Current Events > I miss the days when games were apolitical

(+) Yeah! (+)

hockeybub89 posted...

Do you hate when movies, shows, books, and music do more than "point and laugh" at issues in the real world?

Yes, because I hate when media constantly reminds me of how messed up society is right now. I enjoy these things as escapism from reality. Not as gospel to live my life.

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MegaCamerupt posted...

You don't miss when games were apolitical you miss when you were apolitical or couldn't understand political undertones in games

exactly.

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Video games really need to stop forcing heterosexual characters on us. This political agenda is tearing me apart Lisa.



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PaunchyTurtle53 posted...

But everyone already knows that she's not right? So, no, that's not what I'm trying to push. It was an example of what I actually want, which is for games and their stories to not be dictated by politics.

how do you determine if a game and its story is "dictated" by politics?

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CyricZ posted...

So political takes only work if they're satirical? If there's any seriousness or weight to them in the narrative, then it's too much?

If the story suffers to force in those political takes, yes. That's been my point all along.

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PaunchyTurtle53 posted...

Here's the difference.

Let's take the children of atom in fallout 3. They're some religious kooks that worship a bomb. (Ignoring fallout 4 for now), but overall, they're harmless and just a little nutty. It's a satirical take on organized religion. It's not heavy handed. If they just abducted children and bathed them in the radiation of the bomb for religious reasons and you had to kill them all to save the children, that'd be heavy handed.

And yeah, war is a bad thing. Is anyone in disagreement? Of course that one is heavy handed, it's what the entire series is based around.

Your post has nothing of substance.

So heavy handed politics are bad unless you agree with them? And going off my original post, name 3 games that tackle the LGBT community in a way similar to "abducted children and bathed them in the radiation of the bomb for religious reasons and you had to kill them all to save the children". Also, lots of games have covered cults/religion in that exact way. Are those games heavy handed political agendas?

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averagejoel posted...

how do you determine if a game and its story is "dictated" by politics?

A fair question. And the answer will vary depending on who you ask. But for me, it'd be if the story was still cohesive and enjoyable. And it wasn't preaching to me about how I should live my life.

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PaunchyTurtle53 posted...

That's been my point all along.

But your examples are pushing that satire is key. Do you have any examples of political takes in games that aren't satirical?

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hockeybub89 posted...

Also, lots of games have covered cults/religion in that exact way. Are those games heavy handed political agendas?

Does the quality of the story suffer as a result from these things?

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PaunchyTurtle53 posted...

Yes, because I hate when media constantly reminds me of how messed up society is right now. I enjoy these things as escapism from reality. Not as gospel to live my life.

I hate to break it to you, most artists use art to express their opinions. They escape from reality by writing fiction based on their views of reality. I also don't think you exactly understand what politics is because it has always surrounded you in media. It doesn't mean "annoying things I hate".

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Notice how these arguments about "forced political agenda" always devolve into discussing some rhetorical "story suffers as a result from political agenda" because all the actual examples they could give would get them laughed off the board.

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CyricZ posted...

But your examples are pushing that satire is key. Do you have any examples of political takes in games that aren't satirical?

The only one I can think of off of the top of my head is Dues Ex with it's commentary on class division, however I don't usually play games that are so serious with their narratives, I tend not to enjoy them.

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I miss when gamers were cool counter culture dudes who just liked games...now gamer brings up the image of weird alt right neckbeard douchbags.

We literally have gamers now who parrot bullshit talking points from the 90s about games causing violence and shit...like what? What happened? Now yall are cool with the idiots trying to ban games for violence?

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PaunchyTurtle53 posted...

Does the quality of the story suffer as a result from these things?

I don't think so. What games do you think have a story that suffers due to politics? What do you even count as suffering?

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hockeybub89 posted...

Remember: Knowing a character is gay is heavy handed political messaging, but "Fuck the government, fuck religion, fuck war, and fuck you" is just a design choice.

Im guessing because the latter is something that resonates with the vast majority of people

I love my apolitical games like witcher, deus ex and fallout. also my apolitical movies like fight club and v for vendetta

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Also, there is something funny about praising satire while decrying agendas.

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coh posted...

Im guessing because the latter is something that resonates with the vast majority of people

The vast majority of people hate seeing gay people? But I was told everyone accepts everyone. Also, isn't fuck religion edgelord crap? And only fuck the government if it's the team I hate.

Weird how you're being wrong just to dunk on LGBT characters.

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SSJPurple posted...

I miss when gamers were cool counter culture dudes who just liked games...now gamer brings up the image of weird alt right neckbeard douchbags.

Yeah, sorta this. I miss it when being a gamer at least made you a loser, a weirdo, a geek. Nowadays it means you're desperate to be the biggest goddamn square in the room. Like, imagine looking back at the 1950s and thinking "ah, those were the days! Me and my Cheetoh dusted fingertips yearn for the times when a man was a man and..." and having the goddamn nerve to not only play fucking video games, but fucking colonize the culture.

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MegaCamerupt posted...

You don't miss when games were apolitical you miss when you were apolitical or couldn't understand political undertones in games

I reckon there's something in that.

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Coh really living up to his "biggest dumbass on CE" tag

hockeybub89 posted...

Also, there is something funny about praising satire while decrying agendas.

like its not worth even interacting with because its so disconnected from reality. its not just moving the goalposts, its more like he chopped the goalposts into pieces and started spreading them around

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hockeybub89 posted...

The vast majority of people hate seeing gay people? But I was told everyone accepts everyone. Also, isn't fuck religion edgelord crap? And only fuck the government if it's the team I hate.

Weird how you're being wrong just to dunk on LGBT characters.

Im saying that certain themes have much broader appeal

coh posted...

Im saying that certain themes have much broader appeal

So political agendas are fine if a certain percentage of people agree with it? Is that supposed to be implied when people shriek about gay people being forced down their throats and how political agendas need to go away? "I don't want to hear things I disagree with, especially gay people since I am a hateful waste of skin" is not the same as "We shouldn't have politics and agendas in art and media." Everryone has an agenda and a lot of them are related to real life societal problems.

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IShall_Run_Amok posted...

Yeah, sorta this. I miss it when being a gamer at least made you a loser, a weirdo, a geek. Nowadays it means you're desperate to be the biggest goddamn square in the room. Like, imagine looking back at the 1950s and thinking "ah, those were the days! Me and my Cheetoh dusted fingertips yearn for the times when a man was a man and..." and having the goddamn nerve to not only play fucking video games, but fucking colonize the culture.

Yeah like growing up I just dont remember people giving a shit about any of this stuff we just like playing games

I can look back at old school SF2 tournaments at arcades in the 90s and people of all walks of life were just there having fun playing street fighter

Sure there was some trash talk but at the end of the day everybody was cool it was rare for actual beef to happen

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PaunchyTurtle53 posted...

Let's take Abby. Why is she transgender?

Everything you said after this is hopelessly, and laughably ignorant and incorrect.
Abby IS NOT Trans.
Did you even play the game?

I played Timespinner not too long ago, finished it, had a great time, there was clearly an agenda from the LGBTQ community but I didn't give much of a fuck, the game was a lot of fun

If Abby was transgender, don't you think the promotion of the game would have beaten us over the head and made it explicitly clear that she was?

Anybody saying she was has probably never played it, and just assumed she was because "that's what's popular now".

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PaunchyTurtle53 posted...

A fair question. And the answer will vary depending on who you ask. But for me, it'd be if the story was still cohesive and enjoyable. And it wasn't preaching to me about how I should live my life.

so basically you consider a game's story to be "dictated by politics" if you don't like it

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4bgiMlEYbU

Or when comics were comics and apolitical, like Xmen.

bloodyarts posted...

Everything you said after this is hopelessly, and laughably ignorant and incorrect.
Abby IS NOT Trans.
Did you even play the game?

lol... maybe he just listens to right wing outrage big mouths and one of them said that and he took it as serious.
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It really pulls me out of my escape from reality when a character is just straight for no reason. If I wanted sex politics, I'd turn on CNN.

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The introduction of non-gaming SJWs really ruined Western gaming. Its also starting to spread to Japanese games, too. The right tried to get involved, too, but nothing they did actually affected the games.

Cancel this game because it has a male protagonist!

Not enough _______ representation!!

Like, seriously? Go ruin something else, guys.

Payzmaykr posted...

The introduction of non-gaming SJWs really ruined Western gaming. Its also starting to spread to Japanese games, too. The right tried to get involved, too, but nothing they did actually affected the games.

Cancel this game because it has a male protagonist!

Not enough _______ representation!!

So a few people on the Internet said things you disagreed with and it ruined gaming? I'm pretty sure 95% of games still have male protagonists.

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Well I'm sure you can blame grifters like Anita sarkesian for making gamers more politically aware of their hobby, just not in the way she wanted.

Now they see sjw boogeymen in everything.

deus ex is absolutely chock full of satire. the first game for example is basically just every conspiracy theory to ever exist combined into one and all the absurdity that comes with that. which of course went over most gamers' heads as the right wing conspiracy gamer crowd thought it was unironically exposing a bunch of definitely real conspiracies

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Payzmaykr posted...

Cancel this game because it has a male protagonist!

Not enough _______ representation!!

Like, seriously? Go ruin something else, guys.

SJWs ruined muh white male video game protagonists!!

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Political messages and satire are great and smart and don't derail the plot of the game unless they are political messages which I personally disagree with.

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There's nothing more boring than the generic white male protagonist in that image. Maybe like 5 of them are actually interesting characters, but for the rest, changing something about them, like race, age, gender etc would have brought a new perspective from the character and how people interact with them.

See how people treat Ellie vs the way they treat Joel. Big strong man vs teenage girl. It made the Ellie sections in TLOU so much different.
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LightningAce11 posted...

There's nothing more boring than the generic white male protagonist in that image. Maybe like 5 of them are actually interesting characters, but for the rest, changing something about them, like race, age, gender etc would have brought a new perspective from the character and how people interact with them.

See how people treat Ellie vs the way they treat Joel. Big strong man vs teenage girl. It made the Ellie sections in TLOU so much different.

Thank you for proving my point.

Payzmaykr posted...

Thank you for proving my point.

Your point is that you've been catered to your entire life and when people try to do something new that doesn't involve you it upsets you.

That's it. That's the whole thing. Anybody who isn't a "straight white male protagonist" needs to fit in this box that has to be approved by you before you deem it non pandering.
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Payzmaykr posted...

Thank you for proving my point.

Your point that variety is bad? Having characters of different types/backgrounds opens up a lot more options for the kinds of stories that can be told.

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Hayame Zero posted...

"Why do games even need patches now? They didn't need them back when I was a kid!" - the kid who grew up playing busted ass NES jank that had simpler development cycles

It was actually a bit eye opening going back to the Original Xbox. First of all for whatever reason PAL Xbox's cannot output in resolutions 480p or higher. It's plenty capable of this as hacking the system and changing it to NTSC opens up those resolution options.

So I wanted to play Jet Set Radio Future. For whatever reason my model of Xbox has a glitch where the screen is scrambled if the game is displayed in 480p and I needed to use a mod patch to fix it.

People really have the rose tinted glasses for old games and generations.

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IShall_Run_Amok posted...

I seriously find takes like this so bizarre.

Are people just clueless about market trends?

We went from games being primarily marketed to kids in the 80s and most of the 90s. The late 90s and 2000s they started to lean hard into edginess, blood and sex appeal to be more 'mature' which ironically lead to most of these games being the most immature in the long run.

Then games started to follow trends set by prestige television and blockbuster movies and it's been like that ever since.

How do these guys think that things changes because of people whining on Twitter. They're literally following trends like they always did. The success of GTAIV and Last of Us impacted games far more than SJW's ever did.

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Hayame Zero posted...

"Why do games even need patches now? They didn't need them back when I was a kid!" - the kid who grew up playing busted ass NES jank that had simpler development cycles

Ar Tonelico 2 PTSD intensifies

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IloveJesus posted...

You have absolutely no credibility whatsoever, so if you really believe in the arguments you are putting forward, the most constructive thing you can do is shut up.

Good god you sound like Joseph talin and any other political tyrant. Keep your mouth shut and agree with me. Please delete your account.

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Uh, what?
PaunchyTurtle53 posted...

Let's take Abby. Why is she transgender? What does that offer to the story? Why doesn't Ellie kill her in the end? It makes no sense. Ellie has just murdered tons of people to get to Abby, just to come to the conclusion, "Revenge is bad, I shouldn't kill people for revenge." It's incredibly forced and awful for the story. Now if I may put on my tinfoil hat, it's because killing a transgender person in a video game would've been transphobic. And we're trying to encourage transgender acceptance, it's why we had you play as Abby for the second half of the game.

uh, Abby wasnt trans dude. Wrong character. Abby was just a tough girl.

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zinezinzadan posted...

Good god you sound like Joseph talin and any other political tyrant. Keep your mouth shut and agree with me. Please delete your account.

People can disagree, but when they back it up with claims which are demonstrably false, they are arguing in bad faith and need to shut the fuck up.

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