that happen for the better, happen within the confines of the system. The miners union is the one group that is shown to be uncomplicatedly good, but even they are ineffective in timelines where the duke owns the mine because the union is only using peaceful protest. A kinda washed down vision of historical labour struggles.
The series is deeply critical of the aristocratic class. Every entry in it depicts them as selfish hedonists who'll bleed a beggar to death if they think it will get them a good high at best, and brutal eugenicists willing to let a disease ravage the population in order to get rid of "undesirables" at worst. But this criticism falls weak when the right answer time and time again is always "replace the bad toffs with good toffs".
The system isn't a problem it's the people, in other words.
I did like how in the second one if you're playing Emily all your allies just relentlessly shit on you for being a privileged, out of touch faildaughter who did nothing but go to parties and do secret parkour for fun whenever the topic of poverty comes up.
My favourite ending for Dishonored 2 is high chaos Corvo.
spoiler
If you refuse to undo the curse that turned Emily into a statue, there's no-one left in line to the throne and most of aristocracy is dead so Corvo just declares himself king instead. If the Duke and his body double is also dead, Corvo just declares himself Duke of Karnaca as well. You just end up with Corvo alone and paranoid having ligma grindseted his way into royalty.
They're some of my favourite stealth games, don't get me wrong. But the games are consumed by liberal politics.
I need to replay the first one but I played the second one recently and it was pretty oppressively lib. Might just be a personal thing but i can’t fucking stand liberals obsession with the “right monarch” kind of stories. I don’t know anything about dune apart from the new movie, but there’s a bit of that there that irked me as well
Dune's politics are all over the place, I've only read the first book but I doubt anyone's got any time for unpacking whatever is going on with all that.
I promise that isn't what Dune is going for, though it takes a while to make its point.
that's just the vibe i got from the framing of this first movie. but i can definitely tell this was like a small portion of everything. just the first thing that popped in my head since i watched it recently.
spoiler
They tried to do something like the Outsider is a force of revolution. He gives people his power who will overturn unjust systems. Billie gets the mark and then ends up killing him and the implication is that his power is set free or everyone gets it or something like that. Then Deathloop is the world decades in the future after that and it's still ruled by mad scientists and wealthy murderers.
Spoiler for like the first mission of Death of the Outsider.
Billie didn't even get the mark though did she? It's been a while since I played it, but aren't her powers from the fact that she's got some time line fuckery from the possible outcomes of the dust district going on?
Wait, is it actually in the same setting or is that just speculation/easter eggs?
I have nothing to add except that I found Daud to be a more interesting and fun protagonist than Corvo.
"You could float a whaling ship on the highborn blood I've spilled."
Uncritical support.
Also, having an entire race of long-nosed greedy merchants is kinda sussy considering Notch's political views
I think he was gone and the dev team had disavowed him before that feature was released
Yeah, I set up my trading hall last week which always feels a little weird. Like I’m some bizzaro slaver-god. I always tell myself that once I get around to building a town I’ll let them all go so they can live there, but then I never do get around to building those towns.
What would an ideologically good game look like?
- Guerilla: First person shooter where you play as a guerilla army against imperialists. Campaigns could include playing as the Viet Cong, Yugoslav partisans or in the Cuban Revolution.
- Organizer: Tycoon-style game where you play as a union organizer. You start out in a chuddy workplace where everyone is drenched in false consciousness. You start out by winning small victories, organizing and eventually unionizing. The game doesn't stop there though, the struggle to organize continues until the entire capitalist system has been dismantled.
- City planner: City builder game from a working class perspective where you have to build a livable and sustainable city. The game will penalise car-centric infrastructure and single family homes for anything above village size. The options for transit infrastructure are detailed and offers many different options.
- Great Patriotic War: It's WWII. You kill Nazis for the Soviets.
- Bolchevik: RPG set during the Russian revolution and civil war.
City planner: City builder game from a working class perspective where you have to build a livable and sustainable city. The game will penalise car-centric infrastructure and single family homes for anything above village size. The options for transit infrastructure are detailed and offers many different options.
You just described Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic.
Reverse Factorio. The world is covered in a giant machine. Tear bits of it off to make flower pots, raise the few plants that can grow in this polluted environment, build up an ecosystem.
introducing a problematic “great man theory”
Just do the game in narrative third person. Bob asks Alice whether they should end the strike under the terms proposed by the company, player gets options for how Alice responds. Alice asks Bob whether they should distance themselves from more militant groups, player gets options for how Bob responds.
You only get to act as people who are already on your side though. No controlling the person you're trying to convince to join the union.
Quest Completed: normalizing resentment in group chats
New quest: belittling office parties
I like the idea of a city planning game that rewards a higher floor on material conditions in its entire supply chain, free time, and environmental sustainability, then watch various forms of socialism naturally become the only way to win.
City planner: City builder game from a working class perspective where you have to build a livable and sustainable city. The game will penalise car-centric infrastructure and single family homes for anything above village size. The options for transit infrastructure are detailed and offers many different options.
Can you link the game? I can't find anything. Or are you talking about the entire genre?
I think they're just listing concepts, but this is basically what they're describing
I've always thought that the 4X genre could be non-reactionary if it centered around a revolution trying to propagate rather than just states fighting over land and doing imperialism.
One of those Xs stands for "Exterminate", so bad politics is kind of baked in at a fundamental level.
"eXterminate" the bourgeoise.
Anyway, killing everyone else isn't even required for every playstyle in a 4X game.
I swear, my eyes just skipped past the first stanza and I thought there actually was a "Bolchevik: RPG". Disappointment is immeasurable.
