I enjoy the premise of the game but to me the message seems to be blatantly anti communist, but I have not yet played it. Any thoughts on this?
I enjoy the premise of the game but to me the message seems to be blatantly anti communist, but I have not yet played it. Any thoughts on this?
I don't remember the game ever mentioning the economic and political system of Arstotzka. I remember it as giving bigger hints on the ideology of the other neighbouring states than its own.
Only if you Google enough you'll find the creator saying it's a communist country, but the mechanics are far from it: for example an excessive rent is used to coerce the player throughout the game.
The game does however have an extremely transphobic mechanic when an immigrant or tourist's sex as written in the passport does not match the developer's idea of gender that's completely unexamined and uncritiqued within the game. If this mechanic was addressed instead of let be you could play the game knowing it's a fascist state without any contradictions.
Yes, the country from what I have seen doesn’t seem communist, but to me even without googling I knew what it was trying to represent. It’s pretty blatant that it’s imitating the eastern bloc, aesthetically at least, although I think it’s more of caricature of it than reality. The whole sex thing is pretty transphobic imo. It would be a better mechanic if the regime was explicitly fascist, who have been historically transphobic, and perhaps incorporating moral problems into that by forcing you to choose between sending someone to prison for being trans or feeding your family. That would probably also be a controversial mechanic, but the point I’m trying to make is that the game should try and comment on fascism’s inherently evil fixation on trans people. On the other hand I’d be worried if that flew over actual gamer’s heads who would be like “haha deport trans people” or something, not considering the moral implications of such actions
You could headcanon it as "What if the Hungarian Uprising succeed but also I was a transphobe".
I didn't get the sense that the game was being transphobic so much as it was portraying a transphobic society. Nothing about the presentation makes me think we're supposed to take the invasive body scanning and blanket rejection of those who don't fit the mold as cool and good. Having said that, though, portraying behavior without appearing to endorse it can be a difficult thing even for the best creators (see: Fight Club, The Sopranos, 1987's Wall Street) and I wouldn't tell anyone who sees endorsement of transphobia in the game that they're wrong.
I see what you mean, but it unsettles me that none of the people you can imprison for presenting a different gender that what's on their passports mention or even hint at that they are trans. They say stuff like "what?" or "that must be a mistake" instead of something like "I was born female and could not change the paperwork, please don't send me to the gulag". You can play the whole game while not acknowledging that transgender and intersex people exist.
For most other paperwork mistakes you get one migrant with a story and you need to make a choice. For the mismatching sex, the developer seems to comment on body scanning but not on transphobia.