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?
Moral dilemma in starfield: kill the ultra rich CEO who has been knowingly poisoning the soil and funding a vicious army of angry war veterans to displace poor farmers OR let him live because he is a "job creator"
funding a vicious army of angry war veterans
The funniest part is they weren't even veterans: there were only a tiny handful of survivors of the actual First, the rest were just dumbass fascist fanboys they found in FC bars who were all "hell yeah I would love to join your death cult and subscribe to your newsletter!" All the actual veterans were old, since they'd been locked up for 20 years and they were pretty much just the handful of officers left after all the grunts got thrown into a meatgrinder for literally nothing.
At least no one gave you any shit for executing Ron Hope, though it's kind of weird that the FC's only federal law enforcement agency was just like "lol, lmao" to you executing one of the literal dictators of the FC on the spot. You'd think the other dictators of the FC would be upset about one of their own facing consequences for his actions, and at the prospect that someone could come after them for their own crimes.
Ah okay. Thanks. I thought they were all veterans. But considering how large their horde was your explanation makes more sense.
ultra rich CEO [...] funding a vicious army of angry war veterans
Sucks that you cant kill the dickhead CEO tyrant in Neon because "essential" (i know mods can remove it and people would complain about no world impact if hes killable but still wtf) Come on Todd at least dissable the essential tag in Ng+. Like if you break a questline just make a new game+ like in souls games.
or, better yet, get rid of the essential tag altogether (except for underaged NPCs) and create workarounds for if the player breaks the questline because a needed NPC was killed off. like in new vegas.
i thought this was supposed to be a rpg, come on man.
i'll still kill the ultra rich CEO, you don't need to have private "entrepreneurs" to create jobs
there are other ways
It pissed me off so much when the workers were all like “I’m not sure what we’ll do now without him,” like motherfucker you’ll just show up tomorrow and keep doing the same job nothing will change. He wasn’t the one working the fucking assembly line. His major contribution to the company seemed to be poisoning the local population, not doing any actual fucking work. Also his given reasoning is that he needs to be evil so the company can stay profitable with absolutely no acknowledgment of or thought put into what “profit” means. Oh your company had to hire mercenaries to shoot meemaw and force her off her land because there wasn’t enough cash left over after covering operating expenses for you and the other board members to swim around in? You can’t fill a second pool with credits because it’s been a slow quarter? The horror 🙄
It's implied that the corporation and workers can potentially survive even with the CEO dead so killing the CEO turns out to be the right choice. The CEO is on a goverment as well and his colleagues seem to be fine with him dead. I like the outcome but I hate that it is presented as a critical junction of that questline because the dilemma is a bit of a no-brainer.
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.
by making it super hard/impossible, it might become a challenge. Holocaust speedrun/WAVE 250 shit.
YouTube videos explaining the best strats to make a holocaust build viable
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.
At the end the only valid WW2 game should be a USSR simulator lol.
mao is sad at you for forgetting him
To be fair to Starfield: as an American, I get confused if you ask me to choose between anything other than fascism and capitalism
It’s ok impirl, just suck on your happy meal cube and remember MURICA took humanity into the stars 🇱🇷
What do you mean there’s only two types it’s like black and white
I’m not even in my mid 20s yet but I’ve become jaded with video games and media in general. I never finished reading Capitalist Realism because it meanders too much, but the first few chapters stuck with me. Every piece of media wants to critique “the system” but all of them fail to say anything meaningful. At this point, any time I see the word “mega corporation” in the premise of a game or movie, I immediately dismiss it as dogshit.
The exception would be Andor. Probably the only mainstream piece of media that doesn’t obscure the ugly truths of what it means to resist an oppressive force.
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.
Don’t forget that they also took away civilian casualties even though that would affect so many things like production, recruiting, and psychology. They added this to Vicky 3 but I don’t know. The warfare kind of sucks and yes I know they didn’t want to prioritize that. But if you’re going to add all these dependent systems you might as well show the carnage.
But the best part is that many Paradox fans (and developers, I assume, since they’re e*ros) believe that Stalin is more evil than Hitler, but they have mechanics for the great purge and famine. Don’t forget CoD with their “gulag” mechanic In their own logic, they don’t even take what they consider genocide seriously because if they truly believed their own words, there’d be characters fighting each other with AKs and striped pajamas
Every piece of media wants to critique “the system” but all of them fail to say anything meaningful.
One may dye their hair green and wear their grandma's coat all they want. Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead.
While I never played COD, these threads always remind me of the scene where they portray the Highway of Death as a Russian atrocity. Straight up revisionism...
But the
in popular media are staggering. In addition to OPs examples, I notice how in LNs it is a trope that the main character gets to own slaves, but it's not bad in their case, because they are good slave owners and tread them well... It is so fucking messed up.
On a related note, I'd like to see a John Brown IsekaiI'd like to see a John Brown Isekai
COD is just straight up nazi propaganda. like they're not trying to avoid their message, they want you to join the military so you can be the cool guy that kills for the empire.
On a related note, I'd like to see a John Brown Isekai
Someone wrote one and I've seen it linked here before. Let's see... ok, I managed to track it down, though google only returned reddit threads of people talking about it even though I remembered the name. Haven't read it though.
Thank you very much! I'm glad to see that there is still unpolitical literature out there
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.
Ok I can kind of see this argument but I have to completely disagree here. You say remove the horrors of Nazis as if their fans would look at that genocide button and be like "huh this is bad actualy?" Completely the opposite of reality imo. They would see it as glorification and justification for their own views.
Furthermore we all know pretty well what everyone even remotely leftist, let alone everyone on this site would be saying about PDX if they literaly gave you a genocide button.
I don't think the game handles history particularly well, and obviously the players are already problematic. But exactly because of this I don't see how giving you a genocide button wouldn't just make it even worse here.
PDX is not that straightforward, they've done decently well all with Vicky 3 politics all things considered. But on the other hand you can go do whatever war crimes you want in Stellaris. Yes its obvious the corporate decision making here but if the main argument is a WW2 strategy game would be better with ample depictions of the war crimes committed then I don't agree at all.
Yes perhaps WW2 media should emphasize the horrors is an argument that could be made, but the reality is does it actually help our current situation? On a case by case basis maybe, but mostly if your audience is already leaning fashy then no, it is literally rewarding them for their views. There is no such thing as introspection at a large scale, people don't look at horrible shit and go "wow this is bad actualy I don't like this anymore" on the contrary they are more likely to double down and reinforce their beliefs.
Religious(Christian) fundamentalism is exactly like this, show them evidence of God's crimes in the bible for example and they go "but you don't understand God is good actually because [BS here]". So why would a Nazi look at HOI4s hypothetical Holocaust button as anything more than a validation of their views?
PDX is not that straightforward, they've done decently well all with Vicky 3 politics all things considered. But on the other hand you can go do whatever war crimes you want in Stellaris. Yes its obvious the corporate decision making here but if the main argument is a WW2 strategy game would be better with ample depictions of the war crimes committed then I don't agree at all.
One thing I want to add here is that while yes I agree about Stellaris having a genocide machine and allows horrible things to be done to other aliens, I do actually wonder if we can get stats on how many players play as xenophobic and see if we can get names and locations wink wink
I will say that I have a soft spot for Stellaris now because they have recently added features that allows full complete fully automated space gay communism
I will say I have been guilty of using the world cracker / more evil bombardment stances for the sake of convenience in Stellaris.
I think that if HOI4 is to add the holocaust as a game mechanic it should just be an insurmountable siphon of manpower/materials/factories. Even with that all the perverts that play it would likely still have an undesired reaction to it
what they should do is make playing the fascists an extremely punishing experience. they set out from the outset for it to be "fair" and either side could win. the whole world less japan and tiny european countries fought germany. they should lose every time and the heuristics for high level play should've been how long they could hold out or whatever
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what they should do is make playing the fascists an extremely punishing experience.
they give fascists a fuck ton of buffs that make absolutely no sense, they lean into fascist propaganda hard. What they need to do is also power up the soviets way more than they do, because the soviet AI should be making their way through poland by 44 instead of stuck in a perma deathlock at the stalin line until the british naval invade or some shit. They spend a fuckton of effort demonizing every instance of communism, an effort barely made for fascists.
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yeah, they could at least put those news things of the Soviets finding concentration camps when they push into eastern europe, or something, it needs to show the horror to some degree.
The worldbuilding in a lot of games is shite nowadays. It's all rushed out, and if it's triple A it's got too much money riding on it to have something controversial in it that potentially tanks it's sales.
Probably also something about the target market being g*mers.
I bought this game Bounty Train on Steam and oh boy did it ever do this - you play the heir to a rail company and one of your goals is to stop the forced relocation of a Native American tribe. Your character has no connection to the tribe in question, they're just vaguely referenced and you're only doing it because it would be a good thing to do, it's only motivated by the fact that you're actually a morally good railroad owner. I mean I wouldn't expect a super realistic portrayal out of it, but having native peoples in the game like that just to be saved by a white guy is pretty
The actual gameplay was pretty fun itself and it was just such an unnecessary inclusion to the game that it just kinda killed the story mode. Kind of a shame because the sim elements of the game (it literally has staff management, goods trading, combat, dialogue options, train-building, and godawful combat) were pretty fun.
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.
This is how I feel playing just about any game set in America.
Wolfenstein 2 gets a pass on that one for accurately showing white Americans as evil nazis.
I guess Metal Gear Rising Revengeance also gets a pass because in the one US level you get to dice up a bunch of corpo cops and child soldier Jeff Bezos.
Final Fantasy XIV tried to make Limsa Lominsa morally gray by making them a settler state that displaced the Kobold and Sahagin tribes, and it still makes you help the settler state against the tribes for plot reasons. Just allow me to help those that deserve it for once
Later in the story, once the Garleans are driven from Ala Mhigo, there's this horrid moment where the ruling class of Ul'Dah decree that the treasures that Theodoric looted from his own people should not be returned to the people and instead invested in a new business. With Ul'Dah's ruling class running it, of course.
The moon cat race (can't remember what they're actually called) are also a race of religious pariahs in the woodsy place (fuck I can't remember what anything is called) because the theocracy that runs the place views unsanctioned hunting as blasphemous and they're a people who are traditionally hunters.
You do a ton of quests for the theocracy, especially if you're a Conjurer/White Mage.
I think they’re tailored to the masses. Also, a whole bunch of countries just don’t allow certain things like, drug use, child murder, nazis, etc.
AAA game publishers are literally hoping to maximize profits. They won’t do anything to narrow their effective market.
I’m Not excusing their behavior. I’m just saying don’t expect much else from big games. You might see more interesting themes from smaller devs.
drug use, child murder, nazis, etc
You might see more interesting themes from smaller devs.
I don't see how cramming those in those would make an otherwise bad story/setting automatically a good one, or automatically more "interesting" as you put it.
Yes, and it makes a number of games (and shows, and movies, and books) unbearably draining to read. If the point of presenting a miserable setting is to get off to the misery, I'm not interested. I can enjoy fiction that takes place in a bad place, but if the badness is the self-indulgent point and everyone with agency and presence in the fiction is an asshole, I'm not interested.
I'm trying to think about what it is that really bothers me about it, and while the whole essay about diegetic essentialism and how one really shouldn't look at fiction as if it it's coherent and real even diegetically is stuck in my head I can't help but think maybe that bit of literary theory is incomplete. Like I'd almost want to call my perspective on this "diegetic materialism" as the idea that when creating or depicting systems in fiction they should adhere to the same material pressures they would if they were real, that if you've got a system based on stratification and elitism that it should actually be realistically awful, that it should have the problems that inevitably follow from its structure. Like how in Starfield the hyper-stratified military dictatorship with massive interstellar corporations that just straight up denies basic rights to a supermajority of its population is also this nice tolerant society where there's poverty and dysfunction but none of the misery that goes along with that, none of the brutality that would be required to uphold it, none of the attitudes or hyper-exploitation that would lead to its specific system being designed in the first place - it's like an old Disney cartoon with happy singing serfs who like being the property of the fair and beautiful nobles because it's all just play and there are no material consequences to poverty at all.
For all that's to be said about author fiat and the fact that creators can just say "actually it's all fine and nice in my world," I can't help but feel like that's just doing "thermian propaganda" to copy the term someone else coined to describe it the last time I posted about it here, that the creator is effectively doing an intentional appeal to the thermian argument by constructing a world where [bad thing] actually is fine and good actually.
But then that line of thinking runs into the sort of issue you bring up there, that following this principle to its logical conclusion effectively means that a huge array of topics/settings effectively end up being locked to either "don't touch it at all" or "depict the living hell it must be" and we have to start getting into the question of the responsibility an author has to not normalize or do apologetics for [bad thing] by treating it too casually or nicely, and what the standard for "casual" is and how much the work has to explicitly and textually condemn it as bad, etc.
And I just don't have an answer for that despite thinking about it a lot while I'm writing.
You bring up some good points and gave me some things to think about. My part was mostly subjective preference: I wasn't calling for forbidding shit worlds with shit people with nothing but shit possible in them forevermore, but I was saying I'm not going to be interested in them as entertainment if there's no one that I can be bothered to care about in it or at the very least have some sympathy with, or if there is such a person and everything they do is meaningless and smothered in the aforementioned shit for shit authenticity or otherwise in a totally-not-author-just-likes-shit way.
that's particularly grotesque in a series like AC that prides itself on historical accuracy (except for the 3000 year shadow war between two secret societies that was the true cause of all historical events of course).
i'll be honest i didn't know starfield had a plot. i thought it was kinda like no man's sky where you just zip around doing deliveries or shooting pirates or clicking the mouse button to extract selenium from barren planet #32,890
The funniest part if this statement, no man's sky kinda has a plot too these days. It's just easily ignored.
OMG FINALLY. Have been meaning to offload this re AC Odyssey. Less problematic than the awful treatment of slavery, but equally to-your-face-annoying, the whole main story — to the extent there is one — is basically ORANGE MAN BAD (Kleon was literally orange haired lmao) POPULISM BAD (I’d be mad if war and hunger going on but Perikles keep jerking off to his temples) BUT WE MUST DEFEND DEMOCRACY TOGETHER WITH, hold on … SOCRATES?! Like it’s so nauseatingly CIVILITY liberalism it made me stop half way in my ng+ play through after I so painfully fine tuned all my gears and engravings /rant
i had to quit and uninstall AC odyssey after a recent replay when it portrayed the slaveowning family of the king of sparta as some lighthearted suburban family that just liked to play fight with sticks. not a slave in sight outside of that one obnoxious "slaves are hapy actually, don't ask about how house slaves were made/treated in ancient societies please" (hint: it involves castration so you won't fuck the owners wife while he travels for business, best case scenario you get your dick attached to your scrotum with a piercing) side quest, when the vast majority of sparta's population was slaves (significantly outnumbering the proportional population of slaves in rome or athens, for example), with a small peripheral artisan class in addition to the military aristocracy. i had enjoyed that game in the past, too.
Also the Helots (Spartas slaves) were owned by the state and, during the Agoge (training to become a soldier/citizen) it was expected that the boys killed one Helot, at least, during their training.
So yes, the Ubisoft despition of Ancient Greece is beyond ahistorical and fucked up. The average liberal brained videogame.
Source: Sarah Pomeroy.
It would have even been easy to show this, since that specific treatment of the Helots is mostly after 464 (Plutarch) and reached its peak during the Peloponnesian Wars (Thucydides). Would have been easy to have Kassandra come back to Sparta to see that the already oppressed serfs are now entirely reduced to slavery.
i had to quit and uninstall AC odyssey after a recent replay when it portrayed the slaveowning family of the king of sparta as some lighthearted suburban family that just liked to play fight with sticks. not a slave in sight outside of that one obnoxious "slaves are hapy actually, don't ask about how house slaves were made/treated in ancient societies please" (hint: it involves castration so you won't fuck the owners wife while he travels for business, best case scenario you get your dick attached to your scrotum with a piercing) side quest, when the vast majority of sparta's population was slaves (significantly outnumbering the proportional population of slaves in rome or athens, for example), with a small peripheral artisan class in addition to the military aristocracy.
As usual the "historical accuracy"
crowd is silent about that and is only mad about feeeeeeeeeeemales or 
Go figure, hooded super man of history secret stealth spy badass killer murder fantasy game is reactionary. I for one never saw it coming. 😏
I finally got around to watching Elysium and I was sorta glad they didn't try to both sides the guy who was essentially a gang leader, and let him be a positive force against the super rich who had a "heal everyone on earth" button the whole fucking time.
I was a lib so literally everything flew over my head lol
