Slashdot Mirror
The Politics of the Video Game
illuminata writes "Can the video game industry keep its mittens out of the political slugfest? According to Kevin Parker's article Free Play, they sure can't. In it, he cites Dreamcatcher's Gore and Sega's Legacy Online and Jet Set Radio Future as main offenders. He even goes on to point out how some people want video games to convey their favorite political message in the future. Are there any particular titles or game companies that you think lay on the politics too thick, or is it all just a bunch of foof?"
Is this the one where you invent your own Internet?
The only computer game that makes me think of politics and politicians is Thief. Not because of the gameplay...
Trolling is a art,
> Are there any particular titles or game companies that you think lay on the politics too thick, or is it all just a bunch of foof?
Doom for Columbine is falsely accused of being political, but I think that mods like this may pave the way for better use of balance than more politically engendered titles, with corporate backing and all the politics that goes with that. Keeping it freeware is the key! (Then nobody can mess with it.)
The plot really jived with my strong anti-hell demon political stance.
...America's Army: Operations is little more than a thinly veiled recruiting tool for the U.S. Army.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
How about the COPS in GTA3? ;)
They seem an accurate portrayal of police in the US, especially now that we have the PATRIOT act. Do you ever see the cops hand you a warrant?
quote
Or was it all just a bunch of foof?"
quote
I thought that was a Pentium bug?http://www.x86.org/errata/dec97/f00fbug.htm
Well, we all know Hollywood sure can't. Game developers don't have quite the level of celebrity or exposure, but they are conveying a message.
It's hard to make something realistic and not weigh in an opinion.
most of the slant seems to be definitely doomsday, environmental, and decidely anti-government..
agan, this is just from reading the article. I haven't played any of the games mentioned.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
Do you wish video games to have First Ammendment protection, or don't you?
KFG
a) The stuff that comes out of your ears when you have a cold.
b) An inane, repetitive joke on /. (see In Soviet Russia...)
c) A totally made up word with no actual meaning.
It is my understanding the NRA sponsored the development of the BFG9000. In fact, without their influence most games today would look like the Sims or Animal Crossing.
t
5 billion people survived the destruction of ALL agricultural plants? What did they eat, the other 5 billion?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
What about the myriad of war-themed games released in the recent years: Medal of Honor, Soldier of Fortune, BF1942, Call of Duty, etc?
Politicians are always up the gaming industries butt (too violent, causes kids to be violent, etc...), so why can't the gamining industry get up the politicians butt??
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I loved Knights of the Old Republic --- I grabbed it as soon as the PC version came out. However, I felt the "Big Evil Corporation" thing was a bit lame; it was like the plot to a Captain Planet episode in a galaxy far, far away. You know, where the evil corporate barons are polluting the environment just for the sake of doing it and being evil? I half expected the kid with "Heart!" and his monkey to show up.
O.k Let's see an anti-gun FPS. You an (FBI agent) with a Tazer and sleeping gas are supposed to single handedly elminate a Wacoish compound of gun loving fanatics that are prepared to shoot you to preserve their rights.
There are some genres where it's hard to avoid a political agenda informing the game in some form or other. A few years back I designed some combat flight sims and had to devise background material for the campaigns. The temptation to editorialize on a subjects such as, say, the drugs war in Colombia was strong. For the most part I resisted and I hope found a middle way between Hollywood druglord fantasies and the political realities of what was going on in the country at the time. (And today: it's shocking how some of the events I built the campaign around later came true.)
So in my game I had FARC narcoguerrillas, right-wing death squads and I penalized the player for causing unnessesary collateral damage. There are some who will no doubt think I went to far, as if games on current events can somehow be cosily insulated from politics. But I reckon I did the right thing.
Then in Ages of Empires and Civilizations, I was a king!
In Starwars Galaxies, I played a mayor for a while. With a bunch of friends, we started a town, it grown big, my friends and some of the folks were reelecting me each week, until someone started to complain about my politics and won the vote against me. :(
Since I had a lot of powerfull artisans still in my camp, we boycotted thier artisans and raised the prices for them... heheheh, we showed those bastards how it was to be Cuban!!! héhéhéh
Politics make some games great!!! But it is not a must, just a good option games can count on.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance." Isaac Asimov
There are of course very few game plots that approach the beauty of a well-written novel, or even a mediocre one.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
There have always been producers that have had biased viewpoints for their titles. For example, Square/Enix seems to love putting their the anti-industrial viewpoints into their Final Fantasy games. Going back even as early as U.S. FFIII (FFVI in the series) it was always the evil, greedy, corrupt, industrialized nations at war with the peaceful, kind, gentle, treehuging fairie creatures who lived in harmony with nature.
Even as far back as Frogger, we were witness to the environmental impacts that industrialization has on nature. The brave but fragile frog's futile attempts to cross a busy highway to get back home only show the producer's bias -- they never show the poor truck driver, driving for 20 hours straight just to earn a living, fighting exhaustion but alert enough to avoid swerving his big white truck into oncoming traffic, just to avoid a frog too stupid to stay off the road, as more of a hero.
In my opinion, it's unavoidable that for the most part, serious issues will always be portrayed in games with some bias. It's up to the player, then, to decide for themselves whether the game reflects a viewpoint that can be carried into the real world. Games such as Deus Ex explored a lot of the political ramifications of conspiracy theory, but let the player decide for themselves which was the best path.
Jet Set Radio? You mean the games about street gangs on rollerblades, each one based on a ridiculous* theme like sharks, love droids, and 3-year-out-of-date raver culture stereotypes, sticking it to the man via rail grinds, graffiti and pirate radio?
The one that ends (depending on the game in the series) in either a skyscraper rooftop battle on a giant spinning record against an evil dj booth, or a battle with a three story disco mind-control robot?
Is Kevin Parker seriously trying to say that game has an overtly political message? This just goes to show; some people have a vivid imagination, but little common sense.
*holy fucking shit, Slashdot posters, what's with all the high mod posts with the mis-spelling of this word as 'rediculous' lately? Buy a damn dictionary.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
Sometimes games, great games even, are taken from politically charged source material. The evil Haitians of Vice City invoke political considerations, as do all the recent spate of Iraq War spin-offs. Its inevitable. Also, common gaming themes like violence, sex, and the rest of the usual suspects invoke politics. My question is, so what? Politics happens.
Here is a story about the group Hezbollah using a game based on the open source genesis3d game engine. It is called special forces, link HERE
He makes a good point about the prevelance of the Market economy in video games, but this is probably more of a prgmatic than political decision. Could you imagine trying to program a game with a functional Command driven economy? It would be an interesting experiment in Economic modeling. Does anybody know of a game that makes a good run at this (ie. not a fixed per turn income or anything like that, but something relatively sophistocated)?
The commercial has a bunch of children reciting the pledge of allegiance, interspersed with bits of violence from the game, and then ends with the phrase (in red) "Freedom isn't free."
Maybe I'm just a liberal hippie communist, but I always thought the basis of free government was a willingness to follow the rule of law, not brainwashing children into military service.
Pong is considered a metaphor of modern society's struggle with nuclear waste.
:)
In the game, the waste is represented by a tiny dot with the major political players tossing it back and forth until one slips up, thereby accepting the waste within their district. Defeat comes to the player that proves they are unable to protect their constituants, with 21 being the threshold required to lose re-election.
You didn't really think it was a simple game of table tennis, did you?
This is not my sig.
unbiased is impossible. the notion of unbiased (reporting, movies, games, whatever) is dangerous because it offers a disguise for people who are trying to gain momentum behind their political stance. if everybody read (listened, watched, played, etc.) thinking about the source of the content and what they might be trying to push, then the world would be a better place. instead most people seem to be stuck trying to determine if a message is the norm, or the "main stream view". that leads to being easily duped by politicians and salespeople (experts at delivering a message regardless of the content). No message is unbiased. An the notion of an unbiased message is proliferated by those who want to pull one over on the masses.
--Brian
It always bothered me that the SimCity manual editorializes that Reaganomics doesn't work. (Somewhere toward the back, in the section on economic srategies I think -- it's been a while.) I think the game is even set up to demonstrate that 'fact' for you under one of the pre-configured scenarios.
Now, that said, SimCity does a pretty decent job of teaching you firsthand that taxes are necessary and that overtaxation hurts as much or worse than undertaxation, so the political commentary isn't fatal, just annoying.
BTW, to all the Reagan-haters out there (and there are a lot of you) that are getting ready to click the "moderate" button: please consider that disagreeing is not same as flamebaiting or trolling. This is a discussion, not a war.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
When i was younger, nobody seemed to care much that i was slashing away in Ninja Gaiden on my trusty NES, or spraypainting via some simpsons NES title.
Has technology really changed so much to make this difference, or has the view just been given a shady light in the events of the past 5 years?
I guess what im trying to say....in the words of David Cross, "What were the video games that hitler played?"
Witness "The Passion", which was an enormous success largely because it got people out to movies that normally can't stomach them. I think videogames tap into some of that.
As an example, I find SNL and the Daily Show irritating because lately they try to make lame political statements. So I just don't watch them anymore ... instead I stick to Chapelle Show, South Park, and adult swim.
I've kind of moved away from most movies, tv and music and towards videogames for similar reasons. They don't have a sophomoric political message to irritate me. I hope that doesn't change.
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
Unless you have played a game similar to planetarion, or similar game, you have no idea how much on-line games can have huge political conflicts.
The entire game was a "strategy" game but it really involved simple uot and out politics. There were two kinds of successfull players.
1. Players that were good at the game, and good at the politics (the top tier)
2. Players that were bad at the game, but good at the politics.
Being Good at the game, that involves management of resources, being on till 3 am and getting up every 2 hours via an alarm clock.
Being good at politics was to find a lot of friends to help you.
When I started in round 3 of the game, you simply did not have to be good. All that you required was that you had friends that would CRUSH ANYONE THAT FOUGHT YOU.
I was a "good" player, which means I stayed up way to late, and got up way to early to monitor my fleet. I got crushed several times because I was picking on players who were not as good players but had better political connections.
The next round I actually got a couple friends together and we constantly were sending messages/e-mails/sitting in chat to constantly improve our political situation. My goal for that round was to get my galaxy (which i controlled a group of 25 people) to get into the top 800, instead we got into the top 400, mostly because of strong strategic alliances.
The game was pure rampant capatilism, except all companies had the same product and a few got a relative monopoly (the top 400 galaxies controled well over 90% of all resources)...
The game always reminds me as the best argument for government controls on large companies.
Planetarion sucked later on, but it really was exciting during that time.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
Mephistopheles and a 7th level Hell Demon(tm), I'd like to protest the knee-jerk Hell Demon bigotry that panders to the lowest common denominator here on /.. Considering how many of you will eventually be residing here because of your AD&D, pr0n, and video game usage, I'd think you'd want to be on better terms with your eventual overlords.
Then they came for the hell demons...
What Ronnie did wrong was increase spending greater than the increase in revenue (thus the increase in the debt).
Whether we like it or not, there are underlying messages within the games, and players are there to push the limits, since the risks are basically none. Anyone whose been following TSO (designed to be Perfect-land) knows about the Alphaville elections' being rigged, which can only be described as humorous. There was a big discussion about what we are teaching our teenagers, as the losing non-rigged candidate is in RL a 14-year-old girl. To which I can only respond -- we are teaching them that elections are rigged, that's why in English we have the phrase gerrymandering. And just wait until we get electronic voting...
In any case, the question becomes, as game developers and designers, what is our responsibility in creating the framework and rules of these alternate realities? Can we do better? Or at least, can we create a few games where antisocial behavior isn't the most fun behavior available?
One of the striking passages from "The Utopian Entrepreneur" was about doing a focus group, discussing the Purple Moon games. One of the fathers was a bit distressed that the game had ethical content, but when asked later in the interview about his opinion on the ethical content of Mortal Kombat, for example, he answered that it was not a game about ethics -- but Purple Moon was.
With the amount of time our kids are spending playing games, we owe it to ourselves to offer some alternative to games where the basic goal is to smash stuff up, overthrow a government or make lots of Simoleans. Takers, anyone?
Yes, now that the patriot act is out, I see cops running around and beating people on the streets everyday. Its amazing how ever since they passed the patriot act, cops just storm into my house five times a day seizing stuff, along with the FBI, and John Ashcroft is leading the herd, cackling madly about how he loves his job. Don't forget to mention those terrabytle ram disks that, according to your hero michael, are currently being used for the foreginer fingerprint database, the foreigner tip database, the matrix database, various mad projects at the nsa, and several other projects that may or may not exist (not like truth matters to you guys.)
Its funny how you libs will try taking a potshot at that whatever the topic. "Oh wow, blenders are on sale at K-Mart...I doubt I could buy one without the patriot act letting the man come arrest me for it." Random fact: 60% of the american people not only support the patriot act, they feel it isn't strong enough.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
I'd always heard it as:
Power corrupts.
Absolute power....is actually kind of fun once you get used to it.
Like movies, novels, and plays before them, computer games have discovered politics. Even the pure, plot-driven action that remains often comes attached to heavily politicized back-stories.
Personally, I don't remember the time when stories existed in some magical land of pristine unaffected factual recounts of events.
There are no stories without perspective and no stories without bias of any sort. Even Asteroids has an anti-mineral bias (who's gonna think about the space rocks!?!?!). But to argue that perspective doens't belong in stories is to deny one of the reasons why we read, watch, listen, and play along with them - we want to hear other peoples' ideas about the stuff going on around us.
Games don't exist in a vacuum. Games are stories. Stories don't discover pplotics and other forms of "bias." People do (like writers.)
Anyone who wants factual data should stick to Excel spreadsheets.
I think the author of the article has conflated "politics" with "economics" in the first few paragraphs. While I appreciate that Parker is critical that recreational pastimes like gaming may be taking themselves too seriously, I'm not sure what the hell his point is.
Is he also critical of Monopoly, with it's trvialized depiction of pre-tax-reform US industry and culture? Are fat little men in top hats really in charge of all public utilities, and able to charge whatever they want for rental of their slums? Shocking!
Singling out the so-called massively multiplayer games like Asheron's Call for being too "real" because the players are demanding a certain level of reality in their game play is a pretty weak argument that games, in general, are getting too political. Microsoft is in the business of selling software and subscriptions. Whether or not they are "scrambling" to offer what their subscribers want is hardly relevant.
People who design software and systems know that how the software is used in the wild is often very different than the your own idea of how it should be used. It's not surprising that people who pay good money to play Asheron's Call and Star Wars Galaxies want to create simulated economies, culture and history. As far as I'm concerned, this is just a more sophisticated versions of old BBS culture.
People grow culture. It's what we do.
I'm not convinced that any of this has anything to do with his other contention, that the software manufacturers themselves are getting over-political. Which is it? Are the customers demanding more immersive worlds, or the designers injecting overwrought politics into gaming? Are these really the same thing?
The other games he mentions seem to fall easily into the post-apocalyptic near-future scenarios that share dystopic fictions with a whole range of popular culture. Comics, anime and (of course) science fiction stories have mined this vein for decades. Placing your otherwise undemanding first-person shooter in some kind of science fiction setting to explain why you happen to be a hyper-muscled uber-soldier tearing holes in the "bad guys" seems perfectly reasonable to me.
How is this different from, say, Escape from New York or even "Buffy"?
While the author brings up some interesting points, he seems to miss the mark on every target he aims at. Maybe he needs to just relax and play some Unreal Tournament.
-- clvrmnky
Most game plots are very linear, and the worlds aren't detailed to any appreciable degree if you go 'off the beaten track'. The is only natural because programmer, artist and developer time are expensive. This leads to a lot of assumptions being made during development about both the world and the perspective of the characters in it. It also has to work in terms of game mechanics. You also want to create a worldview that the majority of the people playing the game can connect to, without either boring the crap out of them or pissing off too many PTA types or yokel politicians. Most important of all: SOMETHING HAS TO BE HAPPENING. There has to be drama-- something to make the main character decide to ACT. It helps if it's something that looks good in a screen shot, too.
Taken through all these filters, it doesn't really surprise me that most games have simplistic and heavy handed "messages". It seems to me that has a lot to do with the limits of the medium as currently understood. MMPORPGs have the possibility of changing this, due to their open-ended nature and the way they can evolve over time.
Also, the author mentions simulacra as if it were a purely postmodern marxist concept, but the sort of simulacra he describes is what J.G. Ballard called a 'Baudrillardian Simulacra' which is the term he used for a sort of copy without an orginal. That may sound like a silly concept, but they can be powerful social forces. The most common sort of this is a yearning for the 'good old days' that never existed.
This isn't all that new. One of Infocom's pieces of interactive fiction, A Mind Forever Voyaging, was explicitly political. Similarly, Infocom's Trinity took on the subject of atomic weapons. Both of those games were released in the mid-1980s.
Just like in Hollywood, a lot of protagonists revolved around the "perceived" threat of the times.
Soldier of Fortune for instance has gone thru the "Middle Eastern" country and South American Drug Barons.
China is now perceived as a viable threat as evinced in Command & Conquer: Generals
Picking the enemy is making a statement.
You couldn't just pick the Vatican, or Albania (as happened in the movies Hudson Hawk, or Wag the Dog) without some kind of premise.
Is it preparing the hearts and minds of the public for a future conflict or just reflecting what's already there. With today's media war coverage, keeping public support is important and I don't think a game with the Palestinians being oppressed by the Israeli Army would market in the US of A at all.
Funnily enough, such a game does exist! IIRC Slashdot quickly "labeled" it as propaganda.
Battlefield 1942 had a mod where the Middle Eastern country had special forces troop type could suicide bomb and they were great for taking out tanks. That "feature" didn't survive long. And if it was non PC, how come we can still use flamethrowers?
So the next time you decimate the opposing forces, think about the real world equivilant. Is it just a reflection or is it projecting it's image into your head.
Oriental Hero "I want to live in a city where the Police don't shoot you" Jean Charles de Menezes
While you are playing MGS, amidst the "love upon a battlefield", there is a definite tone of nuclear disarmament, and you get the sense that the Hideo Kojima didn't much care for defense companies who get big-budget contracts. Any radio calls to Nastasha were always about "We cannot allow nuclear deterrance to be our policy" and "Landmines must be banned throughout the world". A huge portion of the game revolves around gene therapy and cloning.
Was Kojima trying to get a political message out? I think so. Did it affect the game in a negative way? Not really.
SmashTech - No smashing of tech involved
Most of the posts are missing the games that REALLY have politics in them:
The Civilization (including Alpha Centauri) series. These games make certain political ideologies inherent in the game, as well as allowing players to make their own political choices. Alpha Centauri makes (implicitly) the point that a Fundamentalist religious government is a viable form of government, while on the other hand, implying that certain losses of liberty would take place. This is a very political statement. It lets you choose between horribly oppressing your citizens and letting them run free and happy -- (and lets you win either way) a VERY political choice.
The SimCity series is a perfect example of implicit rules -- it assumes that unless you, the Mayor (the government), do it, nothing will happen in your city. While fun for gameplay, does this send the right message? You can agree or disagree.
Does anyone remember Privateer 2? The finale of the game was you taking over your dead brother's interstellar crime ring that you'd been fighting the whole game. There's definitely some serious debate here, or with Jedi Knight, where if you make the "bad" choices, you become the Evil Emperor yourself. But if you look at the "choice" you make, it's certainly up to debate about whether it was right or wrong.
Someone above mentioned Splinter Cell:Pandora Tomorrow. The makers of the game have very specific political beliefs, but they're pretty subtle in the game.
At any rate, I found this article to be very interesting, and expanded on some of the points it mentioned.
http://reason.com/0404/fe.kp.free.shtml
>But to be fair, they do let you randomly drop nukes on people.
:-)
And thank you Sid Meier for that! Playing on low difficulty and then nuking their knights and catapults is always good for a quick power trip.
Muslims portrayed as terrorist, while performing vile and evil actions without regard for human life. They did refer to themselves as freedom fighters, which makes the entire game just a smear campaign in my eyes. Innocent as it seams, redefing words is half the game of politics these days in my opinion.
Regardless of what you Americans think about muslim fundamentalists, many of them consider themselves freedom fighters, and in my not so humble opinion, not totally without merit either (Israeli oppresion (justified or not), several invasions (panama / iraq / afghanistan / iraq), US troops in Saudi Arabia etc).
I mean.. would it have hurt so much to just cite one example during the GLA campaign of 'evil' acts (or atleast acts percieved as evil by the GLA) done by the other sides?
(flame away)
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
Yes it looks like all the "bad" worlds have a liberal slant. However it is also true that liberal distopias (sp?) make for a more interesting background for a game. The evil powers were overcome with greed, resulting in fantastic effects that even they did not plan on, possibly resulting in a world where everybody including the evil is in bad shape, where there is no way to fix it so the game play is limited to a controllable microcosm.
A conservative distopia would be a Communist dictatorship, or a world like 1984. In that the individual cannot do anything, so there is no game. If they could then it is not a conservative distopia, as there is possibility of overthrowing the evil government. Perhaps you could play a nasty enforcer, locating those who dare to speak out against the government and getting rid of them, but it seems people don't want to identify so closely with an evil character.
I would say conversely that all the "good world" games, especially those space-trading ones, present an Ayn Rand fantasy world where everybody seems quite happy despite the absolute freedom to even shoot your competitors.
More than likely the FF series has gone the furthest of anything in making political statements of one type or another...in the early games, there's an anti-Imperial bent for sure, the large dominating country that's trying to take over the world. Baron and Vector..
In VII, the pro-enviromentalism aspect of the story is basically impossible to avoid. The large power reactors are killing the planet, and the party is trying to stop them.
VIII and IX really relaxed the political aspects of it all I think, going for a more basic love and fantasy story respectivly..
X really brought it back with a vengence however. It's basically a cautionary tale on the dangers of religious devotion and conservative acting. (Why do we do it? Because we always have). Won't spoil it for anybody who hasn't played it, but everything gets turned upside down on its ear near the end.
Oregon Trail.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Most political game ever is Civilization III! I always play as the Communists...
Think about it - Max Payne = the problems w/ drugs.
NARC, same thing.
Deus Ex - politicians.
EVO (back on the SNES) and Ecco the Dolphin = environmental nutjob propaganda.
Most of the Japanese titles have the same stuff going on as well, only they're really big into post-apocalyptic stuff after Hiroshima/Nagasaki took place; lacking an evil-stereotypical-bad-guy for their culture (you know, the one who is merely "Out to Rule the World) they go for the "I'm gonna blow everything up haha I'm insane" bad guy instead. (see: Sephiroth)
Games are (generally speaking) a work of fiction that involve humans, and being fiction you need a story. I would argue that it's almost impossible to tell a story that involves human beings that would not become "political" if it has any degree of elaboration.
Example:
"Bruce Wayne's parents were shot in the alley one night." OMG ANTI GUN AGENDA!
"Your parents were poor and sick, and being unable to afford medical help died when you were at a young age..." OMG SOCIALIST MEDICINE AGENDA!
Both of these are fairly standard boiler-plate backgrounds, but fall under the article's scope of questioning.
You know the Bush-huggin' righties must be desperate for "proof" that Iraq had WMDs when all they have for references are nutball web sites and vague sentences buried in 300-page reports.
Let's not kid ourselves; if there was real, concrete proof that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and planned to use them against the United States, George W. Bush would have a press conference inside of an hour to trumpet their discovery, and he'd be flogging it in every other sentence on the campaign trail. The fact that Bush-Cheney 2004 is making so much noise about John Kerry's medals instead is an implicit admission that the Iraq WMD stuff was all bullshit.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
I heard they wanted to release America's Air National Guard: Missing Inaction, but Karl Rove nixed the idea.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
One night while inebriated and playing Vice City, I came to a realization: it subtly reenforces society's morals on the player. If you kill someone, they send cops. And if you kill the cops, they send more cops! Rob a store, cops come. Bump your car into a cop, cops chase you. It's through the operant conditioning of cops chasing you making the game harder, that it pushes the messages of not killing, stealing, and driving responsibly.
-no broken link
There are two basic categories for evaluating a games politics.
- How well does the simulation match reality. This applies even for fantasy games, because while the physics may be fantasy or hightly simplified, there are still elements that symbolize abstract features of real things.
- The second is what moral framework the game provides for its simulation. This is no different from a novel, whether realistic or fantasy.
For instance, you are blowing up other ships/people who are presumably sentient beings. Hopefully there is a good reason for this. If the reason is "it's fun", that is politics. If the reason is "to stop them from destroying me first", that is a different kind of politics.the money to pay for it came out of the Army's recruiting budgets. Thay also said it was a tool for recruitment.
No real secret.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
NARC had a plot?! Come on. Narc had about as much of a plot as Final Fight or Double Dragon. That's not to say that NARC didn't have an anti-drug message, but I don't think it was preachy so much as ridiculous. I mean did anyone really think that there were junkies running around the streets throwing giant glowing hypodermics at people?
There's a fairly recent console game, State of Emergency.
The Gov't/Corporate corruption has gone over the top, and the people are in a state of half-revolution. Mostly this manifests in their simply running around the mall/downtown area/etc, with occassional looting, and various street gangs laying claim to random turf. And naturally the gov't gestapo-esque enforcers.
The camera/controls for that game are more than a little amaturish, and the gameplay pretty repeptitive and dry.
Overall it's not a very good game, imo, but it comes pretty close to what you were describing. (though with meatspace law-violations by the populace).
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
and the hell demon community. When someone dares to say anything negative, or heaven for bid, Shoots a hell demon, you guys get all up in arms, indignant about the shabby treatment you get.
But where are you when your demonic hordes are defiling bleak hungarian villages? Where's your statement urging restraint from fellow demons?
I haven't seen such hypocricy since the great zombie protest on the Washington mall in 97, and we all know how that ended.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean