games

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"

Yeah, HoI4 inherently has an interesting double bind as a WW2 game, being stuck between "let players do the Holocaust" and "ignore the Holocaust." It's a problem I've thought about myself, and I've heard or come up with a couple of possible solutions:

• Depict the Holocaust through events that fire off for Allied players when they capture the provinces where Dachau, Auschwitz, etc. were located. This acknowledges the event in a way that makes it invisible to a German player, hopefully robbing them of any satisfaction.
• The brute force option: Do not let players play as Germany. Do not let players use the dev console to tag switch to Germany. Take down any Steam Workshop mods that allow the player to play as Germany.
• The historical realism option: Make Germany a completely dysfunctional mess with a putrid, unsustainable ideology that is doomed to fail. Its Ponzi Scheme economy means it must constantly pick fights against harder and harder targets. Its reliance on slave labor results in widespread sabotage that cripples its industries. Its horrific occupation policies result in it facing overwhelming resistance in conquered territories. There is no level of player skill that would allow Germany to emerge the winner, barring ousting the Nazis from power.

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’m not even in my mid 20s yet but I’ve become jaded with video games and media in general. I never finished reading Capitalist Realism because it meanders too much, but the first few chapters stuck with me. Every piece of media wants to critique “the system” but all of them fail to say anything meaningful. At this point, any time I see the word “mega corporation” in the premise of a game or movie, I immediately dismiss it as dogshit.

The exception would be Andor. Probably the only mainstream piece of media that doesn’t obscure the ugly truths of what it means to resist an oppressive force.

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.

Don’t forget that they also took away civilian casualties even though that would affect so many things like production, recruiting, and psychology. They added this to Vicky 3 but I don’t know. The warfare kind of sucks and yes I know they didn’t want to prioritize that. But if you’re going to add all these dependent systems you might as well show the carnage.

But the best part is that many Paradox fans (and developers, I assume, since they’re e*ros) believe that Stalin is more evil than Hitler, but they have mechanics for the great purge and famine. Don’t forget CoD with their “gulag” mechanic In their own logic, they don’t even take what they consider genocide seriously because if they truly believed their own words, there’d be characters fighting each other with AKs and striped pajamas

While I never played COD, these threads always remind me of the scene where they portray the Highway of Death as a Russian atrocity. Straight up revisionism...

But the in popular media are staggering. In addition to OPs examples, I notice how in LNs it is a trope that the main character gets to own slaves, but it's not bad in their case, because they are good slave owners and tread them well... It is so fucking messed up. On a related note, I'd like to see a John Brown Isekai

The worldbuilding in a lot of games is shite nowadays. It's all rushed out, and if it's triple A it's got too much money riding on it to have something controversial in it that potentially tanks it's sales.

Probably also something about the target market being g*mers.

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.

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.

Ok I can kind of see this argument but I have to completely disagree here. You say remove the horrors of Nazis as if their fans would look at that genocide button and be like "huh this is bad actualy?" Completely the opposite of reality imo. They would see it as glorification and justification for their own views.

Furthermore we all know pretty well what everyone even remotely leftist, let alone everyone on this site would be saying about PDX if they literaly gave you a genocide button.

I don't think the game handles history particularly well, and obviously the players are already problematic. But exactly because of this I don't see how giving you a genocide button wouldn't just make it even worse here.

PDX is not that straightforward, they've done decently well all with Vicky 3 politics all things considered. But on the other hand you can go do whatever war crimes you want in Stellaris. Yes its obvious the corporate decision making here but if the main argument is a WW2 strategy game would be better with ample depictions of the war crimes committed then I don't agree at all.

Yes perhaps WW2 media should emphasize the horrors is an argument that could be made, but the reality is does it actually help our current situation? On a case by case basis maybe, but mostly if your audience is already leaning fashy then no, it is literally rewarding them for their views. There is no such thing as introspection at a large scale, people don't look at horrible shit and go "wow this is bad actualy I don't like this anymore" on the contrary they are more likely to double down and reinforce their beliefs.

Religious(Christian) fundamentalism is exactly like this, show them evidence of God's crimes in the bible for example and they go "but you don't understand God is good actually because [BS here]". So why would a Nazi look at HOI4s hypothetical Holocaust button as anything more than a validation of their views?

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.

This is how I feel playing just about any game set in America.

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.

Final Fantasy XIV tried to make Limsa Lominsa morally gray by making them a settler state that displaced the Kobold and Sahagin tribes, and it still makes you help the settler state against the tribes for plot reasons. Just allow me to help those that deserve it for once

Yes, and it makes a number of games (and shows, and movies, and books) unbearably draining to read. If the point of presenting a miserable setting is to get off to the misery, I'm not interested. I can enjoy fiction that takes place in a bad place, but if the badness is the self-indulgent point and everyone with agency and presence in the fiction is an asshole, I'm not interested.

that's particularly grotesque in a series like AC that prides itself on historical accuracy (except for the 3000 year shadow war between two secret societies that was the true cause of all historical events of course).

i'll be honest i didn't know starfield had a plot. i thought it was kinda like no man's sky where you just zip around doing deliveries or shooting pirates or clicking the mouse button to extract selenium from barren planet #32,890

OMG FINALLY. Have been meaning to offload this re AC Odyssey. Less problematic than the awful treatment of slavery, but equally to-your-face-annoying, the whole main story — to the extent there is one — is basically ORANGE MAN BAD (Kleon was literally orange haired lmao) POPULISM BAD (I’d be mad if war and hunger going on but Perikles keep jerking off to his temples) BUT WE MUST DEFEND DEMOCRACY TOGETHER WITH, hold on … SOCRATES?! Like it’s so nauseatingly CIVILITY liberalism it made me stop half way in my ng+ play through after I so painfully fine tuned all my gears and engravings /rant

I finally got around to watching Elysium and I was sorta glad they didn't try to both sides the guy who was essentially a gang leader, and let him be a positive force against the super rich who had a "heal everyone on earth" button the whole fucking time.

i had to quit and uninstall AC odyssey after a recent replay when it portrayed the slaveowning family of the king of sparta as some lighthearted suburban family that just liked to play fight with sticks. not a slave in sight outside of that one obnoxious "slaves are hapy actually, don't ask about how house slaves were made/treated in ancient societies please" (hint: it involves castration so you won't fuck the owners wife while he travels for business, best case scenario you get your dick attached to your scrotum with a piercing) side quest, when the vast majority of sparta's population was slaves (significantly outnumbering the proportional population of slaves in rome or athens, for example), with a small peripheral artisan class in addition to the military aristocracy. i had enjoyed that game in the past, too.