So, I’ve been playing cyberpunk 2077 and terra Invicta recently and there’s just a couple things that consistently bug me. Now look, I’m not expecting them to be fair to China and the DPRK and Cuba and what not. If I did then I wouldn’t be able to enjoy anything ever in this world. But then there’s other things that just make me believe that Johne Locke rose from his grave to write some code for these games.
For cyberpunk 2077, it’s the police. Apparently, literally 9/10 cops you meet are “the last honest cop in Night city.” After the fifth time hearing this exact line I almost think there’s some inside joke I’m not getting. Sure youre told the ncpd is corrupt sometimes (maybe), and in their little “safe and sound” show, the ncpd says cops may ask for bribes and that you should give them bribes. But like, that’s never shown. The cops you do see are
Detective who wants to get to the bottom of hard cases the brass doesn’t want solved, and to save his nephew from a serial killer
Two police officers who are definitely good and who just want to help their friend Barry, who’s sad his turtle died and who is angry at the brass for covering things up
Cop who sacrifices his life in order to steal life saving medical equipment from arasaka, who only procures stolen cars for the corrupt brass
Cop who does what the brass tells him to do in order to protect himself and his daughter
[Edit was wrong on this one, didnt know there were different choices for this mission and that hes actually not a good cop. My bad.] Detective who hires you to steal bd scrolls so he doesn’t have to go through the trouble of getting warrants
cop who beats you for stealing a car from a corpo, but disobeys orders from said corpo and spares you from death
You get the point. It’s classic COD levels of writing for these guys. “All the problems are caused by the corrupt management and bureaucracy all the cops are really good guys at heart.” Have you ever met cops? Like sure, I’m not saying literally 100% of them are sociopathic serial killers(although i think you have to be a little fucked in the head to do what they do), but the police department doesn’t attract the type of people who want to help the community. It’s literally almost as bad (or hell, I’d say maybe worse in some respects) than literal Dick Wolfe tier cop shows. And it doesn’t help that the game is constantly telling you “man the ncpd are some bad guys. The ncpd are just another gang. The ncpd work with Tyger claws” etc. I wouldn’t be as critical if my ears weren’t hearing one thing and my eyes were seeing another. (Note:To be…too fair, there are essentially corpo cops who do actually get the treatment they deserve. People like Reed and Takemura aren’t bad people on a personal level, but they’re beholden to the interests of their capitalists and so you end up at odds with them because they do their dirty work. I don’t think theres enough questioning of Reeds “for muh country” shit, but at the very least he’s not given a free pass like the ncpd is. Same with Takemura, although it’s never really shown how bad he can be really, opposed to just not liking Yorinobu.)
Terra Invicta is comparably smaller, but I hate their democracy vs totalitarianism crap. Looking around at the starting scores it’s literally like those freedom institute maps.
Cuba, with direct democracy, free elections, accountable representatives, etc.
Grrr totalitarian nightmare
Thailand, the US, etc.
Aww, flawed democracies are still democracies
But then you look some more and it just has you asking if these people researched 5 minutes of political science before making some decisions. Like, really, south korea and Japan are “full democracies.” One is a corrupt hellhole ran by megacorps who can raid and persecute anyone deemed helping North korea, and the other literally has a system to make getting rid of their one party dominance near impossible. At least give them the flawed democracy tag if it’s so hard to understand anything else.
It’s like, I really do enjoy playing both of these games but those two things are just constantly in the back of my mind saying “these people aren’t as intelligent as you think”
It gets more insidious when you have the mission in Phantom Liberty I believe where there is a explicitly socialist faction that you basically have the option to encourage one of the members (I believe a lower-level corpo) of it to “flee” when it is subtly implied they are being manipulated by the group. BioTechnica then appears and you have the option to turn Nele in, dooming the group or kill the Biotechnica agents.
Anyone remember the name of the faction? I don’t have much time now but I’ll look it up later.
I know exactly what you’re talking about. I fucking hate that mission too. The game railroads you into their forced moral dilemma of “hey du u forgive Nelly for being a terrorist now that she’s stopping terror attacks” and I’m just sitting there like “I’ve seen the shit biotechnica does, let me blow up that net bomb myself.” And the fact that Johnny is there too saying exactly what I’m thinking and the game is still not letting you agree with him at all is ridiculous. (The faction is called the crimson road btw [edit:no its not, it’s crimson harvest, sorry])
Honestly the phantom liberty side content really varies between really fun and fairly well written (the Zetatech scav mission, dazed and confused) to insanely railroaded and boring (this mission and shot by both sides comes to mind)
welcome to [western RPG], where you can forge your own path with dynamic choices. This will all culminate with a big battle involving any of these four factions you can choose. We have:
- Fascism
- Libertarianism
- Corrupted liberal democracy
- Independent
these four factions allow a deep exploration of different ideological convictions. which one will you choose? beware! they’re all ~equally flawed~ to keep you discussing for years and years. huh? wassat? a faction that represents the workers? huh? productive forces? class disparity? what the fuck are you talking about?
oh?
that old dusty political theory? well, no, don’t worry, we have an anarchist faction, too. :^)
And then everyone acts like it’s the greatest game ever, with astounding writing that no game since has matched.
x1000 this
Yeah, when you start critically engaging with it, enjoying media becomes harder each day. I decided to finally start developing a game this year, I don’t know what yet, but it will have very big communist themes, so there’s that.
The Outer Worlds (not to be confused with Outer Wilds) is pretty good on this, considering it’s made within the capitalist west. It’s sorta like “what if capitalism went to a space colony and went full company towns with zero regulation”. It’s a bit weak in terms of the revolutionary themes and having that problem just about every western game seems to have where it gets pretty vague where revolution is concerned (along with the common RPG problem of implicit “great man theory”). But the criticism and parody of capitalism and its consequences is cathartic, I find. And you can certainly choose to be the anti-corporate route in full. I also like that it isn’t one of those liberal debate bro written games where choosing to be the “bad guy” is treated as a legitimate moral choice. With some of the more pivotal decisions you make, I think it’s pretty obvious about the fact that choosing to be the baddie is bad and there’s not a lot of complexity to it.
It could be better still, but compared to Cyberpunk 2077, I think it is significantly better on a socialist front. I found that Cyberpunk 2077 mostly seems like an anti-corporate aesthetic with little attention paid to actually enacting the themes beyond that aesthetic. And as we know, or come to know as we learn about these things, it’s not as simple as being anti-corporate or anti-capitalist. You need to have the alternative to embrace and build too, and Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t seem to get into that much at all. It feels more like an escapism, individualist-focused thing to me (as in, the character is doing an escapism rather than confronting or even understanding systemic problems). The closest thing to a socialist faction that I can recall is a communal faction that isn’t explicitly socialist or communist, which seems to just be a vague stand-in for indigenous groups in RL. Doing anti-corporate themes without socialism meaningfully represented is erasure and it hides the realities of history and present day from people. It defangs the frustrations by separating them out from the solutions. A person who hates capitalism, or even just “corporations”, but can’t see solutions, will become nihilistic rather than revolutionary. And I think that’s more the direction Cyberpunk 2077 goes in, is a nihilistic one.
My one complaint about the Outer Worlds is you still don’t get any communist faction choices. In fact, you’re kinda led by the narrative to choose balanced, liberal capitalist choices. If you go full anti-corpo, there’s usually some dialogue implying things will be bad, and the full-corpo route is just comically evil. Balance, though, is usually presented as sensible and sustainable. The anti-corporate choices also all seem to lack anything like socialism, just different flavors of anarchism.
It’s been awhile since I played it, though. Maybe I missed something. The self-aware anticapitalism was great, but the limited solutions and presenting anticapitalism as violent anarchy with questionable demagogues was… disappointing.
I don’t remember it seeming like “liberal capitalist choices” overall, but there may be instances of choices that are worse than others that I’m forgetting. I do agree for sure on the other point though, which gets into what I mentioned about the revolutionary themes being kind of vague. The anarchists don’t really go as far as being socialist/communist, as I recall, and there is a bit of that “a leader might be corrupt because they aren’t a perfect beacon of morality in every single decision” trope thing going on. But the trajectory of things is at least something where you can overall “upend” the prevailing social order and do your own, even if vague. As opposed to, IIRC in Cyberpunk 2077, it’s more just about you and the world’s social order remains more or less the same overall (if there is an ending where this is not the case, I missed it or forgot).
I remember something about the colonization effort being unsustainable and basically doomed to failure unless it was properly guided, so there was an undercurrent of the decentralized anticapitalist choices would ultimately kill everybody. But again, years have gone by. I could just be misremembering.
That could have been a corporate line, sounds plausibly like something one of the corporate types would have said. But I suppose the other thing is, if it was said outside of them, the context matters a lot; marxist-leninists for example don’t believe in an unguided series of anarchist outposts to deal with capitalism. So being opposed to decentralization in certain contexts isn’t necessarily an anti-communist view.
If I replay it again soon enough, I’ll try to remember to keep an eye out for this. I’m curious. I’ve played it multiple times over the years, but some of it blurs together.
There are a lot of games I still really enjoy that do these kinds of things, but I am much more aware of them the more I have read. Sometimes I think it comes from internalized propaganda, and sometimes I think it is a conscious effort being put out. I am a bit more understanding of the former just because I was there at one point too. Generally I can look past that stuff while also acknowledging it is there and a problem.
I played 1000xResist late last year; I like VN type stories and heard it was a really good sci-fi story, which I also usually like. I did not expect how much present day Chinese politics would feature in the game (I was unaware that the game was chinese diaspora developed when I first started it). I got about half way through before I just moved on to something else, because it was just getting insufferable about Hong Kong.
That was on me for not doing due diligience. If I had spent five minutes looking into it before buying it, I would have realised that it was banned in China and why. Would have saved me the purchase.
Terra Invicta was one I had on my list, but kind of a shame to know they have that framing of the world politics stuff. Paradox games, for all the flaws they have, at least TRY to do a reasonable job at that shit. They don’t always succeed and their fanbases tend to lean towards the fascist, but the development teams themselves do…alright. Not great, they definitely fall into a lot of liberal european thinking, but I don’t think they are actively trying to vilify socialism.
I think the Paradox team is a bit more left-leaning than a lot think; or certain parts of it. I think they are beholden to maintaining a large facsimile of that lib-centrist ideologue because a good chunk of their fanbase is map-game fascists.
Look also at the City Guards trope. TV Tropes has a page on it and ironically falls for the trope by comparing it to the police.
The police are city guards and not the other way around. They didn’t exist for most of history, how would a feudal lord who didn’t even own coins but only barley and a manor even pay for an entire armed and armored guard that only ever did rounds around the city? How do you justify taking people away from farm work, give them an expensive weapon and armor, and then put them to work walking around town the entire day?
I’ve been playing Skyrim and they’re clearly an institution of its own over there. City guards wear the same armor throughout Skyrim, despite all holds and towns being ruled by autonomous lords swearing fealty to a ruler of their own (the Stormcloaks or the Empire).
By the time ‘city guards’ came to the real world they were usually existing for a reason, i.e. colonial towns in the Americas used them to protect against decolonial attempts from the Indigenous and they were conscripted from the population in rotation.
I was really disappointed in Disco Elysium. The way online gamer leftists go on about it would think playing it is praxis.
The climax of game’s communist path is stacking match boxes and holding them up with “communist” faith. The presentation of communism was sarcastic and nonsensical. I don’t know how fascism is presented when you pursue that path but at best it treats it with the same distain as it treats communism.
Media that says “communism doesn’t even work in a fantasy setting where the power of thought and will can overcome physical laws of gravity” in not pro communist. Its liberal centrist garbage at best.
thats not what disco elysium says though.
I don’t think you quite understood disco-elysium. I don’t have time to do a full in depth analysis, but a few things from what I remember of the path.
1.Communism does work in Disco. It should be remembered that the game was made (and primarily written) by people who hung portraits of Stalin on their wall. The games version of communism didn’t really fail, it was more crushed by the moralistic international.
2.Communism is different in Disco Elysium because it intersects with two things. The paranormal magic stuff of the universe and Harry Dubois’s booze addled brain (that might have also intersected with the magic stuff)
2a.The “magic” system mainly focuses around the Pale. In essence, it’s entropy and despair. The less people believe in the future and hope and etc., the faster the ever consuming pale grows. It essentially devours everything and starts turning anything that enters it lifeless. Communism (as expanded in “the sacred and terrible air” which is a book set in the same universe) actually pushes the pale back and repairs the world
2b.This is on your sarcasm thing. Harry believes in things, yes, but they can be very basic. He essentially believes whatever ideology he does because of his depression, so he goes so hard-core into them that even proponents of the ideology he agrees with finds him wierd. You’ll notice how communists are a little confused by his obsession with literal meat grinders. This happens in the fascist path too, where Harry literally wants to rewind time. (However, they are not presented as equals. The communist path, I feel, is actually a little hopeful, while the fascist path is downright sad and pitiful)
3.Communism in Disco is written with a kinda familiarity. Basically every leftist I’ve seen who plays or watches the game finds the sarcasm funny. “Arguing with other leftists is a core Tennant of being a communist.” And, well, doesn’t that sound familiar.
4.There aren’t any real communists in game (somewhat), and the game comments on it.
Harry:Where are the real communists
The deserter:They died, fighting for communism.
Again, the game takes place a few years after the communist revolution was crushed. In those times (similarly to Eastern Europe, where the devs are from) there aren’t many real communists. There are isolationist intellectuals, edgy radicals, wayward souls, and walking corpses. The point isn’t “oh all these commies are stupid.” The point is to find common ground with those class allies around you.
Personally, I do want you to take another crack at the game, but if you don’t want to I understand
I love idle games and especially those that are themed around civilizations. I really wish there was one that took a proper Marxist approach to progression though because all of them are nonsensical. Things like evolve idle (very reditty) or you found a hole in the ground. Driven by research mainly which is explained as people suddenly having basic af ideas nobody had before them. I might just make it myself (I will never make it lmao)
My comrade, you must try Idle Civilization: World Story (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=su.nkarulin.cardshistory)
idle civ clicker using Marxist historical materialism and class conflict. You can cause the October revolution, sounds like what you are looking for.
bit obsessed with scrolling through this game’s one star reviews. dev is a little bit based
fellas, is it propaganda to make a game you’re interested in?
I think I’ve tried it before. I should give it another go. From what I remember it was pretty simple, more idle than incremental.
edit: ah yeah I probably stopped playing because of all the ads :/
it’s not an idle or civ-style game, more of a city sim, but I’ve heard some buzz around Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic. Would like to play that at some point myself
It’s an amazing game, but you’ll need to educate yourself on youtube for a few hours, to understand how the game works. There’s barely any explanation for its deep mechanics, in-game.
However, it makes 2 anticommunist sins in my eyes. It counts failure as people “escaping” your republic. And it requires you to use Secret Police to follow people around so they don’t defect.
Still it’s the best city building game I’ve ever played.
On another note, Endzone is a very good colony sim, with simpler mechanics than Workers & Resources, and with some collectivist vibes.
However, it makes 2 anticommunist sins in my eyes. It counts failure as people “escaping” your republic. And it requires you to use Secret Police to follow people around so they don’t defect.
From the videos I’ve seen from this game it seems like it at least needs a mod to change some of the wording, like “escape” to “emigrated” and the opposite as well, with people comming from capitalist countries being counted as escaping capitalism.
Played https://themachinegame.com/, but the revolutionary endings really let me down. Still very enjoyable overall
I loved it so much I bought the cartridge and beat most of the endings. One of my top games of 202…3 I think? Time moves too fast I’m never sure when I do things.
I guess it’s not quite the same thing, but I can’t stand random shit on Netflix. Every other thing either has the cops, the feds, the CIA, the FBI, or the military as the good guys.
Of course The Scent of Burning Grass was taken off of Netflix.
Netflix is a psyop, there’s former CIA, military and Obama people in key positions.
It’s also fun to note that Netflix co-founder Marc Bernays Randolph great uncle is Edward Bernays, father of modern capitalist propaganda, and who himself was Sigmund Freud’s nephew. Although he probably has had basically no input on Netflix’ streaming era as he left the company in 2002 when it was still a mail order DVD rental service.
Not drawing any conclusions, I just think it’s interesting.
Other co-founder and current CEO Reed Hastings was involved with the military as a younger man and has also been a part of the US bourgeoisie project to worsen public primary and secondary education and otherwise privatize it.
hmm. Well, that further explains why the Netflix adaptation for 3 Body Problem was like that
I love strategy games and otherwise politically charged games. However sadly basically every big strategy game is the epitome of “White Arrogance” trying to model everything in the world in the most simplistic, liberal and European terms and mechanics.
Victoria 2 would be a great game if, for example, literally any American country other than the US had unique mechanics regarding the struggle over abolition of slavery. Or Crusader Kings 3 implying that every realm in the old world had some form of 13th century French Feudalism going on.
Contradictorily I wish x-com or Xenonauts toyed more with unique geopolitical situations, specially the latter with the cold war. It would make a lot of sense for different countries to have very different reactions to alien contact in general for cultural, geopolitical, economic reasons in any context, but setting it in the Cold War and doing nothing with it was a huge missed opportunity, even if whatever would probably come out of it would be some Hannah Arendt totalitarian alienbro Stalinist Gorbachev nonsense.
Another pet peeve with media in general is how individualistic the vast majority of things produced are. Games like rimworld are my jam.
I actually wrote a defense of colony sims as not quite communist games (because I don’t think that’s possible) but as games that incentivize collectivism and abstract the player as the process of production itself. https://criticalresist.substack.com/p/a-look-at-historically-inaccurate
Contradictorily I wish x-com or Xenonauts toyed more with unique geopolitical situations, specially the latter with the cold war. It would make a lot of sense for different countries to have very different reactions to alien contact in general for cultural, geopolitical, economic reasons in any context
Terra invicta is an in-dev game that focus more on this aspect, but the geopolitics kind of drop off mid game in favor of space colonization being more powerful, which is a shame because imo the early game political maneuvering is more fun than the rest of a campaign right now. There’s only a 2022 start now but supposedly a cold war start is planned.
Yeah, I had high hopes for it since I played XCom Long War way too much. I’ll wait until it gets out of Early Access and maybe the cycle will repeat and somebody will make a cool overhaul mod for it.
Cyberpunk almost gets it right with the cops being portrayed the same way as any given gang - I think the failure in the details is because the writers on that game watched too much copaganda on TV and wanted to emulate those kinds of shows with many of their subplots.
But yeah this stuff drives me to drink. I think my least-favorite example is from Civilization - the “modern” governments are Fascism, Democracy, and Communism, and then the “future” governments read like something that a redditor would dream up for their alt future flash fiction.
I remember, knowing nothing else about the game, seeing Six Days in Fallujah and thinking “Oh? You get to play an Iraqi resistance fighter of some sort and snipe Americans? That could be interesting.”
bzzzzz Wrong!
It’s just War Crime Simulator 2023 from what I can tell. COD but without the thin veil of “this is just an entertaining story… look no further…”
I don’t know if this is the same type of thing, nor do I think it’s “socialist” to find it kinda gross to make such a game… from the perpetrator’s POV. It’s also just boring. It would’ve been some level of “brave” to make the game I thought it was at first glance.
New idea for President Xi. Pump funding into games where you fight Americans. They already made movies showing the “other side” of conflicts like on the Chinese/Korean border during the Korean War. It would be pretty fun to play as a Chinese soldier fighting to liberate Korea from the US military and fascist RoK forces. Maybe. I have conflicting ideas on the morals of making any of these games, but as long as the west pumps out propaganda supporting (or least glorifying those who did them, intentionally or not) war crimes, it seems worthwhile to pump out anti-Western viewpoints to counter it. I dunno.
It’s just so strange (well, not that strange, but, you know) how ‘neutral’ and ‘both-sidesy’ liberals are but they cannot seem to fathom the idea that America’s or Britain’s or whatever’s enemies wanted to bloody win. Talk about writing out the conflict.
The only people liberals seem really willing to ‘understand’ in entertainment media are racists and fascists—then it’s okay to humanise and imagine that not every Nazi thought exactly the same thing and maybe sometimes thought about having chicken for tea, going out for a dance, and winning the war as well as doing heinous Nazi shit. I suppose reactionaries will always look for the human in other brands of reactionary.
I feel like the real dichotomy is “actively occupied by the US” and not occupied.
In kinda the opposite direction, I’ve been playing Everspace 2 (spaceship shooter with RPG elements), and I was not expecting the story to be anything beyond generic stuff. I’ve been pleasantly surprised as the story has progressed. It explicitly calls out some DEI stuff in a pretty effective way. I started to get some One Piece vibes at a few points as I’ve got closer to the ‘big final battle’ arc.
It is not amazing writing, but much better overall than I was expecting. I guess indie devs can be more of a dice roll, and I got lucky with this one.
