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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I think it's partly things you might not have used to notice and partly because game (and movie) design as pushed so hard away from subtlety to total polarization of characters and shoving it in your face directly.
Movies are a much more mature medium and they compare to games fairly well. There's been politics in movies almost as long as there has been movies. It just wasn't always so direct--a.k.a. lame. You're no longer left to wonder about anything. Every character must be clearly bad or clearly good and even worse they make it so obvious, often to the point of straight up telling you. Shame and hate for the bad ones and constant glorification of the good ones starts from the very beginning. Good characters are no longer allowed to have flaws at all--none. The only "positive" trait allowed to bad characters is if they at some point come to the realization the good characters were right from the beginning. Then you add in the even worse level where in modern movies the good must be the preferred liberal classes, i.e. alphabet people, women, etc. The bad characters must be white men, capitalists, etc.
So what I really hate about most of these stories is they aren't a story at all. If I know who is good, who is bad, and good will be worshiped and bad will be shamed all the time--what's the point of even paying attention?
I've noticed this too. Subtlety is just GONE in a lot of entertainment and it makes everything feel very hamfisted and boring. Even the headlines in entertainment news tell you the "correct" way to feel before you've even read the article half of the time. Like:
or
I do feel you are correct, my question is more about was it always like that but we were used to it is just we no longer agree with the politics?
But yea the politics in games/movie are being made my idiots that lack any nuance or analytic thinking. I blame affirmative action for this, when you hire someone in a creative role based on race/gender or sexual orientation they
Now imagine if the entire team is made of affirmative action hires. Who is left to make the game or movie good and appealing?
I think it was always like that although much less across the board in all types of media. There were loads of movies that didn't try to make a statement. Now it seems way less so, everything has to have a message. Games though, back in the 80s-90s many games didn't have a lot of story and were just about better graphics and different mechanics. As one older example there were some politics in Metal Gear Solid. It wasn't the racism and sexism politics we are used to today and I'm not totally sure it was even 90s politics, but there were certainly some statements being made on military enterprise, nuclear weapons, etc. I wouldn't go as far to say it was so bad that it ruined it but it's definitely something I noticed in a game that's over 20 years old.