Inverting as many things as possible about Disco Elysium would involve a story about an exceptional ubermensch born into greatness with a vast harem of doting fawning waifus obsessing about his greatness where pretty much everything is possible and all threats are just relatively easy obstacles to overcome with more destiny and more greatness, with an undercurrent of "bad people are bad because they resent the great one's greatness."
... Shit, is the opposite of Disco Elysium Sword Art Online? :pathetic:
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.
You know, the Civilization series may be a strong anti-Disco contender because of all that near-omniscient control over society, the vague promises of no-way-but-up progress and the "destiny" ideology of the win conditions.
I still remember that in Civ 2, the "corruption" mechanic was nullified if your civilization became what the game called a "democracy" which was the :freedom-and-democracy: model of it. :lenin-sure:
Still all time banger
I can and have enjoyed things that had very sus ideology and messages to them, and Civ games are definitely one of those things.
And there are valuable lessons like how to determine the effective ratio of Elvises to Anarchists
It's kind of rich how investing in "luxuries" automatically makes people happy when in a more realistic capitalistic simulation it'd make specific people happy and it's very unlikely it'd be general access luxuries for everyone, unless those "luxuries" involved functioning infrastructure, good city planning, and robust public services.
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.
Sounds like another round of mind stapling is in order
WE MUST DISSENTOn 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.