"I don't want Politics in my Gaming!"
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If you want mindless slop, then play it. It certainly exists. Real art and proper storytelling makes you feel things and reflects the the world we live in.
You can have a story without AI slop or politics.
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Nah some people genuinely just want an escape from the world. Politics is a shit show right now and is always in our faces while many of us feel helpless.
For some people an escape from the world is cute squirrel who can’t remember where they buried all their treasures. Others will cry that the squirrel is unnecessarily political because they don’t use he or she pronouns.
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I love politics in gaming, I loved Fallout 3, NV,4 (I still enjoyed it but to a lesser extent), Cyberpunk, and Outer Worlds 1/2. I love it when a game has multiple factions, I love when you get to really understand the politics of a fictional world, and I love stories involving politics.
Yes agree, scheming and politicking can make the game mechanics really work.
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For some people an escape from the world is cute squirrel who can’t remember where they buried all their treasures. Others will cry that the squirrel is unnecessarily political because they don’t use he or she pronouns.
Some people do make politics their personality and can find it in anything.
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Seriously. Every form of entertainment has baked-in political assumptions, and that definitely includes #ttrpg . You might choose not to examine them, but this is an active choice on your part, and you don’t get to pretend that your entertainment is “free of politics”.
Honestly, with how things are right now politically - FAIR!
Let me roll some silly dice as a silly little guy while I ignore the prelude to another world war.
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You can have a story without AI slop or politics.
I wasn’t talking about AI slop. With “slop,” I meant mindless games that don’t take any position on anything.
IMHO, the best games are ones that make you feel something or question something critically. You can have games that make a political statement and are fun to play. Helldivers, GTA, BioShock, Disco Elysium, etc. If you’re uncomfortable with the point that a game is making, then that’s on you (and is the point of OPs comic).
There are certainly plenty of games that take no political stance on anything that I’m sure you can numb your mind with. Just play something else if you are feeling too judged.
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Yeah generally when talking about a thing you draw a circle around the thing, that’s how that works. My glass from ikea isn’t making any political statement or assumption in its design as a finished product (unless you consider presumed size requirement for a beverage container to be political, though inherently nothing about it even states its purpose, so even that is doubtful) the process behind its design, manufacturing, and sale very much is political as fuck though.
You slightly moved the goalposts there. The assertion is not “Everything is making a political statement” it’s “Everything is political.” Your ikea glass reflects your social class, the international relations between where you are and where it was made. It may have been made by an oppressed person in some third world shithole (or even sweden!) It may even be a political statement, like a designer somewhere made it curvy because he thinks people are more likely to buy something with a “feminine” silhouette.
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Seriously. Every form of entertainment has baked-in political assumptions, and that definitely includes #ttrpg . You might choose not to examine them, but this is an active choice on your part, and you don’t get to pretend that your entertainment is “free of politics”.
RPGs, much like SF, have always been a mechanism to explore social issues in philosophy, governance, and thought. In Human society I don’t personally believe that “politics” can be avoided in any group anywhere. —of course that’s just one man’s opinion.
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You can tell what someone’s politics are by what they consider political.
I was astonished at some of the Steam reviews of Outer Worlds after playing it. People proper pissed off that their experience had been ruined because there’s a female side character with an optional side quest where she wants a date with another woman. Like how thoroughly filled with hate do you have to be as a person, to be fine with all the mass killing but suddenly get a moralistic high horse about a fictional character going on a dinner date you don’t approve of.
Sad that Steam are making a comment of their own by allowing those reviews to stay up.
While I haven’t read those reviews, I think the implications of Steam removing reviews would be worse, since they would effectively be manipulating the user score of a game. User reviews are just that, user reviews. The score should indicate what users think, whatever their reasons may be for thinking it, no?
I don’t disagree with the rest of what you said though.
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“Politics” or “the way one sees the world”?
Because I’m pretty sure there’s a language disconnect regarding worldview.
A dev has their game reflect their worldview, and a social curmudgeon experiences political rhetoric cognitive dissonance, illustrating the incongruency and the fact that they are, indeed, a tool. ARRGHHH MUH FREEDOMS
It’s a classic case is “What I do is my world view, what you do is politics.” Maybe sometimes the more radical variant “What I do is reality, what you do is politics.”
You know, like the older version of that, “What I do is religion, what you do is superstition.”
When talking to people, especially on the right side of the political spectrum, it’s sadly quite common that people cannot separate their opinion from reality.
