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”
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.