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.
In Civ 6 at least comunism finally gets bonuses to production which makes it most powerful system in the game because at least this one thing civ always got right that the productive forces are the most important factor (and indeed, civ 6 is the first civ game where you even can go in something resembling production build, in all previous you just got military/science/money). In previous games, if communism was even there, the bonuses were strictly military.
In previous games, if communism was even there, the bonuses were strictly military.
Not entirely. I think ideology was done in an okay way in Civ 5, with “Freedom” having spies good at rigging elections in city states and “Order” (communism) being the overall best ideology. It had some military bonuses, but a lot of Order stuff was focused on kickstarting production in new cities, and combining that with scientific advancement. Forgot what the fascist ideology was called but it was mostly good for waging war and stealing tech when you’re lagging behind.
stealing tech when you’re lagging behind.
the USSR focused DLC for HOI4 has a mechanic around the Great Purge where “Stalin’s Paranoia” is gamified, you essentially have to purge random generals in the game to keep “Stalin’s Paranoia” down but the funny thing is if you ignore this mechanic, trotsky comes back and coups you lol, so i have zero idea what sort of political message paradox is making. So Stalin was bad for randomly killing people but he was actually proven right in the end?
bear in mind that this is the game that still refuses to model anything bad that Axis does (holocaust etc) or anything bad that the western allies do (bengal famine etc)
Every game that takes place in a feudal setting has people buying shit with gold coins even though most feudal societies didn’t even have a formalized money economy. Tax-in-kind was a thing for most feudal societies. Peasants weren’t giving their one (1) gold coin to the tax collector.
I’m also annoyed by the fact default* currency even is gold coin in nearly all the games, especially with prices of some trvial commodities going into dozens and hundreds of gold coins. In real world medieval period they weren’t even in open circulation for most of the time and barely any country even released the gold coins in significant numbers. Not even the big scale trade and finance were done in gold even theoretically on paper, the usual unit was certain weight in silver. Even the games that do have silver and copper coins do it bad like WoW or paper Warhammer Fantasy where gold is soon the only used coin and in hundreds and thousands.
*Some games go for specific currency, like Elder Scrolls game having septims (which is big and heavy and prices are high so gold is apparently pretty much worthless in Tamriel) which leads to even funier things like when you loot an ancient ruins where nobody living came in for thousand years only to find a lot of currency which was at first emitted 500 years ago. Though arguably Tiber Septim using Dragon Break to put money with his face everywhere in Tamriel is both in character and canonically at least possible.
This really pisses me off about Disney’s Robin Hood lol.
I think we can give the kids movie from the 70s a pass.
In civ, the base mechanics enforce the idea that nationalist countries are natural eternal beings that have existed throughout history
Cleopatra, clear leader of the westphalian state of Egypt.
On the other hand, 6000 years of Stalin in civ 1 seems pretty good. I wonder how many times he would try to resign.
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Peter Molyneux is both a visionary and a hack. He’s been trying to make “the game where your choices have consequences and real moral dilemmas” for decades now, and every time he tries it fails in a different way.
As long as you ignore his own hype, he makes some of the weirdest and interesting games. I still like Black And White because of this. A true “missed the moon and landed among the stars” guy.
Black and white is so weird and cool. Nothing like it. I love it
He made some awesome games in the 90s. Populous, Syndicate, Theme Park, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper, etc.
I’ve been saying there needs to be a Syndicate reboot that isn’t a FPS but more like the old games, just with better mechanics
I’ve posted about it many times in the past, but in the first Civ democracy has no corruption.
SimCity is pretty bad too, more cops = less crime.
I remember a cities skylines mod that replaced cop shops as union halls and that was pretty cool
Any game that defends monarchy is the worst. “oh no we gotta put the good, rightful king on the throne!”
Do we? Do we really?
There are so many fantasy games that do this that I don’t need to name any.
Old meme I had lying around
Don’t have another example but just wanted to say the Civ implantation was so bad it kinda ruined the game for me. Thankfully Victoria 3 does it very well and has filled that gap when I’m itching to play that type of game.
Infamous
where the good playthrough inevitable involves helping the cops expand their influence
frostpunk
Somehow using propaganda is more evil than child labour, also the religion gov got treated with kid gloves :::
Frostpunk’s endings are all but at what cost?! lol
I made it through with only one scripted death that happened because I built a state newspaper office and some guy was just really angry about that, and it still did that “wAs tHiS pAtH wOrTh tHe CoSt” shit. Like everyone is happy, healthy, alive, and the only loss was one asshole who got mad about a state owned printing press for ??? reasons, this is literally the best possible situation they could possibly be in.
Plus you’ve automated all the dangerous mining jobs with robots but at what cooooost
2·11 months agoIt literally says “the city survived but was it worth it” if you “cross the line”
To be fair on Infamous, the cops are marginally better than the doomsday cult full of mass murderers.
Sure but can you say the same for infamous 2, and second son?
It’s interesting that despite us making fun of Paradox map nerds for frequently being nazis, we don’t have that much Paradox (admittedly, we (as in Hexbear) like Victoria 3) in this thread.
Hearts of Iron (3 and maybe 4) had the political triangle between democracy, fascism, and communism, but more egregiously both games fail to represent the causes of the war except maybe as flavour text in some events. The economic foundation of Fascism being the same as settler colonialism (which Capitalism is partly rooted in) is entirely unaddressed. It is very addressed in Victoria 3, which still has some brainworms (especially to do with the “social” tab of the tech tree).
Sim City, Cities Skylines (and 2) assume cars as a default and enforce it mechanically (often public transport is a mid-late game upgrade from your previous car owning suburbanites).
Rimworld has random raids that don’t seem to be at all related to what you’re doing. Its just assumed there are vicious tribes out there in this virgin-but-extremely-arable land that send randos to you. Its very much the most naive form of “settler experience” (i.e. what USAmerican kids are taught about Settlers). Its a shame because I like a lot of the mechanics, layout, and modability.
Tropico has a lot of weird little ones, some of them deliberately funny and some of them just insulting, but that’s kinda the nature of the game. I kinda wish there was a slightly less toony more free-form Tropico but whatever. Unfortunately, Workers and Resources often feels like work.
Rimworld really not beating the Gamer gate allegations lmao
iirc Tynan Sylvester is an anti-communist, said some weird shit in support of the victims of communism holiday or whatever
I never thought about rimworld like that
it’s a colony simulator, u can assume
It’s come up a few times before. There’s a bunch of assumptions baked in. That said, I’ve found it more accessible than dwarf fortress just from an interface perspective.
Hearts of Iron (3 and maybe 4) had the political triangle between democracy, fascism, and communism
HOI4 doesn’t have the triangle, instead measuring country alignment based off of whichever party has the largest share of the “ideology pie chart”, but it does keep the democracy/fascist/communist definitions. It also says that Democracies can’t declare wars unless certain restrictions are met to represent “public anti-war intersts”, but Fascists and Communists can declare whatever wars they want. This is of course ignoring that, IIRC, the USSR didn’t actually declare any offensive wars during the period.
Sim City, Cities Skylines (and 2) assume cars as a default
This is a funny one because there’s an anecdote out there somewhere of Will Wright working on Sim City 1 (or maybe even Sim Town?) and designing it around cars but not being able to figure out parking lots because they’d just wreck the city. The “solution” they came up with was to just not have parking. Genius!
If my car disappeared when I wasn’t using it… In workers and resources I wind up having a few cars here and there, but my parking lots are tiny and infrequent. In Tropico I just forget about them until the Capitalists ask for them.
I think a lot of brainworms in HoI4 comes in the little niche fascist nation mechanics, which I avoid playing so I’m not familiar with them. It does wind up sorta justifying Stalin’s “paranoia” though by having a Trotskyist (I think) rebellion if you don’t engage with it. I think conceptually I prefer HoI3’s more fluid mechanics (rather than HoI4’s event based ones), but they are less accessible and do come with a lot of assumptions about ideology and production baked in.
HOI4 literally added a “Stalin’s Paranoia-ometer” in one of the most recent DLCs lol.
Yeah, and it justifies the paranoia because if you don’t, trotskyists show up
