Anyone else get irrationally annoyed when games anachronistically whitewash deeply shitty societies to the point that it turns into apologetics, just to avoid grappling with problematic themes?
Anyone else get irrationally annoyed when games anachronistically whitewash deeply shitty societies to the point that it turns into apologetics, just to avoid grappling with problematic themes?
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?
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Video games have worse stories and worse politics than Hollywood and British movies. Somehow they're even more controlled by soulless creatively bankrupt rich white dudes than even movies are.
They cost a lot to make. Just like Marvel movies, AAA game studios have to infest so much capital that they're extremely risk adverse.
It reminds me an episode of the Deprogram where they ask Noah Samson what game development would look like in a socialist society and he says AAA style games probably wouldn't exist. I think he's right. I can't see games being some kind of national project and the only way I can see that sufficient people would all work together to produce a huge game would be something like Rimworld where the game is really just a framework that smaller teams all develop pieces for to express their own vision
It reminds me an episode of the Deprogram where they ask Noah Samson what game development would look like in a socialist society and he says AAA style games probably wouldn't exist. I think he's right. I can't see games being some kind of national project and the only way I can see that sufficient people would all work together to produce a huge game would be something like Rimworld where the game is really just a framework that smaller teams all develop pieces for to express their own vision
It has to come down to how the state handles the production of entertainment, doesn't it? Like the Soviet state certainly saw the production of entertainment as a desirable service to the people whether through films, theater, museums, etc, whether one wants to look at that cynically as being entirely about morale or as a general ideological belief that people should have nice things when possible.
So you could still have a large game dev industry under a socialist economy whether that's in the form of some central entertainment planning bureau allocating labor and resources to projects as they see fit, using metrics about engagement and critical response or the like to try to serve the entertainment needs of the public as best they can, or some democratized system where the public can vote to allocate resources to prospective projects which then get state funding from the union of game devs or whatever. Those answers obviously have their own issues, but they'd hardly be worse than the current system of media oligarchs arbitrarily funding or scrapping things as they please.
Well said. One thing Noah points out is you could eliminate some of the waste and inefficiency of the current system. Every developer having a proprietary engine means that while things like the horses in red dead redemption 2 have already been coded really well, if you want to make a new engine with horses in it you have to start from the ground up. Presumably a socialist system could just have a central code base to work off of