I feel like it also has to do with lots of games featuring elements of (or full-blown) violence as part of their regular gameplay loop.
Yeah, in Helldivers 2, you're committing genocide for insidious political reasons. But in Pokémon, you're committing genocide, because you're a ten year old and your neighbor gifted you a pet.
Normally, the genocide part would be the very obvious red flag for something political going on. Instead, you need to be aware of why precisely you're doing the genocide this time around.
Such genocide elements are usually also paired with fun gameplay (because violence is easy to translate into gameplay), and with a terrible story, so it's understandable that people would skip all the story elements.
Conflating Pokemon and genocide really reduces the value of genocide. That it might be a tongue in cheek accusation towards our livestock and animal treatments .. but genocide.
Like calling everyone Hitler and a nazi. Or groomer or..
Has anyone actually seen anyone actually complain about having politics in games, and not just obnoxious politics, like Specs Ops where they force you to kill civilians and then act like your the bad guy because you wanted to see the content you paid for? If you dont give us a choice to be good, and if you're super preachy about it, then its just bad writing.
Look at New Vegas, plenty of politics, but you get to make choices, and its not preachy at all. Then look at the Last of Us 2, where they force you to kill a dog the other character petted, and it comes off as blatant emotional manipulation. Which game is widely considered a masterpeice?
Spec Ops actually did have choices where you could be good (or at least less bad), but ironically people missed them because they didn't think being good would work.
For example, at one point you're being harassed by an angry mob of locals. A lot of players simply shot them because a lifetime of experience with shooters told them that no other input would be recognized. But in actuality, if you fired warning shots at the ground or over their heads the civilians would flee without incident.
I didnt know that. After the forced willie pete bit, I thought all the other bits were forced too. Specs op unintentionally set a rule "if theres a choice, youll be forced to take the evil one" which made the entire thing feel obnoxious.
I think you're actually engaging with it a bit shallowly. You are the one who invented the rule and a different framing is exploring how, if games seem to put us in situations where we must do horrible things to advance even a couple of times, we take that as a rule instead of risking losing to find other ways.
Which is a fairly glaring indictment of the whole military shooter genre which is all about "hard men and hard choices" that completely dehumanise the factions you're in opposition to.
Military shooter games glorify war and shallowly reward horrible behaviour. Spec ops does it differently.
Majority of people: do horrible thing
Some people: experimental and find heroic thing is rewarded.
Discussion possible, why did the majority do that? could we talk about horrible and uncreative design patterns in the genre of military shooters? How media portrayals of war train us not to look for peaceful solutions? Whether this feeds into how we view American imperial wars?
you: no spec ops bad video game because I didn't do the good option.
People did experiment, in the first scene with the wp. That experiment told them that the game would force you to make evil decisions to continue playing. I saw that narratively there was a good option, but the game told me that that option wasnt available in the WP scene.
you get that this wouldn't work as a critique if it was obvious you could make different choices right? Then it wouldn't make the player complicit. If you're not complicit it's just a game saying "military shooters could be different" which is a nothing statement.
Like how games with a "get the information (evil)" and "get the information (good)" button aren't offering real moral choices. Or how deus ex would lose all impact if the "here's a gun, go kill these people" starting mission tempting you with a rocket launcher popped up a "you might change sides in the future" warning.
By involving you, leading you just like any other military shooter for a bit then cutting you loose is what creates the critique. You compare notes after playing and someone points out something and you go "huh, why didn't I try that?". It's not condemning you for not trying that, it's asking you if you're happy with a genre which trains you to never to try it.
If the player doesnt know the choice exists, and has reason to think the choice doesnt exist, then the choice is kinda moot, isnt it? In any case, my original point was a lot of complaints were really about bad writing.
People play games for escapism, not to be reminded of politics. Not every story needs deep political roots, people just want to have fun and forget about real world bullshit.
People play games for escapism, not to be reminded of politics. Not every story needs deep political roots, people just want to have fun and forget about real world bullshit.
It's not a very popular opinion it seems but I agree, I rather like a bit of mindless escapism sometimes, not everything has to teach me a lesson, sometimes things can be just fun. Not that we can't have both, of course.
And that also doesn’t mean you can discredit the message of a game just because you don’t like it or want to engage in it. But so many people play a game with a strong political message, and then complain constantly how it’s ruined by it. Okay so don’t play it play something else.
