For instance, the Civ games are basically Whig History: The Game, presenting liberal capitalism as the ideal end point for all societies. It even includes uncivilized "barbarian tribes" whose sole purpose is to be exterminated so you can take their land for the glory of capitalism.
Don't forget Bioshock 2, aka look how evil communism is based on this cartoonish strawman we made
God that game disappointed the fuck out of me. It was the last AAA game I bought close to launch. Retro gaming is my bag. Even got a win95 emulator so I can play ye Olde 16 bit titles :party-cat:
And they draped them in red flags, too. It was so on the nose classic "the terror was bad because of course violence is bad" while the player character uses violence as the solution every time. Good soundtrack though.
Speaking of "the terror is bad because violence is bad", is basically the nessage of AC Unity. Massively ironic for a series about how its totally cool to assassinate people lol
The first Assassin's Creed game was so pretty and you got to kill Knight's Templar. It's tragic how it turned out.
I like it because it's a white Supremacist slaughter sim
I dislike it because it implies that a deeply flawed uprising somehow wasn't any better than the status quo
Civ is so essentially bourgeoisie that the fundamental unit of the game are cities. The rest of the land just exists to be worked. There was a cool and hard scenario in civ4 where you played as the mongols in yurts which were both units and cities.
The real "spot the ideology" moment was in 5 they introduced "ideologies" which were, Order (communism), Autocracy (fascism), and then Freedom which had a 1800s musketmen holding a flag for a picture while the other two were clearly industrial workers and soldiers. An honest picture would've been an artdeco business man.
Yeah it pisses me off in 6, because i want to be Comminust but the New Deal policy card is too good, not to mention the trade bonus to "democracy"(what they call capitslism lol).
All three of the "futuristic societies" are different flavors of capitalist hell too. I don't have to explain "corporate libertarianism", but the description for "synthetic technocracy" sounds like the ultimate perpetuation of the modern status quo with computers and allegedly apolitical experts being put in charge of everything, and "digital democracy" sounds better but only because it doesn't address the role of something like corporate mass media misinformation in a country where policy is decided through referendum.
Though I guess if you played as a communist in the previous era you'll have the "class struggle" civic so you can imagine that your society has defeated the bourgeoisie and evolved the Mass Line into a kind of radical participatory democracy and that your "cultural victory" is actually the victory of communism sweeping the world and finally displacing the capitalist mode of production, but none of that is actually in the game.
I interpreted "Synthetic Technocracy" as next gen space-communism as it clearly had the same perks as communism had (prod and sci bonuses) and likely means a centrally planned economy. I don't think they meant technocratic in the way we understand it. It's not like us and the game devs are on the same wave length. Did enjoy that "corporate libertarianism" was the stand-in for next gen fascism. Felt that was accurate.
PS: had to look up what they meant by "synthetic technocracy"
Technocracy is government by experts in the technical details of specific issues, who presumably best understand both the problems at hand and how various technological redresses can improve the society at large. A synthetic technocracy is one where the experts in governance could include non-human agents.
Basically the Will Smith I, Robot fantasy. Fully automated central planning. About as naively realistic as "digital democracy", ie democracy via reddit like algorithms.
Call of Duty: Black Ops
First mission starts with you having to kill Castro and it gets worse from there. The only redeeming part of that game is the famous Zombies mode.
Even in fantasy alternative history videogame land, the CIA still couldn't kill Castro
I’d argue black ops 1 multiplayer was one of the best of the series. Or at least it was one of the best shooters available at the time.
I’d argue black ops 1 multiplayer was one of the best of the series
:this:
Definitely the most fun I had with a Cod game, actually enjoyed using a lot of the guns. Some of the weirder ones were actually usable too.
I can let that one slide because it was a bit whacky. Recent games take themselves way too seriously and the themes are much worse than before because it's no longer Michael Bay brainless action game, but serious, moody Kathryn Bigelow-esque "commentary"
Assassin's Creed Unity. They tried to make a ", non-political" game about the French Revolution. Besides being impossibe, they do an even worse job than you would imagine. Because its about people literally called assassins, they can't exactly do the Terror is bad because violence is bad. Instead, violence is good, but believing in things too strongly is bad. Enlightened Centrism with assassin characteristics
Thanks for this. I was thinking about playing an AC game and the short description of this one make me suspect it’s gonna be “Robespierre bad, Jacobins are a cult, Thermidorian libs good” or something
This is partly why I only play historically themed games before the 1400s. Shits existed before then, sure, but later shits feel too real not to piss me off
Yeah, thats an issue with the AC games set later, because the politics of those times still directly effects us. Especially Unity and AC 3. The Ezio games dont have that problem, or Black Flag which is a fun pirate sim.
i love the mechanics more than the other AC games, but the ideology makes me unreasonably pissed....no scratch that unhealthily but reasonably pissed
The parkour mechanics are amazing! And Paris is so beautifully created. They clearly did tons of research to bring it to life in 1:1 scale. They just didnt apply any of that research to the story
Y'all gamer boys keep sleeping on The Sims and how much it reinforces capitalist consumerism. The Sims is one of the strongest reinforces of lib-bourgeois ideology out there.
Not just the game/gameplay itself lol, the Sims 4’s total cost with all dlc’s is around $1,000
And sometimes MMOs, if there's enough interest that it spawns a server emulation community.
yo ho yo ho a pirate's life for me
Oh god. I have purchased every Sims 4 DLC. Please do not remind me how much I have spent in total.
Why can't I just pirate like a normal leftist. Why am I a cuck for EA.
Please do not remind me how much I have spent in total.
How do you think I know the price :agony-minion:
Why can’t I just pirate like a normal leftist. Why am I a cuck for EA.
There are a lot of games I want to buy on steam, simply to "own" it and get achievements even though I could pirate them
I've never played the game "the way it's meant to be played." I usually just give myself infinite money and have a mansion at the start lol. I'm guessing the ideology in play is that upward mobility is an attainable goal? I don't know what else is bougie about Sims other than you can own expensive homes in what seems to be gentrified neighborhoods lol
The intended gameplay is pure capitalist grindset mentality. You start with no skills and a low paying job, and you have to work super hard in your free time to increase your skills in order to get promoted, so you can get paid more so you can buy more stuff.
What's interesting is that your sim can function perfectly fine with minimum-quality stuff, so you could also read it as a critique of grindset mentality. Why grind up your stats to make more money? That won't make you any happier - only making friends with your family and neighbors can do that!
"the way it is meant to be played"
- wait for sim to go to bathroom
- delete toilet
- delete door
In fairness to the Sims I think the ultimate human drive is to do interior decorating with cool stuff you found.
Actually the sims is about turning on the rosebud money machine and creating a post scarcity society
As much as I still have a soft spot for it: Mass Effect. The entire universe is drenched in capitalist realism. It has moments it even critiques this in part 3 but it never really goes anywhere with it.
The ending...kinda sorta tries to be something else but it's so damn contradictory to the 200+ hours before it that it just doesn't function as the ending to the story they told.
It's amazing. A whole galaxy of spacefaring, sapient species and apparently they're all fucking stockbrokers
The only handwave you could maybe make with that is
spoiler
Maybe the Reapers wanted everyone to be capitalist? They did plant technology all over the galaxy so that organic societies developed along the paths they wanted.
Demolition Man is hilarious. "We built a utopian society but actually it sucks because I can't drive muscle cars and eat beef!"
Oh man i know! Great series but, yes total capitalist realiism. Its also pretty damn fascist too, or at least explicitly militirastic. Only way to get around this damn red tape is for some hardass military dude to disregard civilian authority and save the ungrateful civilians. Its got some "It was the politicians! They wouldn't let us WIN in Vietnam!" kind of vibes.
I hate Mass Effect with the fire of a thousand suns. You're a vigilante super cop who can kill anyone you want with no oversight. All the bad guy races are great-replacement bullshit. And there's like, what, three different always chaotic evil badguy immigrant races? Four? I can't remember, I only played the first game and I only finished it because I wanted to see what other contrived bullshit it would pull.
I could see a game inspired by the Cuban revolution being very good, except the only game loosely based on that I've played was terrible.
for "the rebellion" being such a common media trope, it's surprising there isn't more rebel/revolutionary fighter type games.
the classic SNK arcade game?
Guerrilla War followed the adventures of two unnamed rebel commandos (Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in the Japanese version) as they raid an unnamed Caribbean Island in order to free it from the rule of an unnamed tyrannical dictator. Along the way the players vanquish hordes of enemy soldiers while attempting to rescue hostages (with large score reductions for any hostages killed in the crossfire), collecting weapons from troopers and operating tanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_War_(video_game)
We. The Revolution lets you be a judge during the French Revolution.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/736850/We_The_Revolution/
Top-down Contra isn't a terrible take on the idea, though in America the main characters' names were censored lmao.
This is basically the plot of Ogre Battle 64 (though you start off on the wrong side) and it rules
I remember enjoying that game but forgot all of the plot, sounds cool
This is why I like Final Fantasy Tactics. Ramza is born into nobility, but is also a bastard son likely from a peasant mother. His best friend is lower born and much of the early part of the game deals with class warfare and his lower born friend getting the shit end of the stick. I'll not spoil it for anyone but I think it does a really good job of exploring these themes.
It does get more and more fantasy-esque in the latter part of the game and honestly Ive always felt that the endgame feels more tacked on to make it align with the fantasy genre than anything else.
The way that Delita's story
play the game if you haven't dam
starts with him empathizing with a peasant's rebellion, then has him being extremely ruthless in his quest for power, and ends with him completely recuperated by the system and perpetuating it instead of reforming it like he set out to do is just :chefs-kiss:. Ramza escapes a Shakespearean death because he rejects the system and goes his own way, which is a bit individualist idealist but it's fine if you consider that the world as portrayed just wasn't ready for a true liberation movement.
It's unfortunate, seems like square had a brief moment of cool writers and now all they make is anime-derived tropic jrpgs. FF6 had an empire using cutting edge technology to do imperialism in a world on the verge on industrial revolution, FF7 had you play eco terrorists. Xenogears... Was trying to say something and is a good example of letting writers have a bit too much freedom.
Final Fantasy, all the way up through 10, had very strong anti-christian, anti-colonialist, and anti-imperialist themes. Gonna spoil tactics here:
spoiler
Ramza is a crusader who finds concrete proof that Jesus is not the son of god. After dealing with the political fall out of simply having this proof (assassination attempts etc), Ramza finds Jesus to be a parasite on the world literally feasting on the blood of humanity
Based.
ff7 starts you of as a group of eco terrorists and then goes off into more standard jrpg stuff, but that beginning makes it a lot more palatable
For about four years now, I have been off and on writing a text-only RPG in Python that you play directly in your computer's terminal, and you just described the storyline exactly lol
I'm taking this idea in a different direction - what if it was Rimworld but you were building the Tower of Babel to storm heaven
I think Suikoden might be the kind of thing you're looking for, although I haven't finished the game yet so I can't vouch
The Company of Heroes series is just Hollywood WW2: The Game. You've got:
-
Noble Americans fighting for freedom/their brothers in arms in western Europe à la Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers.
-
Clean Wehrmacht campaigns and factions.
-
Enemy at the Gates-style Red Army campaign and faction.
The series is so fun to play, but damn if it isn't asinine how dirty they did the Soviets in CoH2.
i was just about to mention this abhorrent game story and how distanced from reality both Relic and the second game got, i am also very glad i'm not the only communist that enjoyed it's gameplay.
mechanically, I absolutely love COH - the unit production of small squads that then have specific cover mechanics that are easily repositionable blew my fucking mind when it first came out
Yeah i typed up a whole reply on CoH2 but deleted it. It's repugnant that the developers thought it was appropriate to make some lousy political statement out of the Soviet campaign after doing the whole Clean Wehrmacht shtick in the first game. They also thought it was chill to depict the red army as fratricidal idiots who massacred Soviet civilians because they couldn't be bothered to evacuate them before going scorched earth on their villages.
Then when Russian players understandably called out the studio on this, Relic doubled down and said they'd done their research. Their research was like one book written by some anticommunist. So yeah their single player campaign is pure ideology and I'm sorry to say, that ideology is fascism. Well, I liked Relic's other games but I won't be buying their schlock any more. However...
There are a few community mods that replace the Soviet units with historical ones, pretty much replacing the Asiatic hordes with a more dignified and historically respectful depiction of real troops and several different Soviet nationalities. Also the Red Army troops have some absolutely based lines about machinegunning fascists, fighting for the revolution, driving out the invaders, etc, and the music is actually really good so the action is really cinematic and satisfying when it comes together. I've logged a truly shameful number of hours playing the spearhead mod against the computer, lol.
So this one gets me because I enjoy the game but can't even recommend buying it on sale, with the repugnant developers and their dreary liberal attitude.
-
Fire Emblem is one big monarchist circlejerk; the nobility and those allied with them are beautiful, graceful, wise, and generous, while those oppose them are grotesque savages that you mercilessly slaughter without a second thought. Kings, queens, princes, and princesses have superior (even divine) abilities because it is their birthright to rule. The end of the game always ends with some royal being enthroned and this is always portrayed as some epochal victory, a restoration of the natural order. These are the sorts of games the Romanovs would have played. Yeah it's just a video game, but then you go on monarchist forums and Fire Emblem is like one of the top fucking things cited in "what made you a monarchist?" type threads. They are some of the most reactionary games around.
not to mention the recurring incest fetish stuff throughout the series, which is always portrayed as desirable and romantic
I thought Geneology did a pretty good job with how it handled it and it wasn't treated as a good thing either. I think Kaga leaving really brought the story quality down and Fates made it worse with their weird fetish shit.
i think that's only fates, which is maybe the worst written game i've ever played, even discounting the conversion therapy and incest and gross handling of the child characters
The entire existence of Nowi is just straight up :epstein: , not just bordering lol. I want to pair off all my characters so I can get their kids but I have no idea whether to pair a however many old dragon that looks 12 with the younger seeming characters or the older seeming ones. It haunted me.
that game is much more about prejudice and preconceived notions than anything thematically, it just has a fantasy aesthetic
Path of Radiance is literally about restoring a monarchy, Ike is a class traitor if anything
and I find the whole notion that Path of Radiance or Radiant Dawn challenges "preconceived notions" hilarious because the good characters are still all beautiful and kind and majestic while the bad guys are ugly inbred troglodytes. You can literally tell who's good or bad in half a second just by observing if their face has a visible deformity.
It's literally a feudalist society how is Ike a class traitor? what is he to do?
In the second game he literally sides with the opressed Laguz.
He is restoring a monarchy and independecne back to a tiny nation that has been taken over by another larger more powerful empire in the first game.
is he suppose to materialize the conditions for a bourgeoise or prolitarian revolution out of thin air??
this shit is stupid.So what your saying is Ike should of materialized the conditions for doing away with feudalism out of thin air. :very-smart:
I'll be sure when I make a TRPG to only set it in the midst of a communist revolution from now on.
:bugs-no: Ike is a gay icon and I will not stand such slander.
I've noticed that some Japanese media follows this pattern where the fundamental hierarchy or political structure is never really questioned.
Take Naruto for instance. All ninja villages in Naruto are within a land which is ruled by a daimyo. Naruto goes through the entire journey of an outcast saving the world and turning it into a "utopia" and yet the fundamental political structure doesn't really change. Is the daimyo overthrown, considering that Naruto and Co are way stronger than the ruler of the land? Nope! Is the concept of ninja villages and one autocrat ruling over them changed? Nope!
Almost every single zombie game reinforces genocide and the restructuring of society into a fascist organisational structure to combat the existential threat. It also reinforces dehumanising sick human beings who clearly have an illness as something that needs exterminating, and players are made to uncritically kill hordes of them as if they're nothing.
It also reinforces dehumanising sick human beings who clearly have an illness as something that needs exterminating, and players are made to uncritically kill hordes of them as if they’re nothing.
There are lots of things to be criticized about in the zombie genre, but I don't think this is really fair lol. They're written to be hostile and trying to kill you, so logically it would make sense to kill them before they could kill you. I think the more valid criticism is the nihilism of it all. Like you said, almost everyone is portrayed as a fascist on his own killing each other to scrap for basic supplies. Finding a cure is rarely a possibility because everyone has already turned on each other
Defending yourself is fair, but it has to develop to that point.
Nobody is going to just start stabbing people in the head because someone is lumbering around in a delirius daze. It would take several days/weeks for people to move from confusion about the matter to a societal acceptance with outright self defence in the form of killing infected people.
There's never any world building whatsoever. "Zombies exist go kill them" that's it. And when they're killed it's entirely uncritical, they're sick until scientifically proven otherwise and the act of killing a sick person is still the act of killing a sick person. To portray that with no emotional response and no critique is ideology.
For comparison, Goblin Slayer is an anime with what I would call the same ideology as most zombie games have, and that ideology is fascism. Unfortunately the really good analysis video that laid out the case for that is currently set to private but I'll throw it here on the offchance it goes back to normal later.
I wish that video wasn't private because it was a 1hour+ analysis of the fascism in the show and it was a banger.
the spoiler
:cringe:
Fortunately I have only seen the first season of the Shield Hero anime, not through choice mind you.
but if you can get past that, you can enjoy the main character (slaver) doing bog standard 5/10 isekai stuff for the bits before the point where even the people who liked all that shit admit the show sucks
Nobody is going to just start stabbing people in the head because someone is lumbering around in a delirius daze.
People do in fact summon men with guns to brutalize people suffering from mental incapacity all the time. And they're terrified of anyone exhibiting mental illness symptoms.
Fair, but I mean nobody's going to do that to their loved ones or someone just acting a bit strange at a bar. That takes build up and by the time it gets to calling the cops they'd already have chunked someone's arm or leg or whatever.
Also fortunately that's completely outside my experience as people with guns don't get sent to see disabled people (or anyone) and the cops here are trained for 2-3 years. Not to say they aren't shits, but at least comparatively they're not usually psychos to the disabled.
Hmm. You've got a good point. I do think there is a very American grounding for a lot of American made Zombie movies. Things like the ending of the original Night of the Living Dead are a strong commentary on contemporary America, for instance, that would need to be reworked at least a bit to make sense in other contexts.
The whole idea of zombie movies seems to play into gun culture and Shaun of the Dead demonstrated quite well that the zombies have to but utterly useless to work in other settings. That or you can do 28 days later and demonstrate complete and total societal collapse in just 4 weeks.
And when they’re killed it’s entirely uncritical, they’re sick until scientifically proven otherwise and the act of killing a sick person is still the act of killing a sick person. To portray that with no emotional response and no critique is ideology.
This is a good point. Though if my memories are correct, I do remember one example of the opposite of this, or at least in one of its game. The Walking Dead by telltale has several moments where key characters - sometimes awful, sometimes close to you - have been infected, or supposedly so, and you're given the choice to either kill them or having some compassion and being cautious. Of course this isn't that much better tbh since there's obviously a "correct" choice, but I do think there's some emotional weight to it compared to most zombie games.
Yeah the problem with putting that choice in the hands of the player is that the player has a pre-existing ideological foundation for what to do in a zombie scenario. The player has been taught by the vast majority of the genre to kill them without mercy because any kind of mercy or hesitation gets people killed.
And we're not even getting to the issue that zombie games reinforce the need for borders and walled societies, reinforce keeping even good people out because they might be infected, and reinforce the idea that the entire of humanity(now zombies) is an enemy, that the only ally that exists is your small society with hard borders and men patrolling the walls with guns. It is you and your society vs the world. It reinforces fascist ideology.
The original Night of the Living Dead is based and worth watching. The hero is a black man who keeps it together when everyone else is losing it. And the twist ending is worth the entire watch.
When it started the zombies were capitalist consumers shambling towards a mall. Somewhere along the way they got swapped out for immigrants crossing the border and/or poor people.
Oh it's even better than that. In the book the Israelis are the only nation that takes the emerging zombie threat seriously and they immediately build a huge, heavily defended border wall around Israel while the rest of the world laughs at them. But get this; They Let the Palestinians in. And then fight a civil war with the ultra-right wing Hasidic factions!
That book has so many liberal brainworms. The virus starts in China when someone gets bit. The Chinese government, of course, covers it up. Then it spread to the rest of the world through illegally harvested Chinese organs and Chinese migrants. Because we know that in the threat of a massive, incredibly dangerous disaster China would of course totally fail to control the spread and then cover it up so no one knows.
Yeah, also the book has a chapter where a Palestinian boy is yelled at by his father for trying to violently resist the occupation
Also the outbreak is all Chinas fault and it spreads worldwide through the massive yet never detected Chinese organ trade black market.
It was kind of ok as a power fantasy at first. It seems fine when you're only dealing with zombies around a single shack conjured by a magic book and using a chainsaw and a shotgun. There's less ideology when the zombies are literally monsters that just climbed out of the fucking grave too.
The problem is when you scale it up to civilisation and societal commentary. The "existential threat" and "we need hard borders and strict military control" as a survival mechanism plays directly into fascist ideology.
I think there's something to be said for how large the difference is between magical zombies and human beings that recently got infected and might possibly be curable.
One is the undead, the other is a sick human being. They create very different scenarios.
Counterpoint: Death Road to Canada's primary politics is about anime not being real, and getting Too Swole To Control.
I never played it but in Stubbs the Zombie you play as the zombie. I wonder if they turned the perspective around in that wone.
Lol heavy rain if you count it as a game holy shit
Also Detroit become human from the same guy. Those games are fucking infuriating if you're coming at them from anything but the lib lens
Also Detroit become human from the same guy. Those games are fucking infuriating if you’re coming at them from anything but the lib lens
I will never forget this game for being basically "android genocide" the game and them somehow not making Markus create a unique piece of art since he was raised by a fucking artist, and instead sing a song like a coke commercial lol 6/10 thanks David Cage
“android genocide” the game
The Hillary Clinton stand in made more sense than David Cage. When you compare the android deactivation centers to the Holocaust, she takes offense to it and says it's insulting because the robots are not humans, which I mean, yeah lol. But like, even if you do agree that it's as evil as the holocaust, the game still doesn't take it as seriously because it has a fight sequence at the 'concentration camp' (factory) where the Connor clone fights the real Connor and Mr. Krabs is forced to shoot the fake one. Just cartoonish shit in a setting where it's supposed to be super duper serious lol
ahahah heavy rain. It has a special place in my heart as a unique weird thing. I think the game would have been so much better if they just made Ethan and his family black. Then all the shit about him being framed as the oragami killer by the cops would make more sense .
Tbh at least David Cage wrote the cops as corrupt assholes.
didn't david cage try to argue d:bh wasn't an allegory for the civil rights movement while having in game characters repeatedly compare it to the civil rights movement?
Thats what he claims but theres literally no way that he wasn't making 90% of the game as a direct civil rights allegory before being told that it would look bad, like you can literally make the rallying cry of the android rights movement "We have a dream".
Indigo Prophecy is the only good game from Cage, and only because it was the worst game I've ever played. Any hint of ideology in that game doesn't even matter because you're hiding from giant beetles in an office and doing matrix kung fu with a mayan demon priest in the middle of a blizzard
Hard agree, indigo prophecy was fucking wild I completely forgot that was him too lol
SHAUN!
SHAUN!
SHAUN!
I'm not going to repeat this several hundred times like the game, but wow, fuck this buggy game.
Star Wars: Knights of The Old Rebublic 2 goes really out of its way to portray Randian objectivism in at least a sympathetic, if not positive light.
The moment where Kreia takes you aside to say, 'Did you just give that beggar money?! Why do you hate him?' is insufferable.
Which pales in comparison to the narrative reinforcing her argument - iirc - with the beggar you just gave money to getting mugged and hurt because you gave them money.
Well that dampens my will to someday grow competent enough at The Witcher to play one of the games past the fist half-hour
oh no
I appreciate the point that one person can't change a world that is so much bigger than them. Directly counter to most video games approach, but important
I never got far enough into Witcher 3 to make heads or tails of it.
I love cussing and sex - especially sexy sex (no volcel violation intended. This parenthetical is legally binding) - as much as the next guy, but it can start to seem desperate at some point
there definitely is some both sidesing in those games, but siding explicitly with the elves in the first two games never came off as overly negative or punishing to me.
I'd still check it out.Eh it kinda does that liberal “they’re right to be mad but they’re bad for actually fighting back” thing, especially in Witcher 2. Hell that one big YouTuber, Joseph Anderson, came away from it with the opinion that all elves are scum it was so heavy handed lol
Am I misremembering, or are you reminiscing with disgust? Pardon me, I'm basically a boomer
No, sorry, I'm agreeing with you. I'm using the zizek head as a stand-in for "ideology is a fuck."
God yes
No worries at all, I'm the one who didn't Lurk Moar so thank you
At least she's the villain — and wasn't it implied that she was pulling the strings to make it happen, or do i remember it being better than it was?
spoiler
Kreia straight up tells you at the end that she was manipulating you the whole time, essentially to agree with her ideology and kill the force.
That's right. I recently decided to play through it again and like, couldn't stand Kreia's dipshit pseudo-philosophy and even started to wonder why I ever liked this game, but then, oh yeah, she's actually the
spoiler
arch-villain, lol
I maintain that Kotor ii, and Kreia more importantly, are better understood and appreciated if you analyze and take them more as commentary and analysis on videogame choices and morality systems.
A lot of people point out that she seems incredibly contrarian for the pure sake of it at times to the point of being contradictory...and indeed I think that is the point far more than pushing rand's objectivism.
Kotor II's critique of videogames and of star wars is the way we tend to uncritically accept the moral framework that's presented. Kreia is essentially beating her hands and your head against the fourth wall pleading with you to stop min/maxing your light and dark side points like a slave beholden to the supreme power of the
game developthe force and assert your own free fucking will.Indeed as she observes
the playerthe exile is the only one in the story with free will of any sort. She doesn't care about about whether or not the galaxy burns because in a very real sense the only thing that actually matters is the impact it and she can have on the player and what they will walk away with.The character Kreia, an ancient Force-user who acts as your character's mentor over most of the course of the game, is effectively a Rand stand-in. Her whole philosophy revolves around the idea of a heroic individual who triumphs over the universe by rejecting the help of others and anything that could be considered a crutch. One of her establishing moments is her getting her hand chopped off in calssic Star Wars fashion (seriously, what is it with Star Wars and hand chopping) and then refusing a prosthesis. Her ultimate goal is to kill the Force itself because she loathes how jedi and sith alike depend on it for their power.
It's a branching RPG so you can ignore her "wisdom," but the game has a lot of scenes that show her actually being right. Like when a beggar gets mugged after you spare him some credits, because your act of charity made him a target to other poor people and because he didn't feel the proper ownership of those credits that could knly come from earning them himself.
Or when she cows a warlord into basically becoming your servant because really he was weak, because in the prior game he chose to follow another person instead of himself.
Etc, etc.
However (spoilers for a 20 year old video game)
spoiler
Kreia is revealed near the end of the game to actually be a Sith Lord in disguise, Darth Traya, and is the final boss of the game. I wouldn’t say she’s portrayed positively.
Her goal to kill the force is mentioned ingame to be omnicidal tho. And the fact that she is constantly grabbing boss characters from off screen to throw at you later doesn't do her favours from a player perspective. I mean, she's basically female :unlimited-power:
True, but I think the big difference is that she's a player character herself. We get to see her philosphy from her perspective, as opposed to Palpatine who's basically just your classic one-dimensional evil wizard.
It then becomes an issue of how would you even make a character this manipulative and competent and powerful a protagonist without them just making themselves "right". But nobody actually listens to Kriea, except to gain power which reinforces her in game ideology, which makes Randians right, but the fact that your making a deal with the devil is obvious... Is the problem that they made her too well? Lmao
~~I don't understand the criticism. I never claimed Kreia was poorly written or characterized, only that ~~
the authors portrayed her pretty vile philosphy in a sympathetic light. I'd guess as a way to "both sides" the light/dark dichotomy that defines the whole Star Wars universe.
Edit: sorry, I'm sleep deprived and misread your comment. Yeah, they definitely made her have a lot of depth compared to Palpatine, which I think betrays that at least some of the writers probably lowkey agreed with some of what she says.
Palpatine who’s basically just your classic one-dimensional evil wizard.
Palps is a great character because he is just a one-dimensional evil wizard with no complexity. He's exactly like real-life billionaires; He just wants power and has no morals what so ever.
Kotor 2 had a rushed release, a lot of the stuff proving her wrong and making her problematic throughout the game was cut. The real issue is that the main quest is made purposefully self defeating for somewhat dumb but understandable reasons, mainly to one up kotor 1’s original twist. I prefer the head canon that the game only makes sense if the bad ending from kotor 1 was canon and the remnants of the Jedi are as broken as the infighting sith. Btw I reject the mmo.
I just think mmo came out after I became too old to be a fucking nerd. I don’t like how Star Wars loves both sides-ism partly because white people don’t understand ying and yang but really because it’s an excuse to sell space nazi merchandise to children.
Star Wars' whole spirituality is all over the place. Sometimes it's Christian, sometimes it's Taoist, sometimes it'a Buddhist, sometimes it's fucking Zoroastrian.
Which is frankly ok so how long as you pick and choose wisely and consistently. The middle path in Buddhism isn’t doing left hand path stuff every other Tuesday.
Oh I love KOTOR 2, it and the OG KOTOR are really the first Star Wars games to really dig into the philosophies behind the jedi and sith. But it still feels a little both-sidey in that way.
Dude, when the big-bad/Revan's dragon at the end of KOTOR is like "If the Jedi had kidnapped me would I have had a chance at redemption?" my teenage ass was shook. It was such a wham line, that this guy you'd been fighting for 30 hours of video game has this moment of self-awareness and self-reflection and is like "Shit I wish things could have gone differently", and that was so Star Wars and also so unexpected from a video game badguy.
Same. KOTOR 2 is probably my favorite SW game, but I hate the bothsidey shit in both games. I never like the "grey jedi" crap in star wars, mostly for that reason.
I despise the grey jedi shit. The whole point of the force is that there actually is a clear moral good and evil, and using power to hurt and oppress people for personal gain is both wrong, and self-annihilating. The whole purpose of Darth Vader is to show that if you use power to hurt people you'll inevitably turn in to a monster, and the only way to save yourself from that is to reject your power. Luke doesn't win by defeating Vader in combat, he wins by refusing to give in to his anger and rage, recognizing that if he did so he'd end up becoming a monster like his father. And when Vader see's him reject that path he has a moment of self reflection and decides to stop being Darth Vader.
But it also doesn't pussy foot around with any liberal shit. George Lucas said it's righteous and just to blow up the American-British-Nazi empire and let little teddy bears eat them.
I'd argue Kreia has a point about not trusting the Force. It really is a giant otherwordly entity that it enforcing its will onto a galaxy.
The rest of her ideas are batshit though.
Idk how it may have expanded, I've only seen a very small amount of old star wars media, but I always thought of the Force as being like the Dao or something. Not really anything alien or much of an "entity" but just a way of conceiving the true nature of the universe. Fate is real, and we lump that into "The Force." Magic powers are real, and we lump them all into "The Force." And so on.
I fucking wish. That's how the original movies made it out to be, but Star Wars has since gone out of the way to make The Light and The Dark into actual metaphysical things rather than, like, altruism and selfishness.
Like, in Kotor2, there were parts where you could find, like, pools of Dark Side energy and use it to become more dark, and that's not at all out of line with other Star Wars media. It's one of my least favorite things about how Star Wars has evolved
Agreed. The Light Side is using your spiritual powers to help people. What do we see Obiwan Kenobi do in Star Wars? He lies to fascists, sneaks around, distracts an evil wizard, and then whispers a few words to Luke at exactly the right time. He's subtle. But his actions are vital to the destruction of the Empire's Death Star and their plans for galactic domination. Star Wars has turned the canny old samurai wizard in to flashy super-hero bullshit. The OT is ultimately about how you can't use your spiritual power for violence without corrupting yourself, and also about the Space NVA blowing up Space America. But now Star Wars is about who is the best flying murder guy. It sucks.
Lucas' original idea was that the light side is a spiritual goal akin to enlightenment, not a good vs evil thing. Bringing balance to the Force doesn't mean an equal number of good and bad Force users, it means following the correct path with no more baddies.
KOTOR 2 puts a spin on this as the Force actively abhorring the dark side and wanting to put an end to it at any cost, including influencing the free will of sentient beings. These gigantic galaxy spanning wars where trillions of people die are justified as long as the sith lose in the end, and they will keep happening every time a new group of sith pop up.
Kreia hates this, and wants to kill the Force and give everyone true free will - if anyone would even survive the process. She would be killing herself and countless others, but it would at least be the end of the eternal conflict.
the beggar scene is deeply annoying but it's worth mentioning that if you take the dark side path (i.e. threaten his life over nothing) she chews you out for being a complete psycho
"I told you to let him slowly starve to death, not to cut his head off!"
yeah she's still a massive dick and i think the fact that she's literally the end boss points to her ideology not being, y'know, good. she's mainly focused on getting you to amass personal power, probably so you can murder god for her and "free" everyone from the force
Or when you randomly kill someone after breaking into their apartment: "Are psychotic urges all that drive you?"
Kreia is the way she is because the game is a commentary on the way that the previous game (and the Star Wars mythos writ large) portrayed moral dilemmas. Plenty of moments in that game have your selfless light side choice work out the best for everyone involved, proving her wrong even if there's a few moments in it where doing the selfless thing is punished as with the beggar scene.
yeah, originally i was going to say much the same, that her chewing you out either way and "showing you the unintended consequences of your actions" was intended as a deconstruction of the star wars universe and its morality as a whole but you put it rather succinctly
it's also worth mentioning that she's essentially the mouthpiece for the lead writer to air out his grievances with the same who turned out to be a big ol' piece of shit so :shrug-outta-hecks:
A lot of people misread the beggar scene, I think. The point is that small actions can have unforseen and much larger consequences than you originally intended. The fate of the beggar doesn't really matter, it's just the fact that you shouldn't blindly hit light/dark. You can learn from it and (if you don't mind being evil) commit a couple small cruelties in the refugee camp, which is enough to cause their leader to give up entirely, and Kreia praises you for it.
Of course, this leads up to the destruction of Malachor having the potential to echo out and kill the Force entirely.
I feel really conflicted with Kreia. Like, her philosophy is fucking terrible and it does seem to be supported to some degree by the game's events. And yet, the game also makes it very very clear that she is lying to everyone constantly, and I think that includes lying to herself. Like (if not for the fact that different writers working for TOR cofirmed her to be correct years later, which I hate), I don't know that it's possible to read her "but what if Revan didn't ACTUALLY fall, maybe I just taught him so good that he faked falling" speech and think that she's not deluding herself at least a little bit.
She's given this incredibly-written dialog (and absolutely amazing voice actor, fucking bravo) to express her awful ideology, and I think we tend to read that as the writer agreeing with her ideology. And maybe he did- we all know now that Avellone is an awful person. But I do think it's possible to not read it as being that way 100% of the time, at the very least. But that might just be the part of me that doesn't want to critique Kotor2 talking.
I mean, like a lot of white men I went through an insufferable libertarian, "fuck you the whole world's against me but I'll fucking win" phase when I was younger, and I'd be lying if I said what Kreia said in KOTOR 2 didn't have some influence on that. At least on a concious level. Material conditions, social programming, etc. are a whole other fuck.
Her Sith name is "Darth Traya", aka "Betrayer" and I think that went over a lot of people's heads. I hated her character so much. The whole point of Star Wars is that, at least at a personal, individual level, there is a clear moral good and evil and using your power to hurt other people for selfish reasons is evil.
The number of absolute irredeemable fucking neckbeards who were going around saying "You know DARTH BETRAYER has some good points" was infuriating. Her name is literally "I'm going to fucking betray you!"
I never really analyzed Paradox games all that much, but I suppose their gameplay mechanics are inherently ideological though someone else probably has a better way of explaining.
But, in HOI4, I remember someone asking why civilian casualties aren't simulated and a dev said that purges, genocides, civilian casualties, etc. aren't going to be included and never will. But then they added The Great Purge as a mechanic for the USSR as well as famines. Obviously I don't support a Holocaust mechanic or anything like that, but these dweebs often say that the USSR is as bad or even worse than the Nazis, and yet the supposed deaths and 'genocides' are treated as a fun gameplay mechanic for you to ponder about whereas Germany's crimes are too evil to talk about. They don't even respect the "victims" of communism as much as they say they do lol.
And apparently, the Great Purge is the correct choice to make in the game because otherwise you're betrayed later on in the game.
They also only acknowledge high ranking military personnel as victims, with no event for forced deportations and migrations which would and IRL did lower manpower. Also when talking about HOI4 not having a reference to the concentration camps, tvtropes in particular will ALWAYS mention gulags in the same sentence, as if that is even remotely the same shit
Yeah there's really no good options for a game where you can control nazi germany to have a "do the holocaust" button or no. There's very bad things about both. Either you are whitewashing Nazis or pandering to fascists.
Someone else once said that a decent way to handle it might be to have a "concentration camp liberated" event that fires when you take certain provinces while fighting Germany and I think there's some merit to that
yeah this has been a thing of mine too for a while, even though i do really enjoy the games. the original civ came out right around the same time as the end of history, and absolutely shows the internal workings of the mind of the sheltered 80s/90s "apolitical" american boomer frozen in time. and like yeah it is absolutely boardgamey (and honestly i think its at its best when its not trying too hard to be "realistic") so prioritises whats fun as a game over whats actually historical but damn so many ideological assumptions packed in.
your countrys level of development is determined by how many scientists you assigned because "technology" is linear and all technology through history is discovered entirely independently by every nation with no reference to any others, so if your country is technologically underdeveloped its really your own peoples fault for not being sufficiently stem-focused in 1500bc.
and the strength of the nation is more important than the happiness of the people, and the ideal strategy is to invest in bread and circuses for keeping people just at the level where they wont actively revolt, but no more because that would be a waste. the original actually was really mask off with class - your cities could have a certain number of clearly lower-class 'unhappy' people (coloured in black) and you could balance it out and avoid revolt by ensuring an equal or larger number of very bourgeois looking "happy" people so that the unhappiness of the lower classes didnt matter.
combined, the endpoint of history is right around 1990, and theres such a paucity of imagination about the future, like the greatest possible use of science is to be able to use your entire countrys productive capacity to build a big rocket for a pointless space colony impossibly distant from actual earth, fundamentally indistinguishable in both mechanics and intent to just building the pyramids in space to say ‘look on my works ye mighty and despair’
and not to use science to build a true post-scarcity society, to eradicate disease and hunger and suffering and want and establish falgsc or anything equivalent because the creators and the game cant even conceive of any societal progress beyond modern neoliberalism but with a bit more shiny shit
and its so american that if someone else is progressing further with their performative space rocket, you need to stop them by going and burning their capital down because its all zero sum and nobody is allowed to have more progress than you
our people are buying your blue jeans and listening to your pop music
in the first one, "democracy" gave a 50/50 that any war you tried to start would be blocked by congress, that body that famously blocks definitely peaceloving countries from starting wars
Civ games are how the bazinga brained actually view history
It's about the material conditions of the land. Specifically the hammers and apples.
there was a civ spinoff game done by a different studio that had it's end game wonders be some kind of nanoreplicator for post-scarcity and a universal bill of rights that eliminated all victimless crimes. also it went far into the future with underwater cities and hovertanks. plus i think civilizations could spin off of others from revolutions. the AI was a mess and it had issues but it seemed at the time lightyears ahead of the regular civ games.
Y'all are sleeping on copaganda games. Obviously you have stuff like the SWAT series, basically reinforcing action-movie copaganda of "If they weren't there the crazy lunatics would kill us all" where you fight multiple highly organized terror cells and crime syndicates. I do like it a little because it still expects you to go for nonlethal force and arrests and stuff, it at least gets around the usual "Well I had to shoot that guy because he mighta had a gun", and it is a very neat game ignoring all that. Probably the weirdest copaganda I've seen, at least based on the trailers, is Rebel Cops, which is about a mafia boss taking over a small town. Basically a rag-tag group of "real, honorable hero" cops do a guerrilla warfare against all the criminals and also the other cops who the mafia boss enlisted. Essentially the "bad apple" thing but as an entire game premise.
Swat is way better than one would expect. The focus on non lethal weapons and strict adherence to the law (rules of engagement) makes the game feel like fantasy. You essentially fail rounds on harder difficulties if you shoot someone with a gun that hasn't actually threatened you or a hostage. I head canon the games in that they take place after a communist revolution just based on you loosing if you kill a civilian.
Yeah I can definitely appreciate that. Also appreciate how all the terrorists end up being right wing, like one of the terrorist leaders you arrest canonically is wanted for bombing abortion clinics.
Swat is way better than one would expect. The focus on non lethal weapons and strict adherence to the law (rules of engagement) makes the game feel like fantasy. You essentially fail rounds on harder difficulties if you shoot someone with a gun that hasn't actually threatened you or a hostage. I head canon the games in that they take place after a communist revolution just based on you loosing if you kill a civilian.
Swat is way better than one would expect. The focus on non lethal weapons and strict adherence to the law (rules of engagement) makes the game feel like fantasy. You essentially fail rounds on harder difficulties if you shoot someone with a gun that hasn't actually threatened you or a hostage. I head canon the games in that they take place after a communist revolution just based on you loosing if you kill a civilian.
