The specific example that made me start thinking about this was how AC Odyssey has a sidequest where a slave doesn't want to be freed because he thinks being a slave is cool, actually, which is both absurd apologetics but also misses that in Greek and Roman systems manumission was a form of social control that both rewarded and indebted slavers' most loyal collaborators. That turned into thinking about how just absolutely absurdly shitty classic Greek society was in general, and how AC Odyssey made it this weird wholesome egalitarian slaver dictatorship where everything's cool and good except for the bad mean guys who are indistinguishable in methods or goals from anyone else.
That's also one of the things that pisses me off about Starfield so much, how the "good guys" are a pair of far right colonial empires: one is literally just the fascists from Starship Troopers, and the other are a bunch of feudal ancap dictatorships. Even the villains are just saturday morning cartoon villains who are bad and mean but don't really ever do anything distinct from the "good" factions except be ontologically opposed to you, the main character.
Someone else pointed out recently how HOI4 ends up effectively doing Nazi apologetics the same way, where in trying to avoid giving their worst fans a holocaust button they just outright remove all the actual horror and material actions the Nazis did altogether.
And I don't think I even need to get into how rampant this problem is in liberal fantasy settings, which are always full of apologetics for monarchism, because that's well tread ground for criticism. It's enough to make something like how the original Mount and Blade handled the in-universe nobles as being inherently sexist and classist pieces of shit who were obstacles for a female and/or commoner PC to fight against and overcome almost refreshing, instead of it just being like "yeah these awful pieces of shit who are all definitely mass murderers and worse are actually cool and nice to you and not really all that bad really" like so much feudal apologia media does.
And yeah, there's a point to be made about not wanting to grapple with problematic themes and all, but where there's the line where that just turns into apologetics for the very problematic thing you're trying to avoid dealing with at all?
Ok I can kind of see this argument but I have to completely disagree here. You say remove the horrors of Nazis as if their fans would look at that genocide button and be like "huh this is bad actualy?" Completely the opposite of reality imo. They would see it as glorification and justification for their own views.
Furthermore we all know pretty well what everyone even remotely leftist, let alone everyone on this site would be saying about PDX if they literaly gave you a genocide button.
I don't think the game handles history particularly well, and obviously the players are already problematic. But exactly because of this I don't see how giving you a genocide button wouldn't just make it even worse here.
PDX is not that straightforward, they've done decently well all with Vicky 3 politics all things considered. But on the other hand you can go do whatever war crimes you want in Stellaris. Yes its obvious the corporate decision making here but if the main argument is a WW2 strategy game would be better with ample depictions of the war crimes committed then I don't agree at all.
Yes perhaps WW2 media should emphasize the horrors is an argument that could be made, but the reality is does it actually help our current situation? On a case by case basis maybe, but mostly if your audience is already leaning fashy then no, it is literally rewarding them for their views. There is no such thing as introspection at a large scale, people don't look at horrible shit and go "wow this is bad actualy I don't like this anymore" on the contrary they are more likely to double down and reinforce their beliefs.
Religious(Christian) fundamentalism is exactly like this, show them evidence of God's crimes in the bible for example and they go "but you don't understand God is good actually because [BS here]". So why would a Nazi look at HOI4s hypothetical Holocaust button as anything more than a validation of their views?
One thing I want to add here is that while yes I agree about Stellaris having a genocide machine and allows horrible things to be done to other aliens, I do actually wonder if we can get stats on how many players play as xenophobic and see if we can get names and locations wink wink
I will say that I have a soft spot for Stellaris now because they have recently added features that allows full complete fully automated space gay communism
I will say I have been guilty of using the world cracker / more evil bombardment stances for the sake of convenience in Stellaris.
I think that if HOI4 is to add the holocaust as a game mechanic it should just be an insurmountable siphon of manpower/materials/factories. Even with that all the perverts that play it would likely still have an undesired reaction to it
I misread that several times of "using the word cracker."
also guilty of that
what they should do is make playing the fascists an extremely punishing experience. they set out from the outset for it to be "fair" and either side could win. the whole world less japan and tiny european countries fought germany. they should lose every time and the heuristics for high level play should've been how long they could hold out or whatever
they give fascists a fuck ton of buffs that make absolutely no sense, they lean into fascist propaganda hard. What they need to do is also power up the soviets way more than they do, because the soviet AI should be making their way through poland by 44 instead of stuck in a perma deathlock at the stalin line until the british naval invade or some shit. They spend a fuckton of effort demonizing every instance of communism, an effort barely made for fascists.
yeah, they could at least put those news things of the Soviets finding concentration camps when they push into eastern europe, or something, it needs to show the horror to some degree.