Wrong Monkey!
Objection! Not a monkey!
Right turn, Clyde!
Why is it I can remember the Orangutan but not Sonda Locke.
Lest your point get buried in ape gifs, I agree with you. Most game stories are somewhere in the range of terrible to serviceable. I can’t imagine they’d handle politics any better.
Orangutan gifs
Hell, most of us are ecstatic when a game has well written characters.
I can hear my son rolling his eyes in his sleep from here. “It’s an Orangutan, Dad, not an ape. Don’t you know that?”
The good news is that I got to see this:
The bad news is that I had to sit through that:
That is all.
The point being made was that the games already have politics in them, and it’s disingenuous for the likes of Ubisoft to disavow politics while pushing out, say, Clancy branded games about the awesomeness of vigilante policing or games about how the Pope was part of an evil conspiracy of totalitarians.
Absolutely. Which is not to say @Menzo’s point is wrong. Most games that actively engaged with the politics would probably do terribly at it.
But with any medium, the art is always better when it tries to say something.
Heir to the Empire might be entertaining
Fahrenheit 451 is powerful
Though if you choose to engage and try and say something, be clear and intentional on it. Don’t go halfway, then try and pull back and remain neutral looking at you Bioshock Infinite and your muddled message. That is the worst choice. To say something, you may have to stand on a position, which might alienate some people. But if you try and grab that prestige, while always pulling up short of a message? It’ll be noticed, and it’ll not look great.
Which is precisely how the EG article concludes:
Nobody ask if a weapons shop have a political message. A weapon shop, sells weapons.
You want weapons? they sell weapons. Maybe you want weapons to defend yourself, or to hunt ogres in the forest. They have a weapon for that.
Nobody ask if a pimball have a political message. You uses the flippers to stop the ball from exiting the playing field. There are “different” machines with different elements around the field, but the game is basically the same game. Maybe one machine is decorated with Flash Gordon, or Tom Clancy or Batman or Tarzan. But that is only fluf. Is not really part of the game, everyone understand that is only window dressing.
Edit:
Games can make political messages. But is hard and part of the message is going to be “distracted” by the gameplay mechanics. As if the gameplay mechanics make their own message independent of the intention the game developers.
Well indeed. Not every game is a pinball table. Some people, including many devs and most critics, would like game stories and settings to be more than window dressing. And Ubisoft’s own CEO says he agrees! That doesn’t mean every game has to have a political message, but it does mean that when the setting is inherently political, the narrative should engage with that rather than pretending it isn’t.
Also, you’re dead wrong about weapons shops not having political messages. I mean, a not inconsiderable number of gun shops literally have political messages on their signage.
Lets talk about wealth and income inequality!
What!?
Income Inequality!
What!?
Nevermind, give me some ammo!
What!?
If you use a computer to make games, theres limitations.
A computer can’t represent the number 1/3.
You want to represent reality? you probably are going to use numbers. Thats a gigantic stament about the world.
It will probably make your game make a strong stament. If your game is about survival of a small town in the desert and use numbers. You may accidentally make the stament that people is a resource. That childrens are a resource to manage.
In this survival town management game, you may model it with a happyness number, and a food number. You will probably model it so a town low in food is automatically unhappy, and a town with a lot of food is happy. So apprently “Wealth = Happyness”. If you play this town simulator, and every citizen have plenty of food and water. Thats happyness.
Maybe you have a tech tree. So the first technology to unlock is religion. And you need religion to invent geometry. And you need geometry to invent the alphabet. You can’t have a atheist town inventing the alphabet, and ignoring geometry and going straigh to algebra. Maybe you can’t even imagine a town that is good at math, but has never invented geometry.
Wait a second. I forgot to make a political stament with this game.
Sorry for the long rant.