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I mean like the polar opposite would be promoting fascism? Like the closest I can think of is Skyrim having an openly fascist/white nationalist faction and the player could just choose to side with them in a conflict against the empire and no one will think less of you in-game for doing so. Like it’s not an endorsement per-se, much less an ideological examination a-la Disco Elysium. I don’t think it’s impossible to do a fascist disco elysium, it would be pretty syncretic, but I don’t think the current right wing, which is feverishly anti-intellectual, is able to. Maybe if games had existed a century ago when italians where doing fasicst syncretism
Mass Effect if you pick every renegade choice. You essentially play a fascist CIA agent. :same-picture:
Counterpoint: there are no choices where you aren’t a fascist CIA agent effectively working for the Galactic EU
WH40K SPESS MAHREEN has you playing as a literal gene-modded Ubermensch in service to a human supremacist empire that worships their god-emperor, and you are tasked with killing foreigners (orks) and religious deviants (Chaos) to protect your giant factory planet crewed by priests and their lobotomized slaves
I’m so tempted to play that game, I think I saw vinesauce lime play it and it was like the kind of video game they would play on starship troopers lol
It’s a very fun game and it’s so shallow you can’t really read too deep into the ideology. For extra fun you can install the AMERICA MOD
SimCity 2000
Disco Elysium has all kinds of themes but ima chose the ones that’ll let me do this bit.
In DE you are pretty powerless you fail through the game and stumble unto a conclusion, in SimCity 2000 you are all powerful, demolish entire neighborhoods to build a highway, call down floods, meteors and all kinds of biblical disasters. As the eternal ‘Mayor’ you are basically a philosopher king and people hating you or loving you is based on how well you do. This doesn’t even get into how a ‘city is simulated’. Oh people just become criminals, a certain amount of people are always criminals no relation to their material conditions at all. How do you deal with crime? Why you build a police station nearby. Public transit is kept down by the fact that people can drive everywhere and don’t need a parking space.
In conclusion Disco Elysium is living in a post soviet city/society, while SimCity 2000 about constructing and living the US society/city.
Also all the Call of Duty and God of Wars etc are just too easy.
I watched a video about how the creators of SimCity researched making that game, and basically they read all of the liberal theory of city planning lmao. That’s why in both SimCity and in real politics the only solution to crime that can be considered is increasing police presence - the difference is that in SimCity it works because it’s programmed to work, and in our reality it just makes things worse.
It’s a great example of doing ideology without realizing that you’re being ideological, since the devs would probably say like “we’re reading the experts/following the data”, etc.
coming in late here but im gonna nominate police quest (and sequels) from my childhood, old sierra adventure games made with the help of some actual retired cop. its like kings quest but you get to play an oppressor who actually has power!
like disco elysium theyre broadly adventure gamey in style, except these ones are completely linear and railroaded. and the key part of it is the importance of being completely by-the-book and following correct police procedure at all times or you will literally die (or sometimes just be fired). like you have to check the car tyres before you get in every time or otherwise you will have a flat tyre and crash and die. cross the street at a non-designated place? hit by a car and die, every time. mess up the strict police procedure in any way like doing stuff in the wrong order? immediately fired lol. you have to constantly check in and check out your gun etc from storage or else someone might steal your gun from you and you die. huge amounts of the games are about sitting at your desk and doing a whole bunch of paperwork correctly. filing evidence into little baggies and checking them in to evidence lockers. my strongest memory of these games is an early part in (i think) the third one, where you go to some lake area and theres a cRaZy dude in his underpants terrorising picnickers. its clearly some guy having a mental health crisis, but instead of talking him down or anything the correct approach when he rips your badge off is to search through his discarded clothes to find his car keys and throw them in the lake as revenge. shocked pikachu this enrages the guy and the next step is to equip the truncheon and beat the shit out of him when he comes near you, and then you have to frisk him or it turns out he has a knife in his underpants and you die (because of course everyone having a mental health crisis is an immediate threat to your life so you have to apply pre-emptive violence to them), then handcuff him, then take him to the station to check him in and do paperwork, etc etc etc. the main plotline in that one is even about stopping a satanic cult (this is supposed to be a highly-accurate real-life cop simulator series remember) cos satanic panic was still kinda in vogue in the mid 90s i guess?
its this amazing copaganda from a cops eye view where every cop is completely by the book, baddies are bad because theyre bad, and the cops just have to act the way they do because every interaction with the public will literally kill them if they arent completely on edge at all times
I remember my friend’s chud dad played the shit out of those. We tried once or twice, but it was the most boring game in the world when you’re a kid,
i was obsessed with those sierra adventure games when i was a kid, even though a lot of them were objectively pretty shit. but yeah the police quest ones were easily the worst and most boring, and had the most bullshit insta-deaths from a company whose games were renowned for bullshit insta-deaths and other frustrating shit to encourage you to buy hintbooks. also half the police procedure stuff was kinda transparent copy protection where you refer to the manual for infraction codes or whatever so if you pirated them like we all did then it was even more bullshit guesswork
still have a weird soft spot for them all though lol
