I can think of some obvious examples to start with, but my subtle but insidious nominee is Fable III. Fittingly for a pretentious grifter like Molyneux, the game requires you to raise a specific amount of gold or your kingdom is destroyed and you get a bad ending. The goalposts are moved by the game if you raise money in ways it doesn’t approve of, and it is simply impossible to reach the fundraising goal in any way that isn’t at least Enlightened Centrist levels of evil, the kind that lanyard-wearing neoliberals giggle about. That’s right, you need to be at least this evil or your kingdom is destroyed. So deep and really makes you think about the hard decisions that are made by the ruling class, doesn’t it? :zizek:

  • BreadpilledChadwife [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 years ago
    The Last of Us 2

    Neil Druckmann was raised in Israel and has stated that the game’s “cycle of violence” theme is modeled after his understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The game both-sides the conflict between the main factions, making you switch perspectives between the two main characters repeatedly.

    The ending of that game for me was a drudge. I was invested so I kept playing, but emotionally I just wanted it to be over and I had a feeling very similar to watching someone self destruct their life and knowing you can’t stop them. I felt pity and sadness and frustration. Apparently that was not the intended effect:

    “I landed on this emotional idea of, can we, over the course of the game, make you feel this intense hate that is universal in the same way that unconditional love is universal?” Druckmann told the Post. “This hate that people feel has the same kind of universality. You hate someone so much that you want them to suffer in the way they’ve made someone you love suffer.”

    As Emanuel Mailberg puts it:

    I suspect that some players, if they consciously clock the parallels at all, will think The Last of Us Part II is taking a balanced and fair perspective on that conflict, humanizing and exposing flaws in both sides of its in-game analogues. But as someone who grew up in Israel, I recognized a familiar, firmly Israeli way of seeing and explaining the conflict which tries to appear evenhanded and even enlightened, but in practice marginalizes Palestinian experience in a manner that perpetuates a horrific status quo.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      3 years ago

      “cycle of violence” theme is modeled after his understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict

      understanding

      :chesus:

  • Metalorg [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 years ago

    Sim City 4 has the player actively valuing rich residence over poor ones and they have to set taxes lower for rich residents.

    • jabrd [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 years ago

      There’s a similar class system element in one of my favorite city building games, Foundation, where higher level citizens need more luxury goods and better property values to be satisfied compared to the low level serfs that you can pretty much exploit to your pleasure as long as you have a strong church presence. I love it though, it’s an interactive peer into the political economy of the feudal period. The end game is the beginnings of a proto-capitalist society and I’ve seen complaints from players online that it’s nearly impossible to manage the logistics of the economy after that point but that’s great because in real history this creates the need for bureaucracy to manage those logistics rather than relying on a centralized power figure like under feudalism. It’s a really fun little educational tool in its own way. Honestly my biggest complaint is that the game is fully gender neutral for which jobs you assign the peasants too which I feel like is a miss if you’re trying to show how the economics of the medieval period worked. Maybe the creators aren’t being that intentional tho

      It’s funny in both situations the games correctly display the horrifying economic stratification present in our economic systems but because the Sim City devs live under liberalism their brains are drenched in liberal ideology so they see these disparities as either good or “unavoidable” but either way immutable and natural to how economics should work

  • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 years ago

    Oh I mean easily what springs right to mind is Call Of Duty. I mean the games are literally made in cooperation with the department of defense and are drunk off the american exceptionalism with real might makes right fashy undertones. I find almost directly responsible for the hero worship we have for special forces in the USA, as most of these games have you working as a spec ops goon.

  • Barabas [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 years ago

    Red Alert is pretty bad as the Soviet Union gets hit hard with the villain bat.

    Outer Worlds is also bad. Present a capitalist hellscape with anarchist and communist factions, and everything other than mild succdem stuff fails.

  • Knoll [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 years ago

    I recently played C&C Generals, thought the ideology there isn’t “subtle but insidious”, but rather just hilariously blatant.

  • SPEEDRUN_4_ARMAGEDON [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 years ago

    I mean, the “worst” are the ones that have natsec money behind them and are insidious propaganda tools, see Call of Duty. The only reason there shouldn’t be a push to have that series halted completely is that it would be incredibly alienating to normal people. Otherwise, there’s rich history of outwardly reactionary games to choose from. Freedom Fighters is Red Dawn if it didn’t suck. 2044 AD is literally the femnazi game.

    My personal least favorite’s probably Ronaldo’s ending in Devil Survivor 2. The writer’s brains are so steeped in liberal ideology. In this ending, the MC uses demon shit to create heaven on earth. Not “angels strip you of humanity and you worship YHVH all day”. They outright call it a paradise where everyone lives for each other, where people live for each other, basically skipping to whatever would come after communism. It’s presented with being on the same level as the ending where some blueblood loser (who starts off with magical shit) rules over a world of constant violence and death. The good ending is restoring Tokyo to the way it was, except your friends are personally better off in specific situations, I guess.

  • ssjmarx [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 years ago

    I love the Wargame series, and its sister series Steel Division manages to avoid a lot of the most common myths about the Soviet Union circa World War II, but god damn does Eugen Systems have serious brain worms.

    Here are the campaigns in Wargame: Red Dragon:

    • The South Korean dictatorship opens fire on a student protest, sparking a massive wave of unrest. This prompts North Korea to invade, and you play as the Americans who push back the Northerners and defend the dictatorship that was literally just massacring college students.
    • The Soviet Union invades China in response to China attacking Vietnam. You play as China, and lead a counterattack that captures Vladivostok, successfully defending the Khmer Rouge.
    • The time has come for Hong Kong to be handed over to China, but after Den Xiaoping makes a somewhat flippant remark to Margeret Thatcher, she decides that she doesn’t want to give up Hong Kong after all. You play as the Br*ts and fight to maintain control of your colonial holdings.
    • The Soviet Union of 1984 grows paranoid about an impending American/Japanese attack to take some disputed islands, and launches a preemptive invasion of mainland Japan.
    • The CPSU successfully coups Gorbachev right before he dissolves the Soviet Union. Despite the Soviet Union barely hanging on after the defection of several Eastern European republics, North Korea decides that this is the perfect chance for reunification, and kicks off the Second Korean War.

    Earlier games in the series posited a Soviet invasion of Germany across the Fulda Gap. It’s like someone made a list of every single thing that the Cold Warriors were wrong about and made fanfiction of them actually being right.

  • Nyarlathotep7 [they/them,comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 years ago

    I’ve been replaying Mass Effect and there’s literally a side quest where a bunch of biotic “terrorists” have taken a chairman from the Alliance hostage. Specifically because he voted against reparations for L2 biotics, being an L2 biotic requires implants which cause insanity, mental disability, and crippling pain. So Shepherd is literally sent in as an agent of capital to kill them, and you don’t have anyway to express any sympathy to the biotics. The paragon path is literally just telling the biotic leader that you won’t kill him if he lets the chairman go, and whooooa as soon as you convince the leader to stand down, the chairman has a change of heart. This stood out to me cause it’s just a small side quest, but the series both sides genocide and has you actually commit genocide in 2. The Batarians, despite the series trying their best to paint an entire species as xenophobic slaver/terrorists, are victim to multiple war crimes committed by the player character. The game has created a situation where there are ‘good’ aliens (the council races) and ‘bad’ aliens (batarians/vorcha/krogan) and the lives of the ‘bad’ aliens matter significantly less than the good aliens. You get hordes of vorcha and batarians to kill, and dialogue and story reinforces the fact that it’s okay. There might as well be calipers in the game. It’s honestly kind of fucked to play through.

    • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      3 years ago

      Mass Effect always had a “screw Batarians, am I right?” attitude, framing them as both pathetic and yet vaguely menacing. Real ur-fascist hours.

    • RamrodBaguette [comrade/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      The way the Batarians have been portrayed, from the very start, has always rubbed me the wrong way. Shepard, who is portrayed as a force for good (even his Renegade path has him framed as “crude but effective”), derisively tries to justify the Batarians being outcasts when talking with a terrorist leader speaking about their grievances. Even the goody-goody Paragon options doesn’t have anything to convey sympathy. Then comes Mass Effect 2 where Zaeed, the veteran of a fucking PMC, is portrayed as having a moral compass since he refused to let Batarians (“Goddamn Terrorists”) join the Blue Suns when he lead them (as opposed to his greedy partner). They’re so obviously a stand-in for [designated bad guy in the global periphery], even incorporating some of the DPRK (being a “Hermit Kingdom” and all).

      Also, another thing about ME is that class conflict seems to never be brought to the forefront, despite the Galaxy being a crapsacharine neoliberal hellhole where corporations and their mercenary companies run amok, and poverty is still an everpresent problem. It’s effort to be a “dark” science fiction setting just end up making it Capitalist Realist as fuck.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 years ago

      Mass effect is reactionary trash. The entire premise of the game is that you’re an ultra-cop who can do anything he wants and fuck the law. The whole Krogan genocide is a great replacement narrative.

    • Barabas [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      3 years ago

      Mass Effect has also always been ridiculously US centric and thus pro US military when it comes to depictions of humanity as a whole. It goes for all races, but if you’re a civilian you’re usually depicted as either useless or just conniving evil, and we should listen more to the military. Take the council or Udina, they’re all just useless pencil pushers who want PROOF that something is happening before they want to act, luckily we have Colin Powell… I mean Admiral Anderson there to back you up.

      This isn’t even touching the ideological nightmare that is the spectres.

  • WittyProfileName2 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    3 years ago
    Dishonored.

    Don’t get me wrong, I love all the Dishonored games (Death of the Outsider is my favourite), but there is a deeply liberal undercurrent to the series.

    Both mainline games are about getting rid of the bad aristocratic tyrant and replacing them with the “good” and “rightful” heir to the throne of Dunwall. The most telling part of this is the conflict between the Abbey of the Everyman and any supernatural covens/gangs like the Bridgemoore witches or Daud’s Whalers.

    Both the Whalers and the witches have specific complaints within society; the Whalers are comprised of former gang members and disenfranchised labourers radicalised by the inequality in Dunwall, whereas the Bridgemoore witches are a radical feminist movement. Conversely the Abbey of the Everyman is a calvinist cult that carries out brutal crackdowns of anyone perceived to be a witch. Despite this the Abbey of the Everyman is consistently framed as being terrible but still the lesser evil. The Overseers essentially fall into the “woke” liberal defence of policing, “Yeah sure they’re bad, torturing and murdering randos and all that. But what are you gonna do if a witch turns up and starts killing people? That’s why we need more Overseers and they need to be increasingly militarised.”

    When Delilah Copperspoon takes control of Dunwall and thus the Empire of the Isles, the Bridgemoore witches begin committing mass murder on the streets because… I don’t know they’re the baddies.

    Time and time again the series shows any attempt to change the status quo resulting in pointless bloodbaths and mindless chaos, a status quo that need I remind you is a combination of Dickensian squalor and the Spanish inquisition.

    Any changes that happen for the better, happen within the confines of the system. The miners union is the one group that is shown to be uncomplicatedly good, but even they are ineffective in timelines where the duke owns the mine because the union is only using peaceful protest. A kinda washed down vision of historical labour struggles.

    The series is deeply critical of the aristocratic class. Every entry in it depicts them as selfish hedonists who’ll bleed a beggar to death if they think it will get them a good high at best, and brutal eugenicists willing to let a disease ravage the population in order to get rid of “undesirables” at worst. But this criticism falls weak when the right answer time and time again is always “replace the bad toffs with good toffs”.

    The system isn’t a problem it’s the people, in other words.

  • mr_world [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    3 years ago

    Bioshock Infinite.

    The city of Columbia was built as a haven for the ruling class of 1800s America. Complete with a white underclass and, of course, slaves. It was built by a scientist who discovered a new technology and was to serve as a floating World’s Fair showing the world how great and advanced America is. Pretty okay premise if done right. Many opportunities to talk about real history and draw comparisons to today. The city is politically divided among several factions, which isn’t a fleshed out mechanic in the game due to development issues. But you have a cult that worships John Wilkes Booth and hates Lincoln for ending slavery. You have people who are hyper religious and treat the Founders as religious prophets. You have normal upper middle-class people who are tuned out to the politics. You also have the revolutionary group Vox Populi who are trying to overthrow Columbia’s government and install actual democracy. Again, some great ideas in there for good stories based in real history. But then somewhere towards the end of the game it makes the Vox Populi just as bad as the imperialist, racists, sexists, zealots. When you start the game there is a couple being physically abused for miscegenation, in front of a cheering crowd. Yet the black lady trying to stop it is bad because her and other workers killed some cops and are pushing the middle class white people out of the city. It’s total “both extremes are really the same” kind of thing. And to make the revolutionary leader bad they write her to kill a baby or something? It’s been a while I can’t remember if she tries to kill Elizabeth or just Comstock. She was also going to use Columbia’s weapons and invade NYC to liberate people on land too. But that’s bad because NYC in the late 1800s/early 1900s was good.

    Some people might bring up the development troubles as a reason the story got so simplified into horseshoe theory. But there are early gameplay videos from before the troubles started that show Vox Populi implying they want to sexually assault Elizabeth. So they meant for them to be bad from the beginning. The only real thing that was different was that Comstock was supposed to me more nuanced. So the people’s revolution of communists were pretty much always a political cartoon and they had to jam the right wing factions into one guy. Instead of getting the subtleties of “cleanse all the immigrants” from many different factions, we get it from one guy. Thanks 2k/Irrational.

    Ken Levine is a fucking hack and always has been. Keep him away from games.