Sim City 4 has the player actively valuing rich residence over poor ones and they have to set taxes lower for rich residents.
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2022
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There’s a similar class system element in one of my favorite city building games, Foundation, where higher level citizens need more luxury goods and better property values to be satisfied compared to the low level serfs that you can pretty much exploit to your pleasure as long as you have a strong church presence. I love it though, it’s an interactive peer into the political economy of the feudal period. The end game is the beginnings of a proto-capitalist society and I’ve seen complaints from players online that it’s nearly impossible to manage the logistics of the economy after that point but that’s great because in real history this creates the need for bureaucracy to manage those logistics rather than relying on a centralized power figure like under feudalism. It’s a really fun little educational tool in its own way. Honestly my biggest complaint is that the game is fully gender neutral for which jobs you assign the peasants too which I feel like is a miss if you’re trying to show how the economics of the medieval period worked. Maybe the creators aren’t being that intentional tho
It’s funny in both situations the games correctly display the horrifying economic stratification present in our economic systems but because the Sim City devs live under liberalism their brains are drenched in liberal ideology so they see these disparities as either good or “unavoidable” but either way immutable and natural to how economics should work
Dishonored.
Don't get me wrong, I love all the Dishonored games (Death of the Outsider is my favourite), but there is a deeply liberal undercurrent to the series.
Both mainline games are about getting rid of the bad aristocratic tyrant and replacing them with the "good" and "rightful" heir to the throne of Dunwall. The most telling part of this is the conflict between the Abbey of the Everyman and any supernatural covens/gangs like the Bridgemoore witches or Daud's Whalers.
Both the Whalers and the witches have specific complaints within society; the Whalers are comprised of former gang members and disenfranchised labourers radicalised by the inequality in Dunwall, whereas the Bridgemoore witches are a radical feminist movement. Conversely the Abbey of the Everyman is a calvinist cult that carries out brutal crackdowns of anyone perceived to be a witch. Despite this the Abbey of the Everyman is consistently framed as being terrible but still the lesser evil. The Overseers essentially fall into the "woke" liberal defence of policing, "Yeah sure they're bad, torturing and murdering randos and all that. But what are you gonna do if a witch turns up and starts killing people? That's why we need more Overseers and they need to be increasingly militarised."
When Delilah Copperspoon takes control of Dunwall and thus the Empire of the Isles, the Bridgemoore witches begin committing mass murder on the streets because... I don't know they're the baddies.
Time and time again the series shows any attempt to change the status quo resulting in pointless bloodbaths and mindless chaos, a status quo that need I remind you is a combination of Dickensian squalor and the Spanish inquisition.
Any changes that happen for the better, happen within the confines of the system. The miners union is the one group that is shown to be uncomplicatedly good, but even they are ineffective in timelines where the duke owns the mine because the union is only using peaceful protest. A kinda washed down vision of historical labour struggles.
The series is deeply critical of the aristocratic class. Every entry in it depicts them as selfish hedonists who'll bleed a beggar to death if they think it will get them a good high at best, and brutal eugenicists willing to let a disease ravage the population in order to get rid of "undesirables" at worst. But this criticism falls weak when the right answer time and time again is always "replace the bad toffs with good toffs".
The system isn't a problem it's the people, in other words.
I mean, the "worst" are the ones that have natsec money behind them and are insidious propaganda tools, see Call of Duty. The only reason there shouldn't be a push to have that series halted completely is that it would be incredibly alienating to normal people. Otherwise, there's rich history of outwardly reactionary games to choose from. Freedom Fighters is Red Dawn if it didn't suck. 2044 AD is literally the femnazi game.
My personal least favorite's probably Ronaldo's ending in Devil Survivor 2. The writer's brains are so steeped in liberal ideology. In this ending, the MC uses demon shit to create heaven on earth. Not "angels strip you of humanity and you worship YHVH all day". They outright call it a paradise where everyone lives for each other, where people live for each other, basically skipping to whatever would come after communism. It's presented with being on the same level as the ending where some blueblood loser (who starts off with magical shit) rules over a world of constant violence and death. The good ending is restoring Tokyo to the way it was, except your friends are personally better off in specific situations, I guess.
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Red Alert is pretty bad as the Soviet Union gets hit hard with the villain bat.
Outer Worlds is also bad. Present a capitalist hellscape with anarchist and communist factions, and everything other than mild succdem stuff fails.
Red Alert 1 having Stalin as some expansionist warmonger is hilarious if you actually, you know, read history.
They should have gone for Trotsky instead. Even if that would be a hyperbole of his ideology, he would at least fit more.
the USSR in red alert is a villain in the same way Dr Robotnik is
sure they're the bad guys but like, they absolutely rock
The Soviet campaign in Red Alert turned me!
I mean, they're the more fun faction, but they are also depicted as imperialists who love killing civilians.
Also, it makes Einstein into a lib.
True.
I love the Wargame series, and its sister series Steel Division manages to avoid a lot of the most common myths about the Soviet Union circa World War II, but god damn does Eugen Systems have serious brain worms.
Here are the campaigns in Wargame: Red Dragon:
- The South Korean dictatorship opens fire on a student protest, sparking a massive wave of unrest. This prompts North Korea to invade, and you play as the Americans who push back the Northerners and defend the dictatorship that was literally just massacring college students.
- The Soviet Union invades China in response to China attacking Vietnam. You play as China, and lead a counterattack that captures Vladivostok, successfully defending the Khmer Rouge.
- The time has come for Hong Kong to be handed over to China, but after Den Xiaoping makes a somewhat flippant remark to Margeret Thatcher, she decides that she doesn't want to give up Hong Kong after all. You play as the Br*ts and fight to maintain control of your colonial holdings.
- The Soviet Union of 1984 grows paranoid about an impending American/Japanese attack to take some disputed islands, and launches a preemptive invasion of mainland Japan.
- The CPSU successfully coups Gorbachev right before he dissolves the Soviet Union. Despite the Soviet Union barely hanging on after the defection of several Eastern European republics, North Korea decides that this is the perfect chance for reunification, and kicks off the Second Korean War.
Earlier games in the series posited a Soviet invasion of Germany across the Fulda Gap. It's like someone made a list of every single thing that the Cold Warriors were wrong about and made fanfiction of them actually being right.
House Flipper just serves to normalize the idea of housing as a commodity. In a vacuum it is not the worst game, in fact it is quite competent though.
Hearts of Iron: Nazi whitewashing. Nazi fantasy simulator. Goddamn fucking Nazi fanbase.
Europa Universalis: Colonial Nazi simulator with religious persecution button, Pogrom button, slave trading button, honestly more offensive than HOI because all the atrocity is extremely normalised and in fact optimal play
In Shadow Hearts: Covenant, you pal around with a goddamned Romanov.
And fight the ancient sorcerer Lich version of Grigori Rasputin from the 90's cartoon. The presence of a talking bat in this game is coincidental and completely unrelated.
I recently played C&C Generals, thought the ideology there isn't "subtle but insidious", but rather just hilariously blatant.
Dr anthrax is the best character ever made
Skyrim is interesting because the main political conflict in the game is actually quite similar, at least aesthetically, to the modern day radical Democrat vs Republican conflict in America. The Empire are shiny and nice, they rule by law, they open up trade and in Skyrim they are literally puppets to fascists. The Stormcloaks are openly racist to elves, they celebrate the founder of their kingdom who committed genocide against the local elves, and they're fighting for national independence in order to enforce their reactionary beliefs. I don't think its purposely written like this, but I think it is accidentally quite good writing about a hopeless political struggle between two reactionary forces. There is no real good ending, the closest you can get is a temporary truce to kill the dragons before the war starts back up again.
:frothingfash: SKYRIM BELONGS TO THE NORDS :frothingfash:
If you're a non-Nord, especially an Argonian or Khajiit, you get to be "the good one" among the :frothingfash: and the dialogue treats you as such: Dragonborn Uncle Ruckus.