I get where you’re coming from, Mark. FWIW, the things I’m looking into most with this expansion (thus far, it’s early and there’s still a lot of info to come) is the Ascension stuff, which seems where Tall empires are going to thrive. I’m liking the idea of having a game focused around building a utopia and achieving victory by ascending to another type of existence as opposed to conquering the galaxy.
I usually like to play the “good guys” in strategy games, but this week’s dev diary appeals to me for that reason. I want to save a race of space raccoons from having their brains eaten by a mindflayer and have them lead the fleet that retakes their homeworlds. It’s one thing I really like thematically about Federations, being able to use their technology and having migration treaties that allow their pops to settle on my worlds. Now I feel like I have more reasons to do so. :) Seeing a teal blob taking over planets from a red blob is one thing, but when the teal blob is literally eating the populace of the red blob, I gotta go intervene!
The group reacting to refugees is probably the same group that got really upset when they did a Euro centrist mod… aka all white people. It’s sad to see that kind of thing in a game community.
I am a bit with @KevinC though. I like to play the good guys, unless I go all in for bad, but in general if i have a genocide race in Stellaris… I will go after them. I’d hope there would be some sort of modifier for any genocide prone race to be extremely hated by everyone else as a penalty.
Yeah I’m with @KevinC as well. Don’t understand why you’d want a sanitized SciFi universe. Seems bland. Particularly when SciFi has traditionally been used as allegories for current and past societal problems, to remove all of the unpleasantness is odd.
I just read The Player of Games the other week. The Culture is a pretty great place to live while the Empire of Azad is very much not (unless you are at the top and even then…). The Empire features most of the bad stuff listed in the DD and much more. The contrast between the two of them is pretty interesting (especially trying to work out where we are on the Culture/Azad spectrum). I object pretty strenuously to the idea that art shouldn’t show this sort of thing.
I’d like to be able to play out these sorts of moralistic tales in games, so taking evil options out of the palette doesn’t sit well with me. I mean you could make a case that playing evil is different than reading about it. Even in the book, the game of Azad shapes the outlook of the Empire’s citizens in deleterious ways. Applied broadly and strictly, however, I think such a criteria would rule out many games we enjoy, and much of worth would be lost along the way.
Edit: If you are interested in questions around potential roles of games in society and the potential of moral stances being encoded in games then you will probably find the book worthwhile. I find it pretty fascinating myself, though not everyone like Bank’s books.
I don’t want to see them removed either. But when you have a group that freaks out because of the word refugees… you’ve got an art form that wants to have moralistic tales but not really comment on them… which would make them less responsible than many other art forms. For example, only poorly done movies are going to put genocide in a movie just for the fun of it.
In some sense it is worse than that, because the omnipresent requirement for Game Balance requires that the evil options have to be competitive in the long run with the good options. It would take a pretty subtle game to cover why societies might go down that path while having the path be ultimately self-defeating.
Well, a typical action movie will have a lot of physical violence without treating the causes and consequences seriously. The specific genre of space opera movies and TV shows are going to feature genocide fairly often, often without being terribly serious about it.
There aren’t a lot of sci or even action movies that present genocide in any light that is good. Half the time the bad guys are not only guys but nameless caricatures of a culture that is not the culture of the primary audience.
I understand that developers want to have their cake and eat it too. There’s nothing wrong with making the evil side valid or even having games based on evil winning or being evil, but when you have a white supremacy group in active on your forums and they more upset about the refugees portion than genocide in the game, maybe developers need to push themselves beyond the oh this is a cool feature moment… aka you can have these features and not actually cater to the bigots and xenophobes… in fact you can have these features and tell that group to f-off.
No Country for Old Men also glamorizes a villain… so?
Paradox has a white supremacy and xenophobic following. They’ve been there for awhile, and Paradox knows it. Maybe they should tread carefully with their craft, but I’m not saying they should limit it so much as hey don’t be surprised when some freak out about refugees… you’ve kind of been catering to this group for awhile.
Let me put it another way. I feel free to share my race and my sex on this board. I would never do that on a Paradox board. There’s a known problem there.
