I don’t really have a name or genre but it’s certain games like 40K, Fallout, Civ/HoI/all the other ones.
Am I the only one to notice these weird trends of political distribution? Is it just me?
I’ve definitely noticed it with grand strategy games, take this with a grain of salt but I assume that it is because these kind of games let the players live their political fantasies, which I guess it’s more appealing to people who want a different kind of society than the one they live under IRL. This is all just speculation though.
I personally like these games precisely because of that reason, I like building up socialist countries in Victoria 3 because that’s currently the only way for me to “have a taste” of socialism, even when it’s just a bunch of pixels on screen.
Pretty much this. Anyone can have daydreams or fantasies about their ideal society, but when yours involved detailed plans about train schedules, economic policies, and realpolitiks, you have some pretty strong Opinions about how things should be run.
Think also that it depends on whether the user gets the humor. Liberty Prime, the Imperium, etc. aren’t things to support what they stand for at face value, yet some do.
Like, I remember a while ago seeing a thread on reddit where some dude was saying that Fallout was a parody of communism, and not capitalism, and his argument boiled down to “when government does something bad, it’s communism”.
So the given examples tend to involve heavy critiques of nationalism and fascism but fascists think that shit’s cool. Liberty prime from fallout is a beloved meme for fascists but also is literally talking about how they’d rather be dead than communist in a post nuclear hellscape that once was the capital of a superpower at the end of a game where the plot revolves around getting access to clean water. Caesar from new vegas is a fascist depicted as a loser who couldn’t cut it in the new California republic so he turned to banditry and pretending to be a Roman, but he’s misogynistic and kills a bunch of people and that’s how fascists want to be seen.
For civ, it’s a game about colonialism, but also all sorts of cultures are treated as special and as having their own things of value.
but fascists think that shit’s cool.
Because they’re morons, but we’re just repeating ourselves
It’s not even idiocy it’s that that’s what they value. To them an uninhabitable wasteland filled with hierarchy is preferable to communism. Some weirdo misogynist crucifying his enemies is someone they actually think is more badass than a society of equals.
That’s honestly why in order to mock fascists in a way they don’t like you have to go low and weird. It’s not enough to call them evil, you have to call them the pathetic losers they are.
Most of those are satires of fascists meant to point out how stupid they are, but the fascists are too fucking stupid to ever realize it.
Games Workshop (warhammer and warhammer 40k) even put out a short comic where the space marine protagonist kills a bunch of literal nazis and tells them they aren’t welcome anywhere to get the point across and the irl nazis only barely caught on
As far as 40K is concerned I think it mostly comes down to the main faction of the franchise being a hyper religious, fascist nightmare and GW shitting the bed when it comes to presenting any real alternatives. Every faction is at least a little evil or extremely selfish. This leads to the very fucking evil Imperium coming of as “one of many” or “not THAT bad compared to Chaos”.
However, I don’t think this was the result of intentionally propping up fascists as cool and good and more the result of corporate ghouls not getting satire and as a result removing those elements from the narrative until we have arrived at the current point in time. Where we are told by GW that the Imperium is a fascist shitshow and is surviving DESPITE being so shitty. While pretty much all of the novels are portraying the Imperium as surviving BECAUSE they are so shitty. If any of the other factions were definitely good this wouldn’t be an issue.Where we are told by GW that the Imperium is a fascist shitshow and is surviving DESPITE being so shitty. While pretty much all of the novels are portraying the Imperium as surviving BECAUSE they are so shitty.
Much of that is because 90% of the novels is written from the perspective of the Imperium. Of course they’re going to say “Our brutal repression and murder of tens of millions was required to prevent billions dying to chaos” instead of “maybe if we offered some minor quality of life improvement instead of death-by-factory, people wouldn’t flock to chaos all the time”.
Never played 40k but omg hearing the lore and descriptions of the game make it sound kinda fun, but im broke no PC lol
I just started to get into 40k, if you like reading, Dan Abnett’s First and Only is a good introduction to the world. It doesn’t expo dump you, and has a nice enough plot to follow.
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Pretty funny that factions in Fallout were supposed to be exaggerated parodies but yet we still have many in the fanbase unironically supporting the Enclave, Legion and the shit that Liberty Prime spews lol.
JFC if I had a penny every time some dumbass quoted that goddamn murder robot, I’d be a bourgeoisie by now. It’s layed on so thick, but thanks to the propaganda everywhere else, people look at it, miss the joke and go “Yes, that is cool and makes perfect sense”
Nailed it
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