games

XCOM: Chimera Squad. 👏 More 👏 xeno 👏 SWAT 👏 teams 👏

All problems can be solved by kicking in the door guns blazing. Don't have any evidence? Don't worry, if you bust in and kill everyone, maybe you'll find some!

Red Alert is pretty bad as the Soviet Union gets hit hard with the villain bat.

Outer Worlds is also bad. Present a capitalist hellscape with anarchist and communist factions, and everything other than mild succdem stuff fails.

Hearts of Iron: Nazi whitewashing. Nazi fantasy simulator. Goddamn fucking Nazi fanbase.

Europa Universalis: Colonial Nazi simulator with religious persecution button, Pogrom button, slave trading button, honestly more offensive than HOI because all the atrocity is extremely normalised and in fact optimal play

The entire battlefield 4 campaign is you helping the guy who tried to do a colour revolution in China lmao. Like that's the plot, trying to free the guy. Which results in war with China ofc. Also you take in a boat of refugees from Shanghai of all places onto your aircraft carrier, those poor people probably had a much better standard of living over there than they'll ever have in the USA.

Bonus points for Call of Duty black ops II, where you help the Taliban to fight against Russia, and help the apartheid supported UNITA forces to fight the MPLA. You literally fight for the Taliban and apartheid South Africa proxy forces.

Oh I mean easily what springs right to mind is Call Of Duty. I mean the games are literally made in cooperation with the department of defense and are drunk off the american exceptionalism with real might makes right fashy undertones. I find almost directly responsible for the hero worship we have for special forces in the USA, as most of these games have you working as a spec ops goon.

bioshock 2 communism is when you do the borg and no one matters, also the collectivist is portrayed way less sympathetically than the libertarian nutjob

I'm surprised no one here has mentioned Assassin's Creed yet. All conflict in history stems from two competing ideological sects of callous murderers who wanton manipulate populations into doing their bidding and for some reason one side in this conflict is supposed to be the moral superior of the other. Also some of the supplemental material is batshit and basically just a way for the devs to denote certain historical figures as good or bad depending on what organization they belonged to. All other conflicts are secondary to the overarching philosophical differences of two sects competing for magical thingies.

At the same time those games have probably the most sympathetic portrayal of Marx in a western piece of fiction, so there's that.

Company of Heroes 2 which portrays the USSR as evil for conscripting its people to fight in die in a "pointless" war to... checks notes ...defend itself from an army hellbent on waging a war of extermination against it. But that's just low-hanging fruit.

For something more subtle, I'd say most games that lament the "Evils of Humanity" feel pretty reactionary. The idea that something bad is inherent to humans (war, crime, bigotry, corruption, etc) and we just have to learn to accept it, without any other investigation into the matter. One game that comes to mind is Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux where

Been thinking a lot about the ideology of Chess recently. The game goes back to ancient India and was designed to teach young men about army tactics. So in a way it was a bit like how COD prepares young men to join the military.

It changed into it's modern form in Spain, where it traveled with Islam and was adopted by the spanish. I believe the original pieces represented infantry (pawns), cavalry, chariots(bishops) and elephants (rooks). The "queen" was then male and considered the "advisor" and moved like the king. Just as Isabela became the most powerful queen in the last 500 years of Europe, the advisor was changed to queen and the became the most powerful piece. Pawns also got their ability to become queens, which, being called "promotion" may be a reference to the original role as "advisor" but may also reflect a king's ability to marry anyone and therefore make them a powerful queen. It was also during this time that the diagonal piece was named the "bishop," representing the power of the church and flanking the monarchy, closer even than the knights to the king and queen.

This is all to be expected, I guess. What I find insidious about the game is simply the "black vs. white" color scheme. Could it have been lost on the Spanish that their skin color was lighter than the Muslims they fought? Is it lost on modern players that the white pieces are superior to the black (white has the advantage of going first and therefore is more likely to win)?

Another subtly insidious aspect is the widespread understanding that the computer knows better than humans. People who are good at chess are thought of as smart, therefore, even smarter is an AI that can beat the best players. Because the rules of chess are simple and the goal of checkmate is concrete the AI has an exact purpose and can be trusted to seek that purpose. The AI is therefore "always right." This might produce in players a habit of deferring to computer generated models, forgetting that in real life the purpose and limits of a computer program can vary wildly and are set by it's creator

I recently played C&C Generals, thought the ideology there isn't "subtle but insidious", but rather just hilariously blatant.

What would an ideologically good game look like?

• Guerilla: First person shooter where you play as a guerilla army against imperialists. Campaigns could include playing as the Viet Cong, Yugoslav partisans or in the Cuban Revolution.
• Organizer: Tycoon-style game where you play as a union organizer. You start out in a chuddy workplace where everyone is drenched in false consciousness. You start out by winning small victories, organizing and eventually unionizing. The game doesn't stop there though, the struggle to organize continues until the entire capitalist system has been dismantled.
• City planner: City builder game from a working class perspective where you have to build a livable and sustainable city. The game will penalise car-centric infrastructure and single family homes for anything above village size. The options for transit infrastructure are detailed and offers many different options.
• Great Patriotic War: It's WWII. You kill Nazis for the Soviets.
• Bolchevik: RPG set during the Russian revolution and civil war.