games

outer worlds was a pretty poor satire of capitalism. starfield doesn't even notice the capitalism swirling around it.

The setting is bleak and dystopian as hell, and doesn't do nearly enough to justify itself nor does it treat anything with the gravity that it deserves. The UC is a fascist dictatorship ruled by a technocratic military industrial complex, with liberal tolerance and socdem welfare and this is just uncritically presented in a neutral or even positive light, while the FC is just straight up a federation of corporate dictatorships with settler colonialist characteristics and it's just all smiles and folksy self-reliance with a few asides about "those darn corrupt business dictators sure are self-serving huh" that don't really have any consequences.

And the thing is I'm not even convinced that the writers themselves couldn't have done better, because there is at least some awareness that the setting they're writing is a bad place, but in typical Bethesda fashion all the edges are filed off and the evil despots become nice and tolerant and nothing too bad ever happens because of their misrule. Better writers with better oversight could have definitely done it better, certainly.

Like the two major factions each need to either be changed for the better or changed for the worse: the UC needs to either be as awful as its system would actually require or it needs to lose the fascism and instead be a socialist state grappling with the material reality that corporate power structures (I'm thinking like Soviet "second economy" shit where it's organized crime outfits and the like doing their own capitalist bullshit outside the state) managed to seize a lot of resources for themselves out in the colonies, leaving it on the brink of a civil war between the party and the colonial powers. Likewise the FC needs to either be genuinely liberationist, representing rebellion against colonial corporations and resistance against the fascist UC, or the consequences of their vile ancap dictatorships and corporate feudalism need to be front and center. As it is they're both awful and whitewashed to all hell while representing functionally identical fascist ideologies to such an extent that their conflict with one another doesn't even make sense.

Further, the settled systems need to be enclosed more, with large swathes of owned and occupied territory where you can't just land a space ship and set up a private mine using a cooler full of rocks to create industrial capital and a living space in seconds.

Why the fuck is there a homeless shelter in a universe with FTL and near infinite resources?

The thing that really stuck out to me about (the intro to) the Conquest Of Bread was that Kropotkin is just completely enamored with the technology of his day. He thought that there was easily enough to provide for everyone using the miracles of modern technology. In 1892.

So yeah, I think the scarcity will continue until capitalism goes away, and post-scarcity technology doesn't mean the end of capitalism unless people successfully do something about it.

I helped out a homeless shelter in Starfield

r/uplifting news

The main problem with this is that the economy makes no sense. There shouldn't be homeless camps in America from the standpoint of reasonable allocation of resources, but in Starfield a spaceship costs pocket change, so it actually just doesn't make sense, as opposed to a more grounded sci-fi capitalist version of the setting where there absolutely would be homeless, but that's because homes and ships actually cost a lot.

WHERE IS MY COMMUNIST REVOLUTION BETHESDA

This is also my central critique of the setting/world building in Mass Effect and one of the major reasons I wasn't super hype for this game. At least mass effect has super interesting characters, even if their overall world building is paint by the numbers capitalist realism sci-fi.

Bethesda though? Oh dear....

Because you still have capitalism there

Is it even the same writers as Fallout 3 though?

The cruelty is the point for libs.