I don't know how I feel about that analysis. Just because something is inspired by historic events (slavery in this case), doesn't mean it's advocating those events as good.
Is it dark? Yes, and I think it's meant to be.
If anything, I think it's actually great that they're doing this because I believe RPG games are a great and safe mediums to acquaint people with these difficult subjects. I can't be the only person with this opinion?
Are people calling Marvel racists or anti-Semitic because Hydra was inspires by some parts of the Nazi military being obsessed with the supernatural?
I think calling these racists (or xist) is a failure of imagination; kinda weird to see it come from the RPG community, too
Period accuracy, especially in the context of medieval settings, is championed by a very small-yet-vocal minority of gamers. But it's a essentially a bad faith argument used to criticize the existence of non-white characters in a game.
Basically, 'period accuracy' is to racists what 'ethics in gaming journalism' is to misogynists. But a Venn diagram of these two groups is pretty much just a circle.
I heard someone on a podcast make a VERY passionate defense of the game. Not only was it well made and presented a good story (for a shooter) but a main character (THE main character?) was Jewish and as a Jew that was a huge thing for him. There was a Jewish character who wasn't tokenized or just a stereotype but a well written and critical to the plot. Helpful and not inept but strong and self directed.
Representation like that can be a very powerful thing.
It's also one in which the side Ubisoft picked is pretty clear.
We're talking about a game series whose central conceit is that an obscure Islamist sect noted mainly for murdering religious figures they disagreed with is actually a secret society acting to preserve an Enlightenment-style libertarian ethos for centuries before the Enlightenment (yet staying curiously neutral during the French Revolution!) Every design decision made in other periods shoehorns in the assumption whichever faction these ahistorically-inserted Assassins are allied to are 'good guys' who believe in freedom fighting an evil conspiracy very loosely associated with a historical Christian order, as well as assumptions like the opportunity to roleplay Vikings will sell more games than protecting Saxon homesteads (commercial pressures the author is well aware of when discussing other design decisions). I'm more surprised by the historically inaccurate weapon choices tbh.
It's clearly an article written by someone with plenty of knowledge about the actual history to share, but still reminds me of an old flatmate criticising the physics of the Simpson's Movie!
The conflict between making a videogame (or any bit of popculture really) enjoyable and inclusive vs. historically accurate often comes up and both sides have a fair point. My personal solution is to both enjoy the content and then try to educate myself through articles like this one.
I think the precise criticism is that it was already puritanized. I don't think the argument was thay they set out to make mysogynist nazi propaganda, but that the cliche reorganizing machine that is a AAA gamehouse looked around at society, gears whirled, and the resulting thing that would sell the best that came flying out was a combination of white supremacist mythology, mockery of christianity, and the devaluation of femininity. Its not a critique of the game so much as it is of the society that produced it.
Is the objection to "murder simulator" or to Arabs appearing in it? do these same people also object to classic "Castle Wolfenstien"?
If I was looking to market an "also ran" video game in today's world, the notion of provoking controversy for news coverage and free promotion would probably be very, very tempting.
> It's not about 'offending' people, it's about consistently and invisibly leaving people out.
The trouble is, this isn't something you can solve on an individual level as someone developing a single game - you have to leave some people out, there's simply not space - and yet, as the article alludes to, there's this pressure to meet everyone's expectations around inclusion.
(Even when the people being included don't actually exist. There was this big, screwed up gaming media hoo-hah a while ago about how a game and its developers were racist because they hadn't include any black people. It was set in a time and a region when they didn't exist - and from what I recall, the developers actually did the research on this, they didn't just assume everyone was white in their setting.)
This may be a post about a game related to medieval political intrigue, but I am creeped-the-fuck-out by the relation to modern r/TheDonald Deus Vult-ness.
Games are works of entertainment, in the same camp as literature and movies. Imagine if someone said they could not read a book if it included chapters from a Nazi's perspective. Some people may simply not enjoy such works, but to say that such passages are inappropriate is going down a dangerous path.
As the author notes, there is nothing closer in most of our minds to pure evil than the Nazis. It is easy for us to treat them as monsters - inherently irredeemable demons in human form who committed atrocities that we never could. The idea of even trying to humanize such villains seems like an insult to their victims.
But those who did such monstrous things were not monsters but men. There was neither some mass delusion which overcame the german people for over a decade while a small cabal of evil beings were in power, nor some tragic fault built into these people that is absent in all the rest of the world. People exactly like you and me were convinced that their compliance with this system was, if not explicitly good, at least acceptable.
The author wonders why someone might want to play a game as a proud german general on their way to conquering great britain, the soviet union, and eventually the united states; the answer to which should be self evident when one considers how desirable this position was to real people in real life. The same desire for victory and glory which motivated war criminals in the wehrmacht also lives in most everyone else. The willingness not to ask what that victory means for the hidden jewish populations of the conquered is common to both camps too.
The author brings up a terrifying game idea to demonstrate their point: an Auschwitz Transport Tycoon. Of course the very idea seems revolting. But for all those who have played train simulators: have you seriously asked what your cargo was and what it was being transported for? Or did you simply accept that your job was to get it between points and thus satisfy some arbitrary requirement from an unquestioned authority. Our default assumption is that we're supposed to play the game according to the rules and that achieving the stated objectives is a good thing in and of itself.
No one sees themselves as the villains of history. When you must decide whether your orders are just, they most likely won't be coming from someone with a skull on their cap. We must understand that being a villain feels just the same as being a hero, the only difference is the lack of honest introspection. Seeing things from the bad guy's perspective is important for reminding us to question our own. More generally, the idea that we should avoid putting ourselves in someone else's shoes because that makes us confront uncomfortable realities is anathema to the sort of liberal culture the Nazis tried so hard to stamp out.
This is a disturbing trend that I hope to see called out more frequently in the future. Several of the latest Call of Duties "play" similarly. Even fantasy isn't immune: imagine my dismay, as a fan of Werewolf: The Apocalypse, when I found that the protagonist of the long-awaited game adaptation unambiguously resembled a paramilitary skinhead type (both in look and language). It's frustrating, with everything going on in the world, to see game devs cynically tapping into that toxic vein.
I think most people that waste their lives with video games and "make you feel good" fantasies of this kind don't care about historical accuracy; it's not about understanding reality but about feeling good and "engaged". That's what sells.
And yeah, the makers of samurai games definitely consider the marketability of their games with regards to races portrayed. Consider the samurai game "Nioh" which takes place in feudal Japan, has a white protagonists and includes a black character.
This is a pretty high effort article, let's take a deep breath. I enjoyed it because it uses Assassin's Creed as a lense to teach us a bit about history. No culture war related baggage is required for admission into this article IMO; the narrative compromises necessary to make a playable game out of a 9th century setting are kind of hilarious, and this article helped me process the cognitive dissonance that comes from playing such games.
The bit about christian churches being decorated like abandoned shacks, with all the gold in a chest in the middle, I thought was funny. Making game worlds that feel 'used' by their inhabitants is a really interesting one.
idk, games are different things to different people; they're escapism and we don't all escape the same way. Some of us enjoy pillaging inaccurate churches, and some of us like chortling about how silly it is while we do it.
>>>Panzer General takes pains to completely ignore the evil present in the actual history. You're not asked to engage with the darker parts of your psyche at all
What is the alternative, from a game design perspective? Every time one of your units takes a Victory Point on a town, a window pops up: "You captured $townname! Do you want to execute all of the civilians here? [Yes/No]" If you click YES, it shows you a real image of a mass execution from WW2? Can you imagine the uproar THAT would cause? I suspect that players would either click YES on all of them, or click NO on all of them, so as a mechanic it adds no meaningful choices. If you just want to force exposure to the brutality, you could throw in a random "You clicked 'NO' but your soldiers disobeyed orders and killed everyone anyway" and display some shocking content, but all that will accomplish is to turn off some segment of your customer base. The point was to sell a product, after all. If people really want to understand the nastiness that happens during a conflict, they'll find it via other mediums anyway (VHS snuff films before the Internet, BestGore et al. now).
Rome: Total War doesn't let me grapple with the moral issues of crucifying Christians and Jews. Is that omission also a problem? Why/why not?
It's not about what their agenda was, it's about what the perceived message is. The article clarifies it in great detail.
Let's compare this to the recent PC brigade efforts of banning "master/slave", or "blacklist/whitelist" terms in software. Whoever introduced "master/slave" terms into e.g. database software certainly did not have an agenda to defend slavery, yet people still got mad.
And if something as minuscule as a simple word can spark so much outrage, then a mainstream, ridiculously popular game doing such blatant and heavy-handed history whitewashing of an entire culture is a veritable powder keg waiting to explode.
("Whitewashing" is also a potentially dangerous word, I hope I did not trigger someone here.)
But you are correct in one thing - Ubisoft, being a greedy corporation, optimized for getting the most money, even at the expense of making the game's "made by diverse team" disclaimer a sad, tone-deaf joke.
The author's problem with the game is, in fact, that it ends up mirroring Nazi ideology almost exactly: Manly men with superior genes and culture, looking for lebensraum, improving the effeminate, "weak" culture they're colonizing. Oops.
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