So, I've been playing cyberpunk 2077 and terra Invicta recently and there's just a couple things that consistently bug me. Now look, I'm not expecting them to be fair to China and the DPRK and Cuba and what not. If I did then I wouldn't be able to enjoy anything ever in this world. But then there's other things that just make me believe that Johne Locke rose from his grave to write some code for these games.
For cyberpunk 2077, it's the police. Apparently, literally 9/10 cops you meet are "the last honest cop in Night city." After the fifth time hearing this exact line I almost think there's some inside joke I'm not getting. Sure youre told the ncpd is corrupt sometimes (maybe), and in their little "safe and sound" show, the ncpd says cops may ask for bribes and that you should give them bribes. But like, that's never shown. The cops you do see are
Detective who wants to get to the bottom of hard cases the brass doesn't want solved, and to save his nephew from a serial killer
Two police officers who are definitely good and who just want to help their friend Barry, who's sad his turtle died and who is angry at the brass for covering things up
Cop who sacrifices his life in order to steal life saving medical equipment from arasaka, who only procures stolen cars for the corrupt brass
Cop who does what the brass tells him to do in order to protect himself and his daughter
[Edit was wrong on this one, didnt know there were different choices for this mission and that hes actually not a good cop. My bad.] Detective who hires you to steal bd scrolls so he doesn't have to go through the trouble of getting warrants
cop who beats you for stealing a car from a corpo, but disobeys orders from said corpo and spares you from death
You get the point. It's classic COD levels of writing for these guys. "All the problems are caused by the corrupt management and bureaucracy all the cops are really good guys at heart." Have you ever met cops? Like sure, I'm not saying literally 100% of them are sociopathic serial killers(although i think you have to be a little fucked in the head to do what they do), but the police department doesn't attract the type of people who want to help the community. It's literally almost as bad (or hell, I'd say maybe worse in some respects) than literal Dick Wolfe tier cop shows. And it doesn't help that the game is constantly telling you "man the ncpd are some bad guys. The ncpd are just another gang. The ncpd work with Tyger claws" etc. I wouldn't be as critical if my ears weren't hearing one thing and my eyes were seeing another. (Note:To be...too fair, there are essentially corpo cops who do actually get the treatment they deserve. People like Reed and Takemura aren't bad people on a personal level, but they're beholden to the interests of their capitalists and so you end up at odds with them because they do their dirty work. I don't think theres enough questioning of Reeds "for muh country" shit, but at the very least he's not given a free pass like the ncpd is. Same with Takemura, although it's never really shown how bad he can be really, opposed to just not liking Yorinobu.)
Terra Invicta is comparably smaller, but I hate their democracy vs totalitarianism crap. Looking around at the starting scores it's literally like those freedom institute maps.
Cuba, with direct democracy, free elections, accountable representatives, etc.
Grrr totalitarian nightmare
Thailand, the US, etc.
Aww, flawed democracies are still democracies
But then you look some more and it just has you asking if these people researched 5 minutes of political science before making some decisions. Like, really, south korea and Japan are "full democracies." One is a corrupt hellhole ran by megacorps who can raid and persecute anyone deemed helping North korea, and the other literally has a system to make getting rid of their one party dominance near impossible. At least give them the flawed democracy tag if it's so hard to understand anything else.
It's like, I really do enjoy playing both of these games but those two things are just constantly in the back of my mind saying "these people aren't as intelligent as you think"
There are a lot of games I still really enjoy that do these kinds of things, but I am much more aware of them the more I have read. Sometimes I think it comes from internalized propaganda, and sometimes I think it is a conscious effort being put out. I am a bit more understanding of the former just because I was there at one point too. Generally I can look past that stuff while also acknowledging it is there and a problem.
I played 1000xResist late last year; I like VN type stories and heard it was a really good sci-fi story, which I also usually like. I did not expect how much present day Chinese politics would feature in the game (I was unaware that the game was chinese diaspora developed when I first started it). I got about half way through before I just moved on to something else, because it was just getting insufferable about Hong Kong.
That was on me for not doing due diligience. If I had spent five minutes looking into it before buying it, I would have realised that it was banned in China and why. Would have saved me the purchase.
Terra Invicta was one I had on my list, but kind of a shame to know they have that framing of the world politics stuff. Paradox games, for all the flaws they have, at least TRY to do a reasonable job at that shit. They don't always succeed and their fanbases tend to lean towards the fascist, but the development teams themselves do...alright. Not great, they definitely fall into a lot of liberal european thinking, but I don't think they are actively trying to vilify socialism.
I think the Paradox team is a bit more left-leaning than a lot think; or certain parts of it. I think they are beholden to maintaining a large facsimile of that lib-centrist ideologue because a good chunk of their fanbase is map-game fascists.