i dont know much about the series, but i was watching and reading about assassin's creed 3 and the main character is a half red indian who wants revenge because evil white colonialists burned down his tribe's village and the bad guys are racist White colonialists. Also his mother is some grumpy girlboss chick. She's like Pocahontas if Pocahontas had an obnoxious and unpleasent personality and a permanent resting bitch face.
was this series always woke or something?
I don't agree at all. Hell, technically this idea would defeat the concept of the Battle of Reach in Halo. Literally: "Before It Begins, You Know How It Ends". Just because the overall campaign is a loss, or even hopeless, doesn't mean a story can't be cherished.
Here's a ballsy game: play as a Nazi soldier desperately evacuating civilians out of Berlin towards the American lines.
By context you should be repulsed by it, but I think this is one of those tales that could be actually enjoyed and supported if done properly.
There is a difference between fictional greater context and real life in this situation.
Its a lot harder to enjoy evacuating civilians in Nam knowing that the hero you are playing of is going to get spit on by a 23 year old white girl when he lands in the US on his way to find out his wife was cheating on him the entire deployment.
This could be true in a fictional story, but its not a thought most people are going to entertain. But its a well known thing in the real world we live in that will be scratching at the back of your head constantly regarding real events, even if it never gets acknowledged.
Its why political analogues and such also struggle in video game settings. Because once you move beyond very generic overview, the real life comparisons destroy anything you are trying to say with it. You can play with the idea, but the moment you try to play it straight something like "Communism killed hundreds of millions of people using these ideas" will undermine it.
You can still write these stories, but you have to also write it while being aware of the real world contexts at work and work with that too.
Why would you do that as part of the story? That's just demoralization, not context. Just because some people got spit on, and some people got cheated on, it doesn't mean your hero character needs to be spit on and cheated on. Moreover, why wouldn't you ruin every war story with identical "context", in WW2 stories.
Hard disagree. Alpha Centauri and Tropico are actually great for political & philosophical examination. The point is that you can apply the ideologies to the game environment and see how they respond. What you can't do is make a political lecture, which is why the Left's propaganda is failing.
I didn't say put it in as part of your story. I said its part of the story that happened. We know it happened, its a very famous part of that story that is quite inseparable from Nam as a whole. You can't just portray a straight "good guys versus bad guys" narrative whatsoever in that war because the story is inseparable from that greater knowledge.
Fictional war stories don't have that, they exist in their own vacuum. Actual history does not and will always suffer from that baggage.
And you can work with that angle, it can add an additional layer of tragedy or even heroism to do so. But you can't just ignore it. You can't make a game about Nam without recognition that most people think your American soldier should never be there, is a draftee, or that he has zero support at home.
The same way you can't even talk about the Civil War (let alone make any media about it) without mentioning slavery, even if its irrelevant to the story you might be writing about a random swamp boy avenging his father.
That's silly. You can absolutely portray good guys and bad guys, certainly well enough for the sake of a video game, and constraining the story to the issue at hand is an imperative of every story. Fictional or Non-Fictional, I don't have to know whether or not a guy who climbed up Hacksaw Ridge broke up with his girlfriend, either during the war or after the war. This is less about "greater context" and more about basic compartmentalization in the structure of stories.
Literally almost every single one has.
And a couple of things there: there's a good argument for Americans being there, the vast majority were not draftees until the US started basically pulling out of the war, and they had majority support at home. Even the Leftists had to push "we're against the war, not the soldiers" narratives publicly.
The only one that didn't was Men of Valor, which basically pushed a right-wing argument. That surprised the hell out of me when I read it, but it also really showed that no one on the political left was prepared to touch the story, and that's the problem.