Call of duty. The sheer number of people that game brainwashed into joining or supporting the military
Pretty much everything starting with Modern Warfare, yes. I'm even including the sci-fi future spinoffs, one of which literally has you invading South America just like anti-war protestors were predicting since fucking Vietnam.
I'm going to go ahead and say the Warcraft series.
There's good races and bad races. There's science races and greedy races (ok I get this is common in games). The good guys are hyper Christian, blonde, and patriarchal. "I will cleanse this land" is a quote. The world is hyper monarchal . Oh ya, in Warcraft 2, you put down a literal peasant revolt of your own peasants.
Fuck I'm old.
Its so funny that horde is not supposed to be the "evil" side yet they replaced the evil warchief with the undead girlboss war criminal.
I saw the cutscene of her doing war crimes burning down the tree. Did that ever resolve into anything meaningful or was she just blatantly evil?
Sylvanas was always a war criminal girlboss, but her character used to be at least coherent. She was cold and ruthless, but cunning. She wanted to preserve the Undead and even went so far as to raise the dead herself, which itself was considered extremely unethical. She was totally fine with committing atrocities against any other race.
She was a fan favorite, I really liked her too, not because I think using chemical weapons of mass destruction is epic but she was just a really cool villain.
Until Blizzard decided to abandon everything and turn her into uhh... whatever she became. Her becoming war chief made 0 sense because she barely ever pretended to have real loyalty towards the horde. Then she burned down the tree because she forgot that she was a cold and calculating character, then they wanted to infamously portray her as moRAlLy GrAy (evil but looking sad about it sometimes, which doesn't fit her character either) and then uhhh... guys, she was just mind-controlled the whole time!
Good lord, I hate how they butchered Sylvanas. I just want my edgy undead war criminal girl boss waifu back.
Sylvanas was apparently being mind controlled for the past several expansions which took all of her agency in being a war crime enjoyer but she still took responsibility for what she had done while mind controlled. She goes into self imposed exile to the spirit realm as penance and has to save a bunch of lost souls or some shit before she can return to the physical plane.
Are the horde races still doing jeff dunham tier racist impressions for voices?
Funny enough they made a playable clone race / different tribe of different trolls just a few years ago and they're basically wakanda
Just world of Warcraft alone is the opposite.
Huge world vs small, history that makes no sense, no real decisions to make as a character, no real npcs, everything is combat, cluttered UI.
The ideology of the game is that races alignment is more important than material, everyone will always be at war, it’s impossible for orcs to be friends with humans.
The monarchies/religion parts, but also the gods are 100% real and physically exist, there is no mystery as even knowledge of life after death is established, and there are true enemies who are evil demons.
Disco Elysium is the anti Wow.
warcraft has the problem of it's prominent writers having pet characters
see sylvanas going from random elf war crime enjoyer to unkillable godlike girlboss who the plot revolves aroundWhen I was a teenager I played WoW all the time but hardly paid attention to any lore or story and then one day decided to start actually reading the story that got us there and immediately went “Oh so the Horde are unquestionably the good guys, fuck humans as per usual”
SimCity 2000
Disco Elysium has all kinds of themes but ima chose the ones that'll let me do this bit.
In DE you are pretty powerless you fail through the game and stumble unto a conclusion, in SimCity 2000 you are all powerful, demolish entire neighborhoods to build a highway, call down floods, meteors and all kinds of biblical disasters. As the eternal 'Mayor' you are basically a philosopher king and people hating you or loving you is based on how well you do. This doesn't even get into how a 'city is simulated'. Oh people just become criminals, a certain amount of people are always criminals no relation to their material conditions at all. How do you deal with crime? Why you build a police station nearby. Public transit is kept down by the fact that people can drive everywhere and don't need a parking space.
In conclusion Disco Elysium is living in a post soviet city/society, while SimCity 2000 about constructing and living the US society/city.
Also all the Call of Duty and God of Wars etc are just too easy.
And there are valuable lessons like how to determine the effective ratio of Elvises to Anarchists
I've been playing a super old game again, Caesar 3 Augustus, that now has an open source port and I'm honestly impressed how good some of the mechanics are when it comes to city builders. You constantly have to deal with the emperor who you have to bribe and curry favor with all the time otherwise he'll send his legion to capture you and burn down your city.
On top of that houses 'promote' to higher tiers the more services and goods you provide them but there's two neat twists, one is that below a certain level they are basically just tents that over time grow more and more angry with you which means you need to provide them with a certain amount of minimum of living standards, healthcare, clean water and food. And at a certain level the houses promote from 'worker' status to 'patrician' status which don't give you any workers but let you collect a bit more taxes from them, you need them for 'prestige' or mission reasons but most of the time they are just a drain on your cities economy.
Oh also crime is a function of how 'angry' people are which is a function of living standards, employment, wages and taxes which is better. Plus you can't just suppress it with more police you need to address their situation.
On the other hand, having "communism" as an allowed government at all is probably more praxis than upper management would otherwise allow.
This answer wins the thread for me. A good chunk of games employ a fascist erotics of violence. Not many are so married to the disease of capitalism.
I watched a video about how the creators of SimCity researched making that game, and basically they read all of the liberal theory of city planning lmao. That's why in both SimCity and in real politics the only solution to crime that can be considered is increasing police presence - the difference is that in SimCity it works because it's programmed to work, and in our reality it just makes things worse.
It's a great example of doing ideology without realizing that you're being ideological, since the devs would probably say like "we're reading the experts/following the data", etc.
Now I wonder, how much misery and suffering simcity actually caused. because you just know that someone like :pete: played the shit out of it and they are now in government trying to build more and more police stations.
Halo comes close. It's basically a school shooter simulator which also works extremely hard to justify the Iraq War. (In the 2000s, "religion bad" = islamophobia.) The grunts look and even kind of sound like kindergarteners.
GTA III: San Andreas also comes so close to having good politics. If you could unite your various neighborhoods to provide mutual aid, and if the police were considered just another gang, it would have good politics.
The later part of San Andreas begins by CJ having completed his sellout arc, even pointing out to Sweet how he's now got all this luxurious shit, to which he criticizes him for having completely forgotten about the neighborhood.
Also, you still have CRASH using divide et Impera tactics to profit off of gangs and their drug operations in Los Santos, while poverty and crime remain extremely high.
Unfortunately, things kinda shit the bed with the Los Angeles Riot part of the game, going full "wtf why are they destroying their own communities".
Having the alliance with the Aztecas also extend to say the Vagos etc., having a bigger part of the game be dedicated to the attitude of the police against the Black and Latino communities would have made the game better politically. [disclaimer: I'm not American]
It's not the worst when it comes to politics, but yeah it could have been better.
Slaughtering the Da Nang Boys for the Triads felt wrong to me, even long before I stopped being a liberal. They're not even hostile on sight, they just stand around wearing funny hats.
Also, "Crack is bad" is a big part of the game, and there's a corrupt fed character, why wasn't he the main antagonist? If Rockstar had balls, the final level would involve a truce with all the gangs, they all invade a CIA facility, and then kill Mike Toreno.
I thought Toreno's role in the story wasn't bad - it's very clear he's using CJ and only pulls the strings to free Sweet after a dozen missions of increasingly unreasonable demands. He's even introduced as a member of a drug smuggler syndicate that indirectly helps the Ballas and Big Smoke expand their criminal empire for the sake of geopolitical squabbles and fed infighting.
He's basically the guy that allowed Tenpenny to become a powerful man and let various of the more unscrupulous gangs get rich off of narcotics he probably turned a blind eye to the Nicaraguan Contras selling.
Yeah on replays I'm baffled at how they openly let Mike Toreno explain to CJ that he launders drug money to finance black ops abroad to "stop communism on ohio, people sharing and not buying shit". The delivery is also really funny. Top notch character.
Halo comes close. It’s basically a school shooter simulator
:jesse-wtf:
Like I agree broadly with the Iraq war criticism but... what?
I think they're making a parallel with Jack Thompson calling games "murder simulators" at the time, which is... kinda an outdated reference?
Literally one of the fan favourite mechanics of the series is that the grunts (small alien bad guys) start screaming, crying, and running away in terror when certain conditions are met.
I think that's where they're coming from but idk.
there used to be this shooter series called America's Army that was pure american military propaganda. now that call of duty is that instead, i havent really heard of AA anymore
if i'm not mistaken America's Army was actually produced (not just consulted on) by the US Army, and at one point was intended to be an active recruitment portal (as in, get good enough at AA and they will ask if you want to enlist)
that's if i'm not mistaken ofc
You're right! A Marine recruiter actually contacted me and tried to recruit me while I was playing it too. Told me I could be an epic sniper or some shit lol
The funniest part is that rather than being a hoo-rah action packed game where you feel awesome and epic, it was a slow, methodical tactical sim where you had to literally sit and watch a lecture on first aid in order to take the combat medic role. And the only thing it taught me about being in the military is that your life can be extinguished in seconds, pointlessly and easily. probably not the message they were trying for though
I remember they shut down the servers a few years ago. IIRC AA was a bit more realistic than COD, but not as realistic as ARMA, an entire genre that basically doesn't exist anymore.
I played the shit out of AA in high-school and it was right after 9/11 thank God I'm a lazy bum cuz I almost joined
ARMA on the other hand is probably both a much better recruitment tool and much worse---like a real ARMA-head would probably be the ideal grunt but most people bounce right the fuck off those games cause they're boring as shit
George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop put forth that arma is the only anti war war game because of the realistic part of walk 30 minutes somewhere and then get shot dead by a guy you never saw. It's a very unglorious experience
i completely agree but those guys who organize those massive multiplayer battles, complete with tactical planning and coordination? i feel like a lot of them are former & prospective soldiers
I've been playing Arma for more than a decade with various communities and while there is a lot of active or ex soldiers about (and they're basically all fucking psychos) the reverse never really seemed to be true. You don't really get people who wanna join an army from arma, in my experience. At least not if they weren't planning to anyways, cadets, junior recruits and such.
Not ARMA but DCS, MilSim people in my experience don't have much overlap with actual military recruiting.
Bioshock Infinite maybe?
Been a while since I played it. In both games, you play as a washed up cop/Pinkerton in an unfamiliar land where you encounter a variety of political ideologies. Both games involve a woman who the PC is motivated by who they've been separated from, and also multiple dimension type stuff. In DE, the people you encounter all make sense in terms of why they believe what they do, they feel organic, while the game pokes fun at the PC for whatever stance they take (including not taking a stance), calling attention to his relation to the environment and how he woke up 5 minutes ago with no knowledge of how the world works. Whereas in BI, pretty much everyone you encounter is a crazy psycho who you're perfectly justified in killing, the people trying to effect change are just as bad as the oppressors, while the player's ideology or motivation is never really called into question.
Like I said my memory of it is kinda shoddy but it seems like it fits.
In fairness, it is made very, very clear that Booker is a bad, bad person who despite some character growth quite literally deserves to die in every possible world. They do fuck up Daisy Fitzroy but the game itself is fairly left-liberal in ideology.
The DLC sort of fixes the whole "revolutions are bad because they're mean" thing, but not really.
i don't think there can be one. the anti-disco elysium would have to be made by browsers of political compass memes. and therefore it cannot be made. its like how starship troopers is both satire and an example of what that sort of fascist society would pass off as art.
you can, of course, point out problematic stuff, sheer liberalism or capitalism realism in other works. but that's more of a background feature rather than the thought out nature of disco.
all rpgs are basically about one randian superperson being an anarcho monarch and solving all problems via utilitarism
therefore the quasi anti disco elysium is actually pathfinder kingmaker, because then that definition becomes literal
dont get me wrong i love rpgs. i play them altogether too much. i know there are ways you can bend the genre's conventions a bit. for an example and without going a bit too niche, there's deadfire with it's story beats that circle around colonialism.
at the end of the day you pick which faction takes over the region that deadfire takes place, from colonial powers to native kings. one thing that even fans of deadfire don't seem to realize is that for all your influence, you can't actually create an ideal scenario. every faction comes with the prejudices and contradictions of their cultures. you can sometimes suggest the better path to specific people, but the epilogues never claim that these issues were outright solved.
and still you're playing what amounts to a prophetic individual. the bridge between the gods and mortals. the world revolves around you as a heavenly superperson and the devs ended up patching in a conversation with one of the gods to make that explicit.
all rpgs are basically about one randian superperson being an anarcho monarch and solving all problems via utilitarism
In Kenshi you're a band of deadbeat bums and lowlifes who wander around until they get really good at Kung Fu and then liberate people from slavers and fashy psuedoChristians. But you still get your ass kicked by Beak Things.
to be fair, kenshi does run on anime logic. the more you can get beaten to an inch of your life the more superhuman you can get. it's just that everyone else benefited from that too.
plus one speedyboi can kidnap all the joe bidens, bringing an end to all the fashy empires with ease.
I had one very speedy very sneaky person (Their gender was "ambiguous shadow in the corner of the room) and their spent so much time rescuing my passed out fighting squad! I never abused hand to hand though so they weren't all powerful.
kenshi is one of those games that come broken out of the box. it's a sandbox so, really, you do whatever you wanna do. its very much like the sims where challenge isn't the point, making up stories is.
one of my favorite characters starts off in the holy gulagstan and is a true believer. joins the army, nearly dies multiple times because the holy army in bast is atrocious, gets estranged from their squad, ends up travelling the world on their way back home and outrowing those beliefs due to multi-racial nature of imperial ancapistan. more stuff happens and then we end the holy empire with a peasant revolution.
god i love kenshi
You can choose to fight the Anti-Slavers instead but the game logic makes it pretty clear that the slaving factions are Bad
Maybe something like COD? Or any other series of US military funded games used to promote imperialism.
Americas Army was a fairly popular fps back in the day
it was an explicit recruiting tool, literally developed and published by the yank army
surprisingly competent as an fps considering who made it lmaoTo play each class, you had to do a series of single-player training missions. For medic, that included sitting in a classroom for 15 minutes of instruction and filling out a test.
If you stood around the medical receptionists instead of going to a certain emergency medical training class, the two women would start to talk to each other.
"Hey when we get off our shift, you wanna go bowling ON BASE?"
"Yeah, that sounds good, then maybe we could get some Thai food, ON BASE."
I'll never forget that. It was deeply disconcerting to me as a young teenager.
the medical instruction was one of the few good things that game did lol
Making a level where you just sit in a classroom and do a test is extremely ballsy for an FPS trying to recruit people.
Also letting you shoot the instructor, then loading a jail cell.
Every day in every way I regret being unable to make room in my schedule for the first aid course in college.
I did play a FPS back in the day that was funded (or at least publicly advised) by the US military where it completely backfired on them and the :amerikkka: and :eu-cool: factions were getting constantly curbstomped by the Russian/Chinese/Middle Eastern faction from day one
I'm still convinced those same military advisors are the ones behind nerfing our maps to make them harder to defend (didn't matter, we still fucking dominated through teamwork and skill) and eventually ruined any semblance of game balance through patches that made LMGs OP compared to every other gun at every range, killing the game
That shit was hilarious, been meaning to make a post about it
OH SHIT you're talking about MAG aren't you! SVER ALL THE WAY!
This game was so jank lol. But hey, it was ambitious to have so many players on playstation even if it was virtually unplayable in those big servers
Hell yeah, SVER forever!
If you ever played on the small map attacking Valor and had the bizarre experience of taking points A and B only to find that point C immediately had the C4 armed a second later, I'm probably the guy who did that
...are those three other factions or is it one faction of all the BRICs countries mobilizing at the same time in a giant rabble?
One big designated "bad guy" faction and it was cool as hell, our starting equipment was a rusty old AK held together with duct tape
The west in general, forgetting that China has the third largest army on the face of the earth:
The brief synopsis was 3 factions, an American grunt themed faction called Valor, a high tech Euro themed PMC faction called Raven, then SVER which was themed as a East European/Not post soviet rebellion group and it was so much cooler to play as those scrappy lads than the others
WH40K SPESS MAHREEN has you playing as a literal gene-modded Ubermensch in service to a human supremacist empire that worships their god-emperor, and you are tasked with killing foreigners (orks) and religious deviants (Chaos) to protect your giant factory planet crewed by priests and their lobotomized slaves
I'm so tempted to play that game, I think I saw vinesauce lime play it and it was like the kind of video game they would play on starship troopers lol
It's a very fun game and it's so shallow you can't really read too deep into the ideology. For extra fun you can install the AMERICA MOD
I would say Call of Duty/Battlefield/Medal of Honor. I know it’s a bit of an easy answer but they are overtly right-wing in the same Disco Elysium is so openly leftie. All of these FPSs, all of them super perfectly reinforce all of the contemporary themes and ideas of the right wing in a way that conservatives slurp up. It’s a bit crass to say but it truly hits them in the same way a Disco Elysium hits us.
I imagine the opposite of Disco Elysium would be some kind of NFT game
:troll: You don't want your very own exclusive Kim Kitsuragi NFT?
