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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The themes themselves aren't exactly modern, the pitfalls of industrialization have been explored explored for a long time like in Thoreau's Walden and Tolkien's Middle Earth books. Likewise racial discrimination has been a theme for almost all of human history, back to even ancient Greek and Roman mythology.
The modern part is the absolutely plummeting quality of the stories the include those themes. Robust and balanced critique of a the pros and cons of a system and making the case that the cons can outweigh the pros has been replaced with blatant lazy strawmanning the side you've decided against into villainous caricatures and pasting over the any flaws of your favoured side with emotionally grabbing heroic sacrifices and Deus ex machina that allow them to leapfrog those problems.
So it feels like propaganda now because it is now, instead of providing balanced food for thought for anyone to consume and digest, it's a blatantly lopsided evangelism only meant to capture the weak and vulnerable and guide them thoughtlessly into the most extreme version of a given belief.
I don't really know if Arcanum is particularly "modern" in its takes on those subjects though, I'm afraid I skipped it. Largely because steampunk ranks only slightly higher than furry shit on my "themes that attract mediocre talent eager to milk a desperately lonely market for easy money" scale, so I don't exactly hold high hopes.