Plenty of games, especially strategy and simulator games, have game mechanics related to politics or economics. From Recettear’s “Capitalism Ho!” to Hearts of Iron 4’s focus trees, political descriptions can be added to flavor game mechanics, and because different game devs have endless variation in personal worldviews, these additions can be absurdly bad at times. Even if the mechanic itself is good, it can have dunk-worthy labelling. Post the worst that you can think of, even if they come from an otherwise great game.
I’ll start: In Civilization VI, different government types you choose have different slots for policy cards, which let you select political policy bonuses for your civilization. In the modern age, two of the government types you can choose are “Democracy” and “Communism”. Already this is liberal drivel conflating Communism with non-democracy and “authoritarianism”. But the policy slots for these governments are even dumber, as Democracy gets more “diplomatic” and “economic” policies, and Communism gets more “millitary” policies. Famously, America and the west (clearly what Democracy is inspired by) never destabilized the world with arms manufactoring and invasions, I guess.
the USSR focused DLC for HOI4 has a mechanic around the Great Purge where “Stalin’s Paranoia” is gamified, you essentially have to purge random generals in the game to keep “Stalin’s Paranoia” down but the funny thing is if you ignore this mechanic, trotsky comes back and coups you lol, so i have zero idea what sort of political message paradox is making. So Stalin was bad for randomly killing people but he was actually proven right in the end?
bear in mind that this is the game that still refuses to model anything bad that Axis does (holocaust etc) or anything bad that the western allies do (bengal famine etc)
In Fable 3, all your political decisions as a monarch come down to “Do X or Y” based on what your advisors tell you. X is either ‘do nothing’ or ‘do something reasonable as opposed to Y’ and Y is the worst thing you can think of.
For example, one decision is “what do we do with all the poor children on the streets, of which you were once a part of?” and X is OPEN A SCHOOL while Y is INSTATE CHILD LABOR FOR THE CAPITALIST WORMTONGUE FIGURE.
Much nuance.
Peter Molyneux is both a visionary and a hack. He’s been trying to make “the game where your choices have consequences and real moral dilemmas” for decades now, and every time he tries it fails in a different way.
Every game that takes place in a feudal setting has people buying shit with gold coins even though most feudal societies didn’t even have a formalized money economy. Tax-in-kind was a thing for most feudal societies. Peasants weren’t giving their one (1) gold coin to the tax collector.
In civ, the base mechanics enforce the idea that nationalist countries are natural eternal beings that have existed throughout history
Cleopatra, clear leader of the westphalian state of Egypt.
On the other hand, 6000 years of Stalin in civ 1 seems pretty good. I wonder how many times he would try to resign.
Any game that defends monarchy is the worst. “oh no we gotta put the good, rightful king on the throne!”
Do we? Do we really?
There are so many fantasy games that do this that I don’t need to name any.
I’ve posted about it many times in the past, but in the first Civ democracy has no corruption.
SimCity is pretty bad too, more cops = less crime.
Infamous
where the good playthrough inevitable involves helping the cops expand their influence
frostpunk
Somehow using propaganda is more evil than child labour, also the religion gov got treated with kid gloves :::
Frostpunk’s endings are all but at what cost?! lol
I made it through with only one scripted death that happened because I built a state newspaper office and some guy was just really angry about that, and it still did that “wAs tHiS pAtH wOrTh tHe CoSt” shit. Like everyone is happy, healthy, alive, and the only loss was one asshole who got mad about a state owned printing press for ??? reasons, this is literally the best possible situation they could possibly be in.
Plus you’ve automated all the dangerous mining jobs with robots but at what cooooost
1·5 months agoIt literally says “the city survived but was it worth it” if you “cross the line”
It’s interesting that despite us making fun of Paradox map nerds for frequently being nazis, we don’t have that much Paradox (admittedly, we (as in Hexbear) like Victoria 3) in this thread.
Hearts of Iron (3 and maybe 4) had the political triangle between democracy, fascism, and communism, but more egregiously both games fail to represent the causes of the war except maybe as flavour text in some events. The economic foundation of Fascism being the same as settler colonialism (which Capitalism is partly rooted in) is entirely unaddressed. It is very addressed in Victoria 3, which still has some brainworms (especially to do with the “social” tab of the tech tree).
Sim City, Cities Skylines (and 2) assume cars as a default and enforce it mechanically (often public transport is a mid-late game upgrade from your previous car owning suburbanites).
Rimworld has random raids that don’t seem to be at all related to what you’re doing. Its just assumed there are vicious tribes out there in this virgin-but-extremely-arable land that send randos to you. Its very much the most naive form of “settler experience” (i.e. what USAmerican kids are taught about Settlers). Its a shame because I like a lot of the mechanics, layout, and modability.
Tropico has a lot of weird little ones, some of them deliberately funny and some of them just insulting, but that’s kinda the nature of the game. I kinda wish there was a slightly less toony more free-form Tropico but whatever. Unfortunately, Workers and Resources often feels like work.
In Civ 6 at least comunism finally gets bonuses to production which makes it most powerful system in the game because at least this one thing civ always got right that the productive forces are the most important factor (and indeed, civ 6 is the first civ game where you even can go in something resembling production build, in all previous you just got military/science/money). In previous games, if communism was even there, the bonuses were strictly military.
