I can think of some obvious examples to start with, but my subtle but insidious nominee is Fable III. Fittingly for a pretentious grifter like Molyneux, the game requires you to raise a specific amount of gold or your kingdom is destroyed and you get a bad ending. The goalposts are moved by the game if you raise money in ways it doesn’t approve of, and it is simply impossible to reach the fundraising goal in any way that isn’t at least Enlightened Centrist levels of evil, the kind that lanyard-wearing neoliberals giggle about. That’s right, you need to be at least this evil or your kingdom is destroyed. So deep and really makes you think about the hard decisions that are made by the ruling class, doesn’t it? :zizek:

  • Sen_Jen [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    0·
    3 years ago

    Skyrim is interesting because the main political conflict in the game is actually quite similar, at least aesthetically, to the modern day radical Democrat vs Republican conflict in America. The Empire are shiny and nice, they rule by law, they open up trade and in Skyrim they are literally puppets to fascists. The Stormcloaks are openly racist to elves, they celebrate the founder of their kingdom who committed genocide against the local elves, and they’re fighting for national independence in order to enforce their reactionary beliefs. I don’t think its purposely written like this, but I think it is accidentally quite good writing about a hopeless political struggle between two reactionary forces. There is no real good ending, the closest you can get is a temporary truce to kill the dragons before the war starts back up again.