I was replaying Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura game recently after some years and I noticed it had modern day politics for the time the game was made. Intolerance against orcs or how industrialization has led to deforestation and pollution.I still enjoyed it and I found this topics to enhance the game. If politics has always been in games then why does it bother me so much now, what actually changed?
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Why does it feel so much like propaganda now but not then?
Maturity and wisdom, mostly. The awareness that you know people are trying to propagandize you probably helps, and is why there is such a concerted effort to censor everyone that could sneak that little ball past the goalie and get you questioning everything.
Plus, political themes have been around forever. Any game with that sort of intrigue is going to have some kind of parallel to some point in human history. Wars of succession, tribes exiling threats to the status quo, people with power taking advantage of the meek, and that whole one-man's-terrorist-is-another-man's-revolutionary thing.
Intelligence is being able to wrap your heads around such topics, even escape to fantasy, while understanding that fiction is fiction and fact is fact and fiction can never substitute for fact.
It felt like propaganda then too, but it was an isolated example and easy to ignore.
So, it's like having a bird shit on your car. Yes, it's annoying, but it's not nearly as bad as having a flock of neo-Marxist pelagornis sandersi shit on it.
Their propaganda was better back then. After the rise of identity politics, a lot of people got involved in propaganda. Those people were the ones easily manipulated by identity politics, so they are the very stupid ones. They eventually vastly outnumbered legacy propagandists and lazily inserted their views into everything rather than build it into the work.