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naraburns  nihil supernum  11mo ago (text post)   3994 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 30, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Are there are any recent good video games that are actually somewhat "based and truth-pilled"? It's rare that I find something I really enjoy, something that's actually clever and makes me laugh. Disco Elysium did that. But the AAA scene is pretty dire. I'm not looking for a game with right wing sentiments. Just something that is a little more intelligent and doesn't follow timepleasing liberal dogmas.

Bonus points if the game has pretty good production values.

If you remove the recency requirement then:

  1. Original Bioshock is misunderstood by most people IMO. What was the point of Ryan's final speech? If he knew the code phrase, why he decided not to use it?

  2. SOMA had some very visceral non-political based and reality-pilled moments which I don't want to spoil.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/249570/The_Castle_Doctrine/

I recently bought The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante on sale. It's a visual novel with a decent amount of stats and decisions and different endings to it, and balancing them is decently challenging and fun. The actual story is quite good imo. You play as an upper middle class man from childhood to his experience in a revolution in a fantasy world clearly strongly inspired by late 18th century France. It's pretty positive about its not!Christian church and the value of family.

This seems pretty interesting, will check it out.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is a sci-fi masterpiece hiding inside Civilization 2.5 IN SPACE and some pretty clunky UI. But it is well worth the price of admission, especially now there are fan patches. When a 2000s video game can make a Christian fundamentalist into a sympathetic character, you know it's doing something right.

From the mouth of one of the game's seven leaders:

“As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth’s final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.”

— Commissioner Pravin Lal, “U.N. Declaration of Rights”

"But it was never the streets that were evil."

“Already we have turned all of our critical industries, all of our material resources, over to these . . . things . . . these inscrutable matrices we call language models. And now we propose to teach them true intelligence? What, pray tell, will we do when these little homunculi awaken one day and announce that they have no further need of us?”

— Sister Miriam Godwinson, “We Must Dissent”

You’re going to have to be more specific. Disco Elysium is a fiendishly clever, bitter, political game. Which parts of that make it “based?” What does “truth-pilled” even mean?

Clever and bitter feels like a niche that should be occupied, but I’m struggling to come up with anything. Dark humor, perhaps. Roguelikes such as Cataclysm might have a really bleak, evocative setting, but they’re sandboxes for the player, not statements. I think bitterness implies a certain intent on the authors’ part.

Bitter/political, maybe something like Papers Please? This War of Mine? I think this is the realm of deeply personal traumas or niche art games. Indie material. Maybe wordier CRPGs like Tyranny fall into this category.

For clever/political, I have a soft spot for Iconoclasts. Environmentalist, but not in a culture-war way. It’s a weird one.

Not very recent, and the production values are poor, but the Geneforge series might be up your alley.

40k is a pretty decent space to find non-cringe stories and games, granted there aren't quite as many worth playing. Spacemarine is good and getting a sequel, spacehulk is pretty fun but probably deserves to be played multiplayer, TW: Warhammer are all fun, and all of these are primarily sans-politics with AAA quality (although some jank).

I tend to steer clear of story based games myself and inhabit my own, anti-environmentalist, pro-duction paperclip machine in factorio. Somebody's gotta teach these natives their place... with a shitload of bullets and nuclear bombs. Perhaps it would be worth your while to branch out and, uhh... do a little crack?

40k is a pretty decent space to find non-cringe

Whoa. Now I'd have said the opposite - 40k and warhammer in general are almost guaranteed to be cringeworthy on every level, only perhaps not in woke ways.

To each his own, I suppose. 40k is certainly goofy and definitely doesn't hit the mark all the time, but I find it fun and endearing. Can't and shouldn't please everyone.

There are several reasons for this, but the main ones are that mainstream media (including any major game studio) wouldn't publish/use a conservative cultural narrative, and that most conservatives choose careers that seem more likely to pay than writing fiction.

Writing is not career, writing is passion and madness.

You have better chance to get rich by rummaging through garbage bins than by writing The Great (enter your country) Novel.

Writers know it - overwhelming majority of creative writing is put online for free, whether fanfiction or original content. Now, how many of them are "right wing"?

Even in countries that arguably 'lean to the right' compared to the US (like Poland, Japan, Russia or indeed the Baltics to some extent), creatives, in particular writers, are still overwhelmingly leftist.

And even the rightist writers are likely to be of the non-American right-wing kind: from Blut and Boden in the Baltics to Nazbol in Russia.

Disco Elysium is a very leftist game made by Estonian communists. The reality is that in the 21st century there isn't much intelligent reactionary fiction.

Realizing that the only political choice I could make that would get me overtly punished by the game was doing things like saluting flags kind of killed the vibe of the game for me and I never got around to finishing as a result. LARPing as a literal communist is fine and dandy, but you have to be hit over the head with a stick if you want to be a nostalgic nationalist? Egregiously obnoxious design decision.

I may go ahead and pick it back up with that in mind and start over in the space of just being the greediest, most manipulative detective I can be, potentially with some added enthusiasm for coke and nicotine.

Cyberpunk 2077 did that trick for me, but YMMV - many dislike it for a host of reasons.

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