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?
To be fair to Starfield: as an American, I get confused if you ask me to choose between anything other than fascism and capitalism
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.
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.
i’ll still kill the ultra rich CEO, you don’t need to have private “entrepreneurs” to create jobs
there are other ways
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.
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 🙄
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.
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
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.
