this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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I mostly agree with your take, though I dont see why they should spend any time justifying how the society got how things got the way they are. Real life is usually a mixed bag of good and bad. And I'm here for the space game, not a societal critique.
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I think the confusion is from thinking they were trying to make a star Trek space game. I've played it a bunch and it's very clear that was not what they were going for.
The issue is the incongruity and how it's fundamentally irresponsible to write inherently bad things in an uncritical or positive way. It's fine to have morally grey things, but they should be consistent: the problems need to be shown, the consequences need to be shown.
For example with the UC one can't just be like "so yeah it's a military dictatorship that renders anyone who hasn't done a term of service in the government as stateless, but uh they do social welfare and they're super tolerant and nice and stuff" because that doesn't make sense: it's incongruous that a state oriented around brutal militarism and its war machine that demands people actively participate in its machine to attain basic rights is then going to be this paragon of religious and cultural tolerance with a social safety net for all its stateless residents; it needs brutality and rage and sadism or it would not be designed the way it is, it would not have the rulers it does, it would not allow the social problems that it has.
That's why I describe it as it either needs to be better or worse: it needs ideological compassion and a drive to improve things for the people even if it is materially unable to do so and it needs to lose the fascism to do this, or its villainy needs to be played straight and its tone should reflect its elitist and militarist nature with the consequences of what such a system wants and needs put front and center.
Unexamined Starship Troopers brain has infested generations of consumers and those consumers are now writing stories.
Fuck it literally is
It's just what the US will be once it goes into space and it's borders become nebulous. It's the smiling face of neoliberal fascism (in space edition). Poor people in the US already live in that world.
There's nothing wrong with any of the analysis here, and I agree with all of it, but I think they are more applicable to a directed narrative experience or a movie rather than a sandbox game that simulates the authors world and serves as a hub for a bunch of different isolated stories.
It's good analysis and very informative for games like Disco Elysium or Baldurs Gate 3, but maybe not as useful for sandbox games that don't have a main plotline. Other sandbox games like GTA have similarly flavored settings.
I was also originally very turned off by the lack of personality in the factions and how generic a lot of the things are in the universe, but it really is a universe and there are a ton of different stories that are built on top of it and I'm starting to recognize that the stories might actually benefit from having a canvas that more closely reflects our own world to build on top of.
Damn, this is good media criticism.
Yeah damn I'm glad I posted this thread cause some of these posters have very interesting things to say.
some of my favourite threads to lurk in on the subreddit were the ones relating to vidya and their worldbuilding looked at through a marxist lense. it gives me easy examples to understand the theory and it's just fun to see clever people talking about dumb shit
Good lord how can someone write fascist apologia that stupid.
Like, c'mon for fuck sakes
The genre is "immersive sim", though a very corporate "mass appeal" dumb-down of the genre. You cannot escape politics in a game about factions of humans navigating problems of scarcity, ownership, social disputes, etc., whether it is "IN SPACE" or not. What the hell do you think the stories would even be otherwise?
Not sure if you are disputing this or not but just FYI there is a ton of societal critique in the game, but the world itself reflects the American hellscape where the main forces in play are blue fascism or red fascism and there is no communist force anywhere. I'm having fun shooting the empire in the face without facing real life consequences.
I think that's an excessively generous characterization
Of the factions? The world of GTA is similar. That kind of setting flavor isn't necessarily bad for open world sandbox games. I just wish there was a "good faction" to join. The crimson fleet is the only good choice it seems for now
LMAO, if you don't want "politics" go choose a "rogue-like", not an RPG
Tbf the biggest rpguelike is traditionally Binding of Isaac
Ok, I meant "no talk, only pew pew"
Because that's the foundation of good world building, otherwise the setting comes out as flat, boring, inconsistent and completely arbitrary
It fleshes out and cements the stakes of the story, provides scale and the chance for the characters to be grounded in anything other than archetypal traits, that's why in the most celebrated sci fi, the setting itself defines the story as much if not more than the characters