cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1902564
its actually more like 5-7 books
How is disco Elysium leftist? Didnt play it, so honestly asking
It’s a highly political game in general, and it’s pretty obvious the critiques of communism were written by insiders.
It’s also the best illustration of the complexities of investigative police work I’ve ever seen in a computer game.
It’s also a lot of dialogue. But the voice acting is superb.
Themes and dialogue? It pretty clearly favors the more anti-authoritarian forms of socialism while heavily criticizing communism and fascism. The ultra-liberals come off the best of the lot but it’s also made clear that they offer no solutions to the problems the city has and capital will always call the shots at the expense of workers.
Also, on a meta level, the creators got screwed over by capitalists because that’s just what a scorpion will do if you give it a ride across a river.
I also liked that it doesn’t say that all followers of an ideology are good or bad people. A lot of media that tries to tackle ideologies just make everyone in the general direction of an opposing ideology horrible people. In Disco Elysium is not as black and white. There are good and bad people in every broad ideology. Are you a bad person, just because you believe in capitalism? No. Are you a good person, just because you believe in communism? Also no. Disco Elysium is very nuanced while making it’s cases.
There was a good Royalist? I’m guessing you mean Rene, because it sure wasn’t Gary the Cryptofascist or Measurehead or the Racist Lorry Driver. Imo the only thing that stopped Rene from becoming someone like Dros were his relationships with Gaston and Evrart. If he had been “alone” the way Dros was then the investigation may have gone quite differently
It pretty clearly favors the more anti-authoritarian forms of socialism while heavily criticizing communism and fascism
I hate to break it to you but communism is stateless. If you have a state, it’s not communism, it’s socialism. All communism is necessarily anarchist.
Also, on a meta level, the creators got screwed over by capitalists because that’s just what a scorpion will do if you give it a ride across a river.
Or maybe they were really good at coming up with stuff, but really bad at managing projects. And when the organization grew to more than a few people they couldn’t handle it anymore and couldn’t deliver on what they had committed to.
Everyone has a story in this particular screw up, and while I really would like the moral to be “capitalism bad/creatives good”, it sounds like your average SME implosion.
“Hey, all the creators keep saying this went down, but I do love the taste of corpro cock, so I’m just going to make up my own version.”
It’s very reminiscent of the Paris commune, where Parisian pre-marxist socialists were killed almost to the last by the french army after they’d built a short-lived commune. It was basically the end of the Proudhonist idea of socialism (no gods, no masters), which provided space for Marxism to take over in France and particularly in Paris.
It’s very leftist; the dialogue is full of political speak with honest critiques of different ideologies. The story itself is set in Revachol, a place where a communist revolution was crushed by the Coalition (a foreign capitalist military alliance of the most powerful countries and somewhat of a stand-in for NATO), similar to what happened to Libya and the USSR.
The game centers around you (a cop) trying to solve a murder mystery that has something to do with the local Dockworkers’ Union striking for overtime pay, workplace democracy etc from a megacorporation.
Alot of the creators are also communists, as you can see from one of the (ex) writers for the game recently saying that the workplace culture after the recent lay-offs of alot of the writers was like “transitioning from the Soviet Union to the fascist Russian Federation”
what happened in Libya
NATO only got involved in Libya after the civil war was in full swing and Gaddafi’s regime had been commiting crimes against humanity vs the civilian population where people were showing support for not his regime.
And NATO only went in with the authorization of the UN Security Council, and the left when the Security Council told them to (against the wishes of the newly formed government after the death of Gaddafi)
NATO only got involved in Libya after the civil war was in full swing
“The country was already in a terrible state after we funded countless insurgencies in it since forcing them to give up self-defence programs. We just went in and finished the job.”
Libya had gone from one of the poorest countries in the world to having the highest human development index of any country in Africa by 2010 under the Socialist government, and became a powerful anti-capitalist force in Africa. The US and UK forced Libya to give up their nuclear weapons program in 2003 and used the resulting lack of a deterrent to fund insugencies in the country, then used that as a casus belli to invade and destroy it in 2011.
Come on, we’ve seen this play out time and time again with the US and its allies (or the Imperial core in general). Be it the wars in Vietnam, Cuba, Afganistan or the countless coup’s against leftist governments in Africa and Latin America. Every single time saying that their governments are bad or something as an excuse to invade and destroy a threat to imperialism, as if them waging wars and killing people on the other side of the world is supposed to improve something.
We’re literally watching this happen in Palestine right now with the US-backed “israel” forcing Palestinians to use armed resistance against their oppressors, then using that as a casus belli by calling it “terrorism” to invade and commit the ongoing genocide.
who here said anything about call of duty?
edit: in case you were genuinely asking in good faith, it’s different because disco elysium is not a capitalist mouthpiece
Because the quality of Disco Elysium comes from it feeling like a piece if art that stays with you, it is absolutely written by left leaning writers but it’s mature and elegant in it’s storytelling tbaf happens to revolve around those ideologies.
Call of duty is a for-profit propaganda tool of the US government that is rimarily a multiplayer arena shooter designed to optimise profits due to gaming addictions while passively normalising American world police imperialism.
Apologies for any typos I wrote this while drunk.
