I’m surprised no one here has mentioned Assassin’s Creed yet. All conflict in history stems from two competing ideological sects of callous murderers who wanton manipulate populations into doing their bidding and for some reason one side in this conflict is supposed to be the moral superior of the other. Also some of the supplemental material is batshit and basically just a way for the devs to denote certain historical figures as good or bad depending on what organization they belonged to. All other conflicts are secondary to the overarching philosophical differences of two sects competing for magical thingies.

At the same time those games have probably the most sympathetic portrayal of Marx in a western piece of fiction, so there’s that.

In Shadow Hearts: Covenant, you pal around with a goddamned Romanov.

Minecraft’s villager and pillager colonial mechanics is weird.

House Flipper just serves to normalize the idea of housing as a commodity. In a vacuum it is not the worst game, in fact it is quite competent though.

chess

Red Alert is pretty bad as the Soviet Union gets hit hard with the villain bat.

Outer Worlds is also bad. Present a capitalist hellscape with anarchist and communist factions, and everything other than mild succdem stuff fails.

I love the Wargame series, and its sister series Steel Division manages to avoid a lot of the most common myths about the Soviet Union circa World War II, but god damn does Eugen Systems have serious brain worms.

Here are the campaigns in Wargame: Red Dragon:

• The South Korean dictatorship opens fire on a student protest, sparking a massive wave of unrest. This prompts North Korea to invade, and you play as the Americans who push back the Northerners and defend the dictatorship that was literally just massacring college students.
• The Soviet Union invades China in response to China attacking Vietnam. You play as China, and lead a counterattack that captures Vladivostok, successfully defending the Khmer Rouge.
• The time has come for Hong Kong to be handed over to China, but after Den Xiaoping makes a somewhat flippant remark to Margeret Thatcher, she decides that she doesn’t want to give up Hong Kong after all. You play as the Br*ts and fight to maintain control of your colonial holdings.
• The Soviet Union of 1984 grows paranoid about an impending American/Japanese attack to take some disputed islands, and launches a preemptive invasion of mainland Japan.
• The CPSU successfully coups Gorbachev right before he dissolves the Soviet Union. Despite the Soviet Union barely hanging on after the defection of several Eastern European republics, North Korea decides that this is the perfect chance for reunification, and kicks off the Second Korean War.

Earlier games in the series posited a Soviet invasion of Germany across the Fulda Gap. It’s like someone made a list of every single thing that the Cold Warriors were wrong about and made fanfiction of them actually being right.

Bioshock Infinite.

The city of Columbia was built as a haven for the ruling class of 1800s America. Complete with a white underclass and, of course, slaves. It was built by a scientist who discovered a new technology and was to serve as a floating World’s Fair showing the world how great and advanced America is. Pretty okay premise if done right. Many opportunities to talk about real history and draw comparisons to today. The city is politically divided among several factions, which isn’t a fleshed out mechanic in the game due to development issues. But you have a cult that worships John Wilkes Booth and hates Lincoln for ending slavery. You have people who are hyper religious and treat the Founders as religious prophets. You have normal upper middle-class people who are tuned out to the politics. You also have the revolutionary group Vox Populi who are trying to overthrow Columbia’s government and install actual democracy. Again, some great ideas in there for good stories based in real history. But then somewhere towards the end of the game it makes the Vox Populi just as bad as the imperialist, racists, sexists, zealots. When you start the game there is a couple being physically abused for miscegenation, in front of a cheering crowd. Yet the black lady trying to stop it is bad because her and other workers killed some cops and are pushing the middle class white people out of the city. It’s total “both extremes are really the same” kind of thing. And to make the revolutionary leader bad they write her to kill a baby or something? It’s been a while I can’t remember if she tries to kill Elizabeth or just Comstock. She was also going to use Columbia’s weapons and invade NYC to liberate people on land too. But that’s bad because NYC in the late 1800s/early 1900s was good.

Some people might bring up the development troubles as a reason the story got so simplified into horseshoe theory. But there are early gameplay videos from before the troubles started that show Vox Populi implying they want to sexually assault Elizabeth. So they meant for them to be bad from the beginning. The only real thing that was different was that Comstock was supposed to me more nuanced. So the people’s revolution of communists were pretty much always a political cartoon and they had to jam the right wing factions into one guy. Instead of getting the subtleties of “cleanse all the immigrants” from many different factions, we get it from one guy. Thanks 2k/Irrational.

Ken Levine is a fucking hack and always has been. Keep him away from games.

The entire battlefield 4 campaign is you helping the guy who tried to do a colour revolution in China lmao. Like that’s the plot, trying to free the guy. Which results in war with China ofc. Also you take in a boat of refugees from Shanghai of all places onto your aircraft carrier, those poor people probably had a much better standard of living over there than they’ll ever have in the USA.

Bonus points for Call of Duty black ops II, where you help the Taliban to fight against Russia, and help the apartheid supported UNITA forces to fight the MPLA. You literally fight for the Taliban and apartheid South Africa proxy forces.

Company of Heroes 2 which portrays the USSR as evil for conscripting its people to fight in die in a “pointless” war to… checks notes …defend itself from an army hellbent on waging a war of extermination against it. But that’s just low-hanging fruit.

For something more subtle, I’d say most games that lament the “Evils of Humanity” feel pretty reactionary. The idea that something bad is inherent to humans (war, crime, bigotry, corruption, etc) and we just have to learn to accept it, without any other investigation into the matter. One game that comes to mind is Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux where

XCOM: Chimera Squad. 👏 More 👏 xeno 👏 SWAT 👏 teams 👏

All problems can be solved by kicking in the door guns blazing. Don’t have any evidence? Don’t worry, if you bust in and kill everyone, maybe you’ll find some!

I mean, the “worst” are the ones that have natsec money behind them and are insidious propaganda tools, see Call of Duty. The only reason there shouldn’t be a push to have that series halted completely is that it would be incredibly alienating to normal people. Otherwise, there’s rich history of outwardly reactionary games to choose from. Freedom Fighters is Red Dawn if it didn’t suck. 2044 AD is literally the femnazi game.

My personal least favorite’s probably Ronaldo’s ending in Devil Survivor 2. The writer’s brains are so steeped in liberal ideology. In this ending, the MC uses demon shit to create heaven on earth. Not “angels strip you of humanity and you worship YHVH all day”. They outright call it a paradise where everyone lives for each other, where people live for each other, basically skipping to whatever would come after communism. It’s presented with being on the same level as the ending where some blueblood loser (who starts off with magical shit) rules over a world of constant violence and death. The good ending is restoring Tokyo to the way it was, except your friends are personally better off in specific situations, I guess.

Been thinking a lot about the ideology of Chess recently. The game goes back to ancient India and was designed to teach young men about army tactics. So in a way it was a bit like how COD prepares young men to join the military.

It changed into it’s modern form in Spain, where it traveled with Islam and was adopted by the spanish. I believe the original pieces represented infantry (pawns), cavalry, chariots(bishops) and elephants (rooks). The “queen” was then male and considered the “advisor” and moved like the king. Just as Isabela became the most powerful queen in the last 500 years of Europe, the advisor was changed to queen and the became the most powerful piece. Pawns also got their ability to become queens, which, being called “promotion” may be a reference to the original role as “advisor” but may also reflect a king’s ability to marry anyone and therefore make them a powerful queen. It was also during this time that the diagonal piece was named the “bishop,” representing the power of the church and flanking the monarchy, closer even than the knights to the king and queen.

This is all to be expected, I guess. What I find insidious about the game is simply the “black vs. white” color scheme. Could it have been lost on the Spanish that their skin color was lighter than the Muslims they fought? Is it lost on modern players that the white pieces are superior to the black (white has the advantage of going first and therefore is more likely to win)?

Another subtly insidious aspect is the widespread understanding that the computer knows better than humans. People who are good at chess are thought of as smart, therefore, even smarter is an AI that can beat the best players. Because the rules of chess are simple and the goal of checkmate is concrete the AI has an exact purpose and can be trusted to seek that purpose. The AI is therefore “always right.” This might produce in players a habit of deferring to computer generated models, forgetting that in real life the purpose and limits of a computer program can vary wildly and are set by it’s creator