Plenty of games, especially strategy and simulator games, have game mechanics related to politics or economics. From Recettear’s “Capitalism Ho!” to Hearts of Iron 4’s focus trees, political descriptions can be added to flavor game mechanics, and because different game devs have endless variation in personal worldviews, these additions can be absurdly bad at times. Even if the mechanic itself is good, it can have dunk-worthy labelling. Post the worst that you can think of, even if they come from an otherwise great game.

I’ll start: In Civilization VI, different government types you choose have different slots for policy cards, which let you select political policy bonuses for your civilization. In the modern age, two of the government types you can choose are “Democracy” and “Communism”. Already this is liberal drivel conflating Communism with non-democracy and “authoritarianism”. But the policy slots for these governments are even dumber, as Democracy gets more “diplomatic” and “economic” policies, and Communism gets more “millitary” policies. Famously, America and the west (clearly what Democracy is inspired by) never destabilized the world with arms manufactoring and invasions, I guess.

  • bunnygirl [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    9 hours ago

    one of the annoying parts about species in stellaris is how they are so linked with empires

    like every empire has a primary species which kinda makes sense early game (when it’s so heavily linked to the homeworld) or for xenophobic empires. But later on, especially with plural xenophilic societies, it’s super weird to still have this thing just kinda being like “yeah this empire belongs to this species”

    especially especially dumb with Broken Shackles where from the start there isn’t a majority species and it’s not even based around a homeworld. There is literally no reason to have a primary species (and there is no reasonable way to select one) other than the fact that the game is just set up that way 🤷‍♀️

    also annoying me as I’m writing this, terms like ‘empire’, ‘settler’, ‘colony’ etc, which have fairly specific and moral meanings irl and are then used in this super generic and morally neutral way