askchapo

Eh I just get to Communism then stop

In Red Faction you become an integral part of a worker's revolution against an oppressive Space America expy. There's no liberal bullshit - You are a terrorist and blowing up vital infrastructure and killing imperial occupiers is how you're going to win your freedom. I don't remember if they ever explicitly say the "C" word, but the rebel group is called the Red Faction and the logo is a fist clenching a hammer. And it's damn good fun. The game has a really intricate building destruction system that let's you carefully dismantle buildings with high explosives, rockets, or just a big fucking hammer.

The Division from top to bottom. Series about how if it was the End of the World, the people we'd all turn to for help would be the pigs

The ARMA games. ARMA: Cold War Assault lets you join the communists but they're goofily evil mustache twirling villains that execute you two missions in. ARMA 3 starts with American soldiers bitching about how shit their economy is and how we need to stop those evil CSAT, an organization of Chinese and Middle East countries that had the audacity to work together and gain independence from western hegemony. They'll constantly talk about the evil Russians or Chinese doing things America has done many times in real life like killing democratically elected leaders and influencing other countries elections. The mods are great though, some let you play as Russians helping Syrians fight ISIS or let you be revolutionaries taking over a whole island from NATO.

The Company of Heroes series is just Hollywood WW2: The Game. You've got:

• Noble Americans fighting for freedom/their brothers in arms in western Europe à la Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers.

• Clean Wehrmacht campaigns and factions.

• Enemy at the Gates-style Red Army campaign and faction.

The series is so fun to play, but damn if it isn't asinine how dirty they did the Soviets in CoH2.

Assassin's Creed Unity. They tried to make a ", non-political" game about the French Revolution. Besides being impossibe, they do an even worse job than you would imagine. Because its about people literally called assassins, they can't exactly do the Terror is bad because violence is bad. Instead, violence is good, but believing in things too strongly is bad. Enlightened Centrism with assassin characteristics

Y'all gamer boys keep sleeping on The Sims and how much it reinforces capitalist consumerism. The Sims is one of the strongest reinforces of lib-bourgeois ideology out there.

Fire Emblem is one big monarchist circlejerk; the nobility and those allied with them are beautiful, graceful, wise, and generous, while those oppose them are grotesque savages that you mercilessly slaughter without a second thought. Kings, queens, princes, and princesses have superior (even divine) abilities because it is their birthright to rule. The end of the game always ends with some royal being enthroned and this is always portrayed as some epochal victory, a restoration of the natural order. These are the sorts of games the Romanovs would have played. Yeah it's just a video game, but then you go on monarchist forums and Fire Emblem is like one of the top fucking things cited in "what made you a monarchist?" type threads. They are some of the most reactionary games around.

yeah this has been a thing of mine too for a while, even though i do really enjoy the games. the original civ came out right around the same time as the end of history, and absolutely shows the internal workings of the mind of the sheltered 80s/90s "apolitical" american boomer frozen in time. and like yeah it is absolutely boardgamey (and honestly i think its at its best when its not trying too hard to be "realistic") so prioritises whats fun as a game over whats actually historical but damn so many ideological assumptions packed in.

your countrys level of development is determined by how many scientists you assigned because "technology" is linear and all technology through history is discovered entirely independently by every nation with no reference to any others, so if your country is technologically underdeveloped its really your own peoples fault for not being sufficiently stem-focused in 1500bc.

and the strength of the nation is more important than the happiness of the people, and the ideal strategy is to invest in bread and circuses for keeping people just at the level where they wont actively revolt, but no more because that would be a waste. the original actually was really mask off with class - your cities could have a certain number of clearly lower-class 'unhappy' people (coloured in black) and you could balance it out and avoid revolt by ensuring an equal or larger number of very bourgeois looking "happy" people so that the unhappiness of the lower classes didnt matter.

combined, the endpoint of history is right around 1990, and theres such a paucity of imagination about the future, like the greatest possible use of science is to be able to use your entire countrys productive capacity to build a big rocket for a pointless space colony impossibly distant from actual earth, fundamentally indistinguishable in both mechanics and intent to just building the pyramids in space to say ‘look on my works ye mighty and despair’

and not to use science to build a true post-scarcity society, to eradicate disease and hunger and suffering and want and establish falgsc or anything equivalent because the creators and the game cant even conceive of any societal progress beyond modern neoliberalism but with a bit more shiny shit

and its so american that if someone else is progressing further with their performative space rocket, you need to stop them by going and burning their capital down because its all zero sum and nobody is allowed to have more progress than you

our people are buying your blue jeans and listening to your pop music

Star Wars: Knights of The Old Rebublic 2 goes really out of its way to portray Randian objectivism in at least a sympathetic, if not positive light.

Civ is so essentially bourgeoisie that the fundamental unit of the game are cities. The rest of the land just exists to be worked. There was a cool and hard scenario in civ4 where you played as the mongols in yurts which were both units and cities.

The real "spot the ideology" moment was in 5 they introduced "ideologies" which were, Order (communism), Autocracy (fascism), and then Freedom which had a 1800s musketmen holding a flag for a picture while the other two were clearly industrial workers and soldiers. An honest picture would've been an artdeco business man.

As much as I still have a soft spot for it: Mass Effect. The entire universe is drenched in capitalist realism. It has moments it even critiques this in part 3 but it never really goes anywhere with it.

The ending...kinda sorta tries to be something else but it's so damn contradictory to the 200+ hours before it that it just doesn't function as the ending to the story they told.