The specific example that made me start thinking about this was how AC Odyssey has a sidequest where a slave doesn't want to be freed because he thinks being a slave is cool, actually, which is both absurd apologetics but also misses that in Greek and Roman systems manumission was a form of social control that both rewarded and indebted slavers' most loyal collaborators. That turned into thinking about how just absolutely absurdly shitty classic Greek society was in general, and how AC Odyssey made it this weird wholesome egalitarian slaver dictatorship where everything's cool and good except for the bad mean guys who are indistinguishable in methods or goals from anyone else.

That's also one of the things that pisses me off about Starfield so much, how the "good guys" are a pair of far right colonial empires: one is literally just the fascists from Starship Troopers, and the other are a bunch of feudal ancap dictatorships. Even the villains are just saturday morning cartoon villains who are bad and mean but don't really ever do anything distinct from the "good" factions except be ontologically opposed to you, the main character.

Someone else pointed out recently how HOI4 ends up effectively doing Nazi apologetics the same way, where in trying to avoid giving their worst fans a holocaust button they just outright remove all the actual horror and material actions the Nazis did altogether.

And I don't think I even need to get into how rampant this problem is in liberal fantasy settings, which are always full of apologetics for monarchism, because that's well tread ground for criticism. It's enough to make something like how the original Mount and Blade handled the in-universe nobles as being inherently sexist and classist pieces of shit who were obstacles for a female and/or commoner PC to fight against and overcome almost refreshing, instead of it just being like "yeah these awful pieces of shit who are all definitely mass murderers and worse are actually cool and nice to you and not really all that bad really" like so much feudal apologia media does.

And yeah, there's a point to be made about not wanting to grapple with problematic themes and all, but where there's the line where that just turns into apologetics for the very problematic thing you're trying to avoid dealing with at all?

  • BeamBrain [he/him]
    ·
    9 months ago

    Yeah, HoI4 inherently has an interesting double bind as a WW2 game, being stuck between "let players do the Holocaust" and "ignore the Holocaust." It's a problem I've thought about myself, and I've heard or come up with a couple of possible solutions:

    • Depict the Holocaust through events that fire off for Allied players when they capture the provinces where Dachau, Auschwitz, etc. were located. This acknowledges the event in a way that makes it invisible to a German player, hopefully robbing them of any satisfaction.
    • The brute force option: Do not let players play as Germany. Do not let players use the dev console to tag switch to Germany. Take down any Steam Workshop mods that allow the player to play as Germany.
    • The historical realism option: Make Germany a completely dysfunctional mess with a putrid, unsustainable ideology that is doomed to fail. Its Ponzi Scheme economy means it must constantly pick fights against harder and harder targets. Its reliance on slave labor results in widespread sabotage that cripples its industries. Its horrific occupation policies result in it facing overwhelming resistance in conquered territories. There is no level of player skill that would allow Germany to emerge the winner, barring ousting the Nazis from power.
    • MaoTheLawn [any, any]
      ·
      9 months ago

      by making it super hard/impossible, it might become a challenge. Holocaust speedrun/WAVE 250 shit.

      • jabrd [he/him]
        ·
        9 months ago

        YouTube videos explaining the best strats to make a holocaust build viable

    • BynarsAreOk [none/use name]
      ·
      9 months ago

      The historical realism option: Make Germany a completely dysfunctional mess with a putrid, unsustainable ideology that is doomed to fail. Its Ponzi Scheme economy means it must constantly pick fights against harder and harder targets. Its reliance on slave labor results in widespread sabotage that cripples its industries. Its horrific occupation policies result in it facing overwhelming resistance in conquered territories. There is no level of player skill that would allow Germany to emerge the winner, barring ousting the Nazis from power.

      I like this but I'd like to point out these criticisms apply to every playable country in the game though not just the Axis. The UK/France were also decaying imperial powers and the minor allies(Netherlands/Belgium/Brazil etc) are completely irrelevant. Yes players can brute force achievements but its more to do with limitations of the game than actual realism, I mean fucking Brazil isn't capable of conquering the entirety of South America in 6 years or whatever either but its fairly trivial.

      Anyway point is the US obviously found itself fighting Germany by chance and a chain of events rather than much deeper ideological differences and if you handle Germany like that then the probably should do the same with the other capitalist shit countries too.

      At the end the only valid WW2 game should be a USSR simulator lol.