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:

top 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] 3 points 4 years ago (1 child)

The Last of Us 2Neil 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.

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • load more comments (1 reply)
    [–] 1 point 4 years ago (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 4 years ago (7 children)

    I'm surprised no one here has mentioned Assassin's Creed yet. All conflict in history stems from two competing ideological sects of callous murderers who wanton manipulate populations into doing their bidding and for some reason one side in this conflict is supposed to be the moral superior of the other. Also some of the supplemental material is batshit and basically just a way for the devs to denote certain historical figures as good or bad depending on what organization they belonged to. All other conflicts are secondary to the overarching philosophical differences of two sects competing for magical thingies.

    At the same time those games have probably the most sympathetic portrayal of Marx in a western piece of fiction, so there's that.

  • source
  • hideshow 7 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 4 years ago (6 children)

    they made marx a lib which is argubly worse

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 6 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 4 years ago (4 children)

    Tbf I think he was criticizing propaganda of the deed anarchists, it’s a big factor in the split of the first internationale.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 4 years ago (3 children)
  • [–] 1 point 4 years ago (2 children)

    …no, banishing anarchists from the first internationale didn’t make him a lib

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 4 years ago (3 children)

    bioshock 2 communism is when you do the borg and no one matters, also the collectivist is portrayed way less sympathetically than the libertarian nutjob

  • source
  • hideshow 3 child comments
  • load more comments (3 replies)
    [–] 1 point 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (4 children)

    The entire battlefield 4 campaign is you helping the guy who tried to do a colour revolution in China lmao. Like that's the plot, trying to free the guy. Which results in war with China ofc. Also you take in a boat of refugees from Shanghai of all places onto your aircraft carrier, those poor people probably had a much better standard of living over there than they'll ever have in the USA.

    Bonus points for Call of Duty black ops II, where you help the Taliban to fight against Russia, and help the apartheid supported UNITA forces to fight the MPLA. You literally fight for the Taliban and apartheid South Africa proxy forces.

  • source
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 4 years ago* (1 child)

    Also the Modern Warfare Reboot, which (beyond the whole "Highway of Death" controversy) tries to paint a US-aligned Middle Eastern collaborator freedom fighter as having gone "too far" because he used chemical weapons in that one flashback.

    Which is pretty hypocritical for the protagonists who regularly do heinous shit on a regular basis in the vein of getting the job done, and never having it blow up in their faces.

    There's an excellent video on it.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 1 point 4 years ago (9 children)

    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.

  • source
  • hideshow 9 child comments
  • [–] [S] 1 point 4 years ago (4 children)

    Which one of those propaganda pieces pretending to be games had evil South Americans steal a doomsday weapon from the United States (only evil in their hands of course), but when your elite black ops tacticools seize it back, you save the day by using the same doomsday weapon on those scary evil foreigners? :amerikkka-clap:

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 4 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 4 years ago (2 children)

    Oh I think that was one of the ghost games, I think? Wasn't it an orbiting rail cannon or something?

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 4 years ago

    OOooo look at the poor widdle north amerika sooo weak and demoralized by the evil brown man.... :( :( :( :( will you help us save them?? would you still love us?? :((( ???? you probably wouldnt :( :( :( or would you :) :) ;)

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 4 years ago (2 children)

    Minecraft's villager and pillager colonial mechanics is weird.

  • source
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • load more comments (2 replies)
    [–] [S] 1 point 4 years ago* (1 child)

    I'll add one more for now. I will never forget that back in Civilization II, the corruption mechanic that most civilizations had to deal with in the modern era could be bypassed simply by choosing "democracy" as the game describes it over its competitors. We never have corruption in US-style "democracy" do we? :amerikkka-clap: Also, inventing capitalism has absolutely no downsides and is only a boon, though to be fair all capitalism does on its own is allow you to convert your people's labor into additional money which checks out. :marx-hi:

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • load more comments (1 reply)
    [–] 1 point 4 years ago*

    Company of Heroes 2 which portrays the USSR as evil for conscripting its people to fight in die in a "pointless" war to... checks notes ...defend itself from an army hellbent on waging a war of extermination against it. But that's just low-hanging fruit.

    For something more subtle, I'd say most games that lament the "Evils of Humanity" feel pretty reactionary. The idea that something bad is inherent to humans (war, crime, bigotry, corruption, etc) and we just have to learn to accept it, without any other investigation into the matter. One game that comes to mind is Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux where

    spoilerthe new ending has the main character turn immortal and get stuck into an endless cycle of needing to purge the Dark World over and over again because humanity cannot stop its self-destructive tendencies. Keep in mind that this is supposed to be an allegory for climate change.

  • source
  • [–] 1 point 4 years ago (1 child)

    XCOM: Chimera Squad. 👏 More 👏 xeno 👏 SWAT 👏 teams 👏

    All problems can be solved by kicking in the door guns blazing. Don't have any evidence? Don't worry, if you bust in and kill everyone, maybe you'll find some!

  • source
  • hideshow 1 child comment
  • [–] 1 point 4 years ago

    We've fought long and bitterly against our subjugation. Now that humanity has access to literal space-age technology, we can grow as a united civilization to great heights!

    Wait, it's just the same as before but with aliens? Okay then...

  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 1 point 4 years ago*

    Hearts of Iron: Nazi whitewashing. Nazi fantasy simulator. Goddamn fucking Nazi fanbase.

    Europa Universalis: Colonial Nazi simulator with religious persecution button, Pogrom button, slave trading button, honestly more offensive than HOI because all the atrocity is extremely normalised and in fact optimal play

  • source
  • [–] 1 point 4 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.

  • source
  • hideshow 9 child comments
  • [–] 1 point 4 years ago (2 children)

    The more the Batarians get genocided the nicer they become lol

    It's heavily implied in 3 that they'll become good aliens after their entire civilisation was destroyed.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • load more comments (1 reply)
  • [–] 1 point 4 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.

  • source
  • parent
  • load more comments (5 replies)
    [–] 1 point 4 years ago*

    The Civ series is basically Whig History: The Game.

  • source
  • load more comments
    view more: next ›