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:

  • Catherine_Steward [she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I don’t think its purposely written like this, but I think it is accidentally quite good writing about a hopeless political struggle between two reactionary forces.

    Nah, it really is supposed to be like that, sort of. They knew what they were doing when they wrote the Empire as being formed by a horrible tyrant the crimes of which history whitewashed and who was literally deified. I'm sure there were more than a couple liberals on the team for Skyrim who didn't understand the story of the game they were making, but it's definitely not accidental that both the Empire and Stormcloaks are clearly bad. I mean, even back in Morrowind it was implied that said deified tyrant('s ghost) felt like it was time for his own empire to fall, and for something new to rise up from its ashes.