this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2022
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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:

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (9 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

The SpecTRe program is so good for storytelling purposes as it gives you a reason to do whatever you want while also giving you a strict mission guideline to do.

But it's not a great thing to have when you really think about it.

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