All RPGs by definition are reactionary at best and cannot have good politics because they're genre-locked to devolve into adventurist, individualised (at worst, atomised) virtue-worship. Arguing over which has the best politics is akin to arguing which turd has the most undigested bits one could theoretically subsist upon. I enjoy the genre deeply and have spent more hours than I care to mention, but at no point do I consider any RPG, ever, to have ever had "good politics" and if I particularly cared about that, then I would have played one and a half RPGs before swearing off the genre completely.
This is not a bit, or a take, but critically held belief. The pefect RPG would start and end with the phrase "No great men, only the great many" with nothing in-between.
I'm sad to tell you that speech bubble never happens in the game. Isn't it weird how it's always posted out of context, clipped on a white background? Well that's because it was made with this website
If you paste the text of the meme into the speech bubble and select Wiegraf as the avatar, you'll notice it's a pixel for pixel recreation.
If the penalty for a crime
is a fine, then that law only
exists for the lower class.
I'm unconvinced, both with the examples (I can't speak much for Chained Echoes thought it is on my "going to play next" list). Note that I do not limit RPGs to games that have them thar levels and XP and the like. I consider This War of Mine an RPG, same with Pheonix Wright, for example, you're playing a role in both of them. If RPGs can encompass so much more why are all the examples that people give me the same old "here are the exploits of the hero and their retinue, here is their stats screen, yet whereupon are their loot tables?"
As for Disco Elysium, I struggle to imagine I've been playing the same game that everyone else has. What are the "good politics" present there? Harry is just as likely to shove a thumb up his ass or be so racist that his partner abandons him as he is to uphold Mazovian thought and build communism. If you swear off drinking, everyone who interacts with you will still call you a drunk, because indeed, why wouldn't they? You're a burnt out wreck at the end of a 10 year drunken bender.
The extent of communist politics is:
Harry, someone who's going through a major episode, to say the least, spouting reddit-tier memes about communism
Evrart a duplicitous slimeball that ticks all the boxes for the "ah, those damn unions, always run by corrupt moneymen" tropes, head of a union where worker's democracy is so cared for that either him or his twin brother (wink, hint, nudge) win every time; that is revealed to bulldoze a fishing village without the local's consent (one of the jobs you do for him is literally trick an old half-blind lady to sign her house away to being condemned) but it's ok cause "it's for their own good"
a student with a Mazov bust and assorted paraphernalia in his room, again, the trope of the militant naive youth (plus they're probably a trot anyway)
a guy that cannot put behind him that the revolution is over and the world he knew is lost, high off stick-bug fumes, and notably the only other communist (except for presumably yourself) you can find in the game, that immediately calls you a liberal paedophile if you mention you're also a communist
I'm not saying you shouldn't like this, I'm saying you should be asking for better, this shit is bleak. I've replayed the game as a moralist, and guess what, everything falls into place. The revolution failed, Mazov literally committed suicide (you don't need big brain media analysis for this one). The only people that have even the vaguest inkling of communism are people being led by corrupt slimebags, naive student types and a murderous dead-ender. "We" run the world now and things are well under way to "going back to normal". Indirect modes of taxation are required. Hell, your partner, bless their heart, is a moralist. The Twin Pines company is in the wrong, if only because they're going the wrong way about this. The police is overstretched, and had you not been there, this would have been another 50s style massacre strike bust, and nobody would have cared.
All the mentions of communism as something that maybe didn't crawl out of Satan's asshole might be amazing to someone living in West Europe, or heaven forefend, North America, but here in the Eastern Bloc, it's just more run of the mill Post Communist Realism, (the dev team, including the writers, are from the Baltics). Consume more non-anglo media, I guess.
OK, here's a couple counter-examples, for fun:
Tonight We Riot is a simple two-brain-cells-required arcade game that has more good politics in 20 minutes than most RPGs have in 20 hours.-
Neofeud is a point and click adventure game made by a homeless at parts Hawaiian school teacher that had to live with all the horrendous crap his homeland has been through for the past 50 years, the game is metaphorically about this, shockingly enough.
Umurangi Generation is a photography game where you snap things for a newspaper in a place that's under UN occupation as a result of an alien invasion. You are punished for photographing "the wrong things".
Idk, Ghostrunner technically ends with a communist revolution so you could argue it says "revolutionary terror is good, actually" but i have my doubts.
Only two of these I would consider close to being an RPG. And only two of them I would consider completely incompatible with typical deflections that would come from Neoliberalism with a Human Face, which I personally consider a baseline for "good politics". Acknowledging that things are bad under the current system is not "good politics" it's the bare fucking minimum.
Also correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the devs of Disco Elysium regret doing the right-wing trope of corrupt unions? I wouldn't be surprised since the majority of people that played Disco Elysium think it's more the standard fare of both sides bad, anti-communist, etc etc.
Still, I adore the game and would've like if in the endgame you are given a Communist-specific dialogue option to let old communist go, but still comply to arrest them by Kim because you're still a cop in the end of the day. To hit the hammer more on the head and to give the ending more variety.
You're not wrong, they said something to that effect, and to their treatment of communism in general. Yet I can't critique what's not in front of me, I can only critique what was actually released. I can only hope that one day they put out a game with better politics. As for the game we did get, I would say that it's not a game with good politics, or a game about communism, it's a game that happens to have communism in it. To wit, you can absolutely ignore all that and play the whole way through as a lib, which unlike being an out and out racist, does not have any kind meaningful punishment attached. (I could argue that for a fascist, Kim abandoning you is not a punishment at all, but a vindication, but I digress.)
I did think the game was really unique and fun. CRPGs are for sure in a post-Disco Elysium world now. I didn't play the game twice while gnashing my teeth in order to own the revisionists on the internet. It was a very enjoyable experience. I liked the "Smallest Church in Saint-Seans". My fave quote was telling the girl outside the church that we were supposed to make a better world for her but we all failed. It made me tear up.
Alas, I don't think there's an easy way to fix the politics of the game, because the story itself was not made to outline good politics. It's a very personal story about people being driven to shitty places. And I feel like the writers having (at a minimum) the very basic of political literacy coupled with the nonchalance of post-soviet Europeans, made people think it some unique W that Harry, after the mother of all bumps on his head, among other varied and weirdly deeply held beliefs he could spontaneously develop, could think himself a communist. I won't repeat my points from above, if you live in a place where saying that maybe Sweden does some OK things paints you as a communist radical, then sure, I will relent, enjoy it as a W, but as far as I'm concerned, it's just doing the bare minimum and then nothing else.
Fucking thank you. I think one of my reluctance of finishing Disco Elysium is that its politics isn't particularly good, certainly not revolutionary. I really dislike Evrart since to me, he's just your standard "aren't unions actually corrupt and work with organized crime??????" bullshit trope that is more than half a century old at this point. This movie, in particular, was directed by an anticommunist traitor piece of shit who sold out his fellow directors and creatives by ratting them out in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. A deeply reactionary film with a reactionary backstory. Some of these reactionary tropes go way back and have a reactionary history. No art with good politics should attempt to uncritically incorporate them into their art.
This is not a bit, or a take, but critically held belief. The pefect RPG would start and end with the phrase “No great men, only the great many” with nothing in-between.
Western pop art in general pushes for the great individual hero who is the smartest guy in the room, has all the witty lines, and ultimately saves the day. This is true even in something like music where the art is solely attributed to the creative genius of the artiste and not the various sound engineers and studio performers who make it happen as well.
This is extremely noticeable when you compare Chinese films made during Maoist China. In those films, the protagonists are never the smartest guy in the room or have the wittiest lines. They don't really save the day either. By Western standards, the protagonists almost come off as complete rubes. Likewise, the supporting characters don't come up with the good ideas either. Some of it is essentially "Chairman Mao wrote in On Guerilla Warfare that [reads a passage from On Guerilla Warfare]," but a lot of it is "Hey, I heard the village next to us are doing X, Y, and Z. Maybe we should do that as well." Good ideas are rarely attributed to anyone on screen, but either to Mao or some off-screen character or setting. And when it's attributed to an actual on-screen character, it's often something like a 6 year old girl or a 12 year old boy, basically someone who you would least expect to have good ideas.
They do this because they want to place the events of the film within a much larger revolutionary context. The characters are a part of a village and the villages are just two of many villages which compose the Chinese masses. "This other village came up with the idea" is to say that the ingenuity of the Chinese masses, of which both the on-screen village and off-screen village are a part of, came up with the idea. The Chinese masses are their own liberators, and it's through their discipline, conviction, ingenuity, and fervor that they liberate themselves.
All RPGs by definition are reactionary at best and cannot have good politics because they're genre-locked to devolve into adventurist, individualised (at worst, atomised) virtue-worship. Arguing over which has the best politics is akin to arguing which turd has the most undigested bits one could theoretically subsist upon. I enjoy the genre deeply and have spent more hours than I care to mention, but at no point do I consider any RPG, ever, to have ever had "good politics" and if I particularly cared about that, then I would have played one and a half RPGs before swearing off the genre completely.
This is not a bit, or a take, but critically held belief. The pefect RPG would start and end with the phrase "No great men, only the great many" with nothing in-between.
RPG’s encompass so much more than that. And Chained Echoes explored great characters within the trappings of a quintessential rpg framework
Also disco elysium is an rpg?
deleted by creator
I'm sad to tell you that speech bubble never happens in the game. Isn't it weird how it's always posted out of context, clipped on a white background? Well that's because it was made with this website
If you paste the text of the meme into the speech bubble and select Wiegraf as the avatar, you'll notice it's a pixel for pixel recreation.
If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class.(text for convenience)
The resulting image also does something that the actual game never does: the "Y" in "only" clips into the character avatar box, the original gives the text a lot of right margin
Anyway enjoy my edit
deleted by creator
oh, 100%, FFT is pretty good about it, just not that good
deleted by creator
i should really replay the game, it's been a while
I'm unconvinced, both with the examples (I can't speak much for Chained Echoes thought it is on my "going to play next" list). Note that I do not limit RPGs to games that have them thar levels and XP and the like. I consider This War of Mine an RPG, same with Pheonix Wright, for example, you're playing a role in both of them. If RPGs can encompass so much more why are all the examples that people give me the same old "here are the exploits of the hero and their retinue, here is their stats screen, yet whereupon are their loot tables?"
As for Disco Elysium, I struggle to imagine I've been playing the same game that everyone else has. What are the "good politics" present there? Harry is just as likely to shove a thumb up his ass or be so racist that his partner abandons him as he is to uphold Mazovian thought and build communism. If you swear off drinking, everyone who interacts with you will still call you a drunk, because indeed, why wouldn't they? You're a burnt out wreck at the end of a 10 year drunken bender.
The extent of communist politics is:
I'm not saying you shouldn't like this, I'm saying you should be asking for better, this shit is bleak. I've replayed the game as a moralist, and guess what, everything falls into place. The revolution failed, Mazov literally committed suicide (you don't need big brain media analysis for this one). The only people that have even the vaguest inkling of communism are people being led by corrupt slimebags, naive student types and a murderous dead-ender. "We" run the world now and things are well under way to "going back to normal". Indirect modes of taxation are required. Hell, your partner, bless their heart, is a moralist. The Twin Pines company is in the wrong, if only because they're going the wrong way about this. The police is overstretched, and had you not been there, this would have been another 50s style massacre strike bust, and nobody would have cared.
All the mentions of communism as something that maybe didn't crawl out of Satan's asshole might be amazing to someone living in West Europe, or heaven forefend, North America, but here in the Eastern Bloc, it's just more run of the mill Post Communist Realism, (the dev team, including the writers, are from the Baltics). Consume more non-anglo media, I guess.
OK, here's a couple counter-examples, for fun:
Only two of these I would consider close to being an RPG. And only two of them I would consider completely incompatible with typical deflections that would come from Neoliberalism with a Human Face, which I personally consider a baseline for "good politics". Acknowledging that things are bad under the current system is not "good politics" it's the bare fucking minimum.
Also correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the devs of Disco Elysium regret doing the right-wing trope of corrupt unions? I wouldn't be surprised since the majority of people that played Disco Elysium think it's more the standard fare of both sides bad, anti-communist, etc etc.
Still, I adore the game and would've like if in the endgame you are given a Communist-specific dialogue option to let old communist go, but still comply to arrest them by Kim because you're still a cop in the end of the day. To hit the hammer more on the head and to give the ending more variety.
You're not wrong, they said something to that effect, and to their treatment of communism in general. Yet I can't critique what's not in front of me, I can only critique what was actually released. I can only hope that one day they put out a game with better politics. As for the game we did get, I would say that it's not a game with good politics, or a game about communism, it's a game that happens to have communism in it. To wit, you can absolutely ignore all that and play the whole way through as a lib, which unlike being an out and out racist, does not have any kind meaningful punishment attached. (I could argue that for a fascist, Kim abandoning you is not a punishment at all, but a vindication, but I digress.)
I did think the game was really unique and fun. CRPGs are for sure in a post-Disco Elysium world now. I didn't play the game twice while gnashing my teeth in order to own the revisionists on the internet. It was a very enjoyable experience. I liked the "Smallest Church in Saint-Seans". My fave quote was telling the girl outside the church that we were supposed to make a better world for her but we all failed. It made me tear up.
Alas, I don't think there's an easy way to fix the politics of the game, because the story itself was not made to outline good politics. It's a very personal story about people being driven to shitty places. And I feel like the writers having (at a minimum) the very basic of political literacy coupled with the nonchalance of post-soviet Europeans, made people think it some unique W that Harry, after the mother of all bumps on his head, among other varied and weirdly deeply held beliefs he could spontaneously develop, could think himself a communist. I won't repeat my points from above, if you live in a place where saying that maybe Sweden does some OK things paints you as a communist radical, then sure, I will relent, enjoy it as a W, but as far as I'm concerned, it's just doing the bare minimum and then nothing else.
Fucking thank you. I think one of my reluctance of finishing Disco Elysium is that its politics isn't particularly good, certainly not revolutionary. I really dislike Evrart since to me, he's just your standard "aren't unions actually corrupt and work with organized crime??????" bullshit trope that is more than half a century old at this point. This movie, in particular, was directed by an anticommunist traitor piece of shit who sold out his fellow directors and creatives by ratting them out in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. A deeply reactionary film with a reactionary backstory. Some of these reactionary tropes go way back and have a reactionary history. No art with good politics should attempt to uncritically incorporate them into their art.
you might enjoy kenshi
Western pop art in general pushes for the great individual hero who is the smartest guy in the room, has all the witty lines, and ultimately saves the day. This is true even in something like music where the art is solely attributed to the creative genius of the artiste and not the various sound engineers and studio performers who make it happen as well.
This is extremely noticeable when you compare Chinese films made during Maoist China. In those films, the protagonists are never the smartest guy in the room or have the wittiest lines. They don't really save the day either. By Western standards, the protagonists almost come off as complete rubes. Likewise, the supporting characters don't come up with the good ideas either. Some of it is essentially "Chairman Mao wrote in On Guerilla Warfare that [reads a passage from On Guerilla Warfare]," but a lot of it is "Hey, I heard the village next to us are doing X, Y, and Z. Maybe we should do that as well." Good ideas are rarely attributed to anyone on screen, but either to Mao or some off-screen character or setting. And when it's attributed to an actual on-screen character, it's often something like a 6 year old girl or a 12 year old boy, basically someone who you would least expect to have good ideas.
They do this because they want to place the events of the film within a much larger revolutionary context. The characters are a part of a village and the villages are just two of many villages which compose the Chinese masses. "This other village came up with the idea" is to say that the ingenuity of the Chinese masses, of which both the on-screen village and off-screen village are a part of, came up with the idea. The Chinese masses are their own liberators, and it's through their discipline, conviction, ingenuity, and fervor that they liberate themselves.