like oh wow ur game about exploring an untouched world where the punchline of every "joke" is that you're being exploited by an unfeeling corporation? man that's so unique that nobody who read that sentence realized I was talking about Journey To The Savage Planet because there's so fucking many of them
You know what I want? Universal jail time for all gamers
But if I'm not gonna get that, I want games that take place in a world we'd want to live in where the objective is to help it remain as such.
If someone pitched to me a GTA game set in a horrible word not worth living in the way they all are, I wouldn't care what city it's set in. It's been done. If someone said, "hey we're gonna make a GTA game except it's set in a nearly post-capitalism world and your objective is to try to protect your city from incursion by the forces of reaction" I'd buy that shit up so fast.
TLDR; why doesn't an inherently reactionary industry just pander to me? :/
In Capitalist Realism, Fisher talks about media doing our anti-capitalism for us. Ever since i read that ive seen it everywhere
theyll sell our revolution back to us and fund the people who'll firebomb our houses with the proceeds
edit: hold up i got something for this https://ibb.co/16NYj6d
I go between thinking it's intentional, and thinking there's just no way to make good art anything but anticapitalist, because the alternative is so spiritually void.
Yeah for sure, it was kind of a rushed comment but I guess I meant you can't really make audiences relate to crushing poor people underfoot
Wait, do Bandai fund Japanese fashies or this is just a random edit?
I think it's probably true in that Bandai Namco is a publicly traded company, owned by the private capital instruments that are owned by those who fund right-wing terrorism. I can't find anything linking it more directly.
Maybe it's a joke about something that happens in a Gundam series. Like, they give little a Gundam to Operation Gladio as a treat or something, idk I never watched it
It's an extension of the co-opting and sanitizing of revolutionary figures. If media puts a pin on the problems of capitalism, with no following directive of how to enact change, it lets people say, "yeah, that's fucked up" and then terminate the line of thinking there.
That's because Fallout is the end stage of everything. Hyper-consumption destroyed the world.
I think one of the more interesting places in Fallout is the Ash Heap in 76. It's littered with protest camps because the state and corporations automated everything with no help given to people who lost their jobs, because of these protests many of the hazards left over are killer strike-breaking robots.
The air is poison, the ground is black and almost nothing is alive. Fires rage because they started burning mines because the smoke it created was able to be extracted and converted into a valuable resource.
An entire town was bought out and evicted because they wanted to mine underneath it (nuclear strikes underground synthesise a valuable ore) and once again provide no further assistance outside of that.
Above it all are giant mansions on stilts that belong to the millionaires who own the same corporations destroying this area.
There were no nuclear strikes here, there was no invasion or weird disaster. They already killed the world before the nukes even hit.
Well that's the real tragedy of the Fallout universe. They had incredible technology that could have saved the world but they just didn't.
But yeah good point about the mixing of government and corporations. In the Nuka World DLC you can find out that the theme park doubled up as a military R&D department solely because the CEO was chummy with the government.
Red Faction: Guerilla is the only good video game because you use IEDs and sniper attacks to fight space America and in the end you use a weapon of mass destruction to blow up a space aircraft carrier and absolutely no apologies are made for any of it. Also, the game play rocks.
Tropico is "haha gommunism dictator", yet you can actually make a workable socialist state in game and purge capitalists.
Or Workers and Resource: Soviet Republic where you can build a legit communist economy with no "haha gommunism". It's pretty hard but it'll help appreciate what a massive chad move the Soviet rapid industrialization is.
I like some of the options available in Stellaris if grand strategy is your thing. There's even a commie voice option that refers to enemy threats as reactionaries.
I want a game where you fight in a revolution/civil war and then achieve communism
see also. Of note, the game isnt a side scrolling beatemup, part of the game is knowing when its appropriate to do peaceful protest for media sympathy & when you need to firebomb the pigs into the dirt. It feels a lot more... instructional
let me add onto the rioting game pile, although this one is mostly cute animal crossing characters but beating the shit out of cops
haven't actually played it though so idk if it's any good
did u know theres a game where u play as a revolutionary judge in the french revolution? It's pretty grim, but,
https://store.steampowered.com/app/736850/We_The_Revolution/
In Red Faction: Guerilla you just straight up fight a guerilla war against a thinly veiled Space America. The game heavily emphasizes ambushes, IEDs, sniper attacks, and aysmetrical warfare. Your explicit goal is to attain a weapon of mass destruction you can use to neutralize Space America. Oh, and you're Union, unapologetically, and the Union is called the Red Faction, and they're the heroes. Later parts of the game have you literally extending your guerilla war in to the suburbs that are less oppressed than the rural mining towns you start out it. It's as good as games get.
Only issue I have with them is you are always an unwilling participant (not played Armageddon so unsure if that is different) In 1 your a miner that has to fight to survive as the guards are trying to wipe you out, in 2 your a special forces soldier, and in Guerrilla you are a miner again focused on avenging his brother. Would be nice if your character was a little more proactive in the rebellions instead of just getting swept a long (begrudgingly sometimes)
I feel like that's how most people get radicalized, though. Folks don't just stumble on a copy of Mao's little red book then decide to bomb a military convoy. In Guerilla your brother is basically drone-striked and that causes you to sort of shake out of your "This is about me as an individual" mindset and start seeing the oppression of Mars as a community problem.
I feel like that’s how most people get radicalized, though. Folks don’t just stumble on a copy of Mao’s little red book then decide to bomb a military convoy.
Speak for yourself
What if MGSV but instead of liberating soldiers from soldiering for nations to being 'free' or whatever Big Boss is on about and instead you run a mother base as a Maoist (or whatnot) guerrilla base? I was working on a design doc for an MGSV-alike but with Metal Gear graphics cause I ain't doing fancy graphics as a hobbyist. Anyway, being a guerrilla is really what I liked about that Mother Base system in MGSV (and Peace Walker).
Subnautica has a couple of stinger lines about how much you're going to owe the corporation for using the planet's resources to survive and escape.
I'm not saying you're wrong, and it's true of plenty of gamers, but out of curiosity, why do you say gaming is an "inherently reactionary industry" (aside from it being a consumer product produced by a corporation for profit, which is a given)?
the industry was colonized by the right in the 80's when all the women & minorities were run out in a campaign to undo the gains made by the US cultural revolution of the 60's/70's, bringing the industry's minority representation all the way back to where it was in the 50's with the overwhelming answer of people asked why they were leaving being "harassment from coworkers" -- not of gaming specifically but all STEM fields, which happened to include gaming. It's taken as a given that gamers being sexist & shit is Just The Way That It Is like oh the marketplace of ideas has spoken but there's an actual history behind this stuff, we just aren't taught what it is instead of the truth that it's the result of a coordinated, ongoing 40 year old harassment campaign against anyone who isn't cishet white male
edit: and for the record, when I say "coordinated" I mean that Reagan headed it. You know how Trump does stochastic terrorism against protestors by openly encouraging chuds to attack them? Reagen did the same thing but for non-cishet white men in STEM fields. Nothing on this earth is new
the industry was colonized by the right in the 80’s when all the women & minorities were run out in a campaign to undo the gains made
I think you're overselling the state of "the industry" in the 80's, tovarish. Games in the 80's were basically socially isolated close-to-teenage nerds writing stuff in their bedroom. Games weren't a narrative vehicle, and representation through 16x16 pixel sprites was going to be spotty in any case. Home computing in general was a bit of a sausage fest, admittedly, but at that point that was more down to prevailing cultural norms in society at large than the effect of deliberate gatekeeping.
no it wasn't, by 1980 there was a woman in the industry for every man. They were run out in the following decade & insisting it was always the way it is now is accepting sexist propaganda to whitewash what was done wholesale. "Girls dont code/game" was invented in the 80's, before then coding & gaming was seen as a women's hobby.
There was no mentionable gaming industry in 1980, what are you on about? Around that time you had, Atari, Activision, a couple of Arcade vendors, and a bunch of bedroom coders selling their wares to distributors. I'd love th be proven wrong, but if you look at the credits for games released between 1960-1980 (realistically 1970-1980, save for 'spacewar' even arcade games were not a thing in the 60's) you will not find 50% women, not even close. There's plenty to write about sexism in the industry, no need to spin a narrative that is just plain inaccurate.
If we talk about computing in general, as someone else already pointed out in the thread, the women employed during the early days were mostly operators in the same vein as they were employed at telephone switches, and their employment as such was a result of prevailing sexism, not of emancipation that was later reversed. Their jobs disappeared as time sharing systems with terminal input became a thing. You underestimate how deeply sexist society was in terms of gender roles and employment until deep in the 1980s. Feminism had bigger axes to grind than the number of women in these glamourless jobs that turned even the male workers into social outcasts.
there were no videogames in the 80's lmfao okay. just bc ur 20 and havent played anything from before you were born doesn't mean they didn't exist. The home console industry specifically started in 1972 -- I would know, I grew up playing them. If u dont know what ur talking about & are basing it entirely off of how men who were toddlers in the 80's depict it in Stranger Things then just don't talk about it, mkay?
The home console industry specifically started in 1972
Also, no, that was the pong arcade. The home pong systems started selling in 1975. And time didn't move quite so quickly, it remained a novelty into the late 70's, and it had a grand total of 6 variations of 1 game on it, none of which were written by women. The VCS2600 was released in 1978 and had less than 50 titles by 1980, see here.
I was born in 1974. And I said there was no significant industry. Games were already being made, but you greatly overestimate how big the 'gaming industry' was back then. The biggest publisher during the 1970s, Atari, was literally 80 people in a small office. Nintendo had only 4 games in its catalog by 1980 (arcade titles, the NES wasn't a thing yet). The Commodore 64, by far the most popular home computer, had a grand total of 36 commercial releases that year, and, well, just look.
yes there were, by the 1980 there was a 1:1 parity of women to men in programming jobs which, as stated, plummeted back to the level of 1950 by the end of the decade. You've eaten the honey, comrade, their sexist propaganda has worked on you
yes it is. They had statistics back then, the 80's was on the back-end of two decades of coordinated leftist action, they did a really good job of increasing female representation within STEM fields. Im guessing from ur name that u wanna look cool by denying anything based has ever happened in the US but denying the work of past leftists, even if their work was undone, does nothing but disservice the comrades who came before us.
Ok, so this game isn't quite what you were asking for, but hear me out. How about a game where:
- You build houses for homeless people
- You help a community grow a variety of crops
- You build bars and entertainment buildings for the working class
- Build a fortress to protect everyone
- End a war
- Find out the monster npcs actually have individual personalities and motivations just like the humans do
- Nuture strong bonds of friendship
- NOBODY KNOWS WHAT CURRENCY IS AND EVERYONE'S NEEDS ARE AUTOMATICALLY MET AS THE TOWN IS ABLE TO FILL THEM
- I'm fucking serious, the closest this game gets to currency is that people drop hearts on the ground when they're happy. You can use these hearts to upgrade the town level and later on trade them for building mat recipes
If that sounds good to you, check out Dragon Quest Builders 2. Steam has a free demo that will last you 3-6 hours depending on your play style. :cat-vibing:
NOBODY KNOWS WHAT CURRENCY
reminds me of the beginning of mother 3
I dabble in gamedev as a hobby and I wanted to make a game with some of these ideas. Basically stardew valley but communist, but there are sooooo manyyyy SV clones lol
OH SHIT that reminded me, that game wasnt up on torrent sites when I read Jim Sterling's review but I haven't checked since. Aaaand... there it is! Thanks for the reminder conrad
The only downside to torrenting it is that the game has online features where you can check out other people's sick ass paradises and they can check out yours.
But otherwise if you just want to play the story you should be good to go.
two thoughts thus far; 1) holy fuck is this a slow start, i am reminded of why I stopped playing pokemon games -- if you already know what the game is & how to play it (come on its minecraft) having to hold space to skip dialogue for hours just to get to the actual game is agonizing. 2) if u play as the female character, equip a giant stack of kelp and then hold the eat button it sounds like she's getting throated
Along with being a builder game, it's also a Dragon Quest JRPG game, so yes the story has a lot of dialogue.
I think the throating thing might be your imagination tho. Why only the female voice actress? :panting:
