You're telling me team USA has thirty more medals than team China and that counts for nothing? That just doesn't make any sense to me
You're telling me team USA has thirty more medals than team China and that counts for nothing? That just doesn't make any sense to me
I think it’s in the book “Games of Empire” where the argument is made that the worlds in fantasy games are usually just recreations of our modern capitalist world, aforementioned financial shenanigans very much included. These games often have the aesthetics of a kind of mediaeval feudalism, but in-game economies feature very modern things like decimalised currency, auction houses, arbitrage, consumerist alienation, instant payments, and so on, all of which would be very out of place in a feudal world. Fantasy RPGs show us worlds that appear radically different from our own at first glance, but upon deeper examination they are another example of the social imaginary restrained by capitalist realism.
Good post, good points. It reminds me of those early modern depictions of classical antiquity, where people are dressed like tercios, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HumiliationValerianusHolbein.jpg
Perhaps most depictions of the past tend to be anachronistic because we are too immersed in the super structure we are part of that we become unable to imagine anything different.
Then again this fantasy worlds and games created under capitalism have every incentive to do the bare minimum and just copy each other without any nuance or research. It's also likely that a truly accurate world would not resonate with audiences.
And indeed the half assed fantasies reinforce the prejudices of their consumer.