Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Clumsy, Preachy Political Messaging Does More Harm Than Good
Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Clumsy, Preachy Political Messaging Does More Harm Than Good
I know this might start war in the comments so please chill people, I don't want to get 20 reports from this single post.
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I would like to find a game free of political message, can someone please show me one?
I'm really curious about what this mythical beast might look like.....
Doom? Tetris? Need for Speed? Wii Tennis? WTF are you talking about?
Actually, tetris is really a commentary about the brief and fragile ethnostate in Constantinople as the Byzantine empire fell to the Ottoman empire.
Good to see my sixth sense tuned to useless bullshit is still working. I knew some joker was gonna call me out on Tetris 🤣
I just couldn't let the original commentor get away with saying the most ridiculous shit in this thread, I had to top them.
Yeah, people not getting that is a prime example of the sad state of contemporary media literacy.
Istanbul was Constantinople now it's Istanbul not Constantinople been a long time gone, Constantinople and a Turkish delight on a moonlit night. Every gal in Constantinople lives in Istanbul not Constantinople so if you have a date in Constantinople she'll be waiting in Istanbul. Even old New York was once New Amsterdam, why they changed it i can't say, people just liked it better that way... So take me back to Constantinople no you can't go back to Constantinople cause it's Istanbul not Constantinople been a long time gone, Constantinople why did Constantinople get the works? That's nobody's business but the Turks... Dodo do do do de do do do do aaaaaaa whaaaaa (I'm just going to stop here)
Ok it's from memory don't sue me if I fucked it up.
This had me cracking up. I was checking if I opened reddit accidentally.
Need for Speed promotes scofflaw activities.
And I'm all for it.
I'm not saying I know anything about this Dragon Age, I haven't played it.
I think it's a fair point though, to imagine an a-political narrative game, because I think most if not all RPG games I can think of have some kind of political content.
Shifting the goalposts on behalf of OP, but whatever. Where are you guys coming from?
Narrative games of any scope are almost inevitably going to bump into themes like hierarchy, power dynamics and moral dilemmas. That doesn’t make them “political” in the sense that they’re directly discussing real events around you. I won’t presume anything about your personal position here, but OP gives the impression that if a fantasy game depicted a fictional race subjugated by another he would start complaining that it was woke.
If you want a story without those things you largely need to pick a different genre.
That's what I'm trying to say. I don't think such a game is feasible.
Also, in the context of this threat, saying "ooo Tetris isn't political!" is being pedantic, that's not what the person meant when they asked for an example of a non political game.
I would like to find a game free of political message,
They asked for a game free of political messages, and got several. Are you sure that's not what they meant? Does Tic Tac Toe have political messages? What about 2048?
- Doom promotes strong virilism = political.
- Tetris = promote the control of chaos (view as destructive, because too much and you lose) through psycho-rigid order.
- Need For Speed = yeah nothing political about promoting cars, except the incitation to get one.
- Wii Tennis = tries to make you forget tennis is for rich people only, by making it cute = political.
My point is everything is political, you don't have to see political standpoint in things, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.
If that’s what you meant with your original comment then I deeply regret engaging with this at all 🤣
Have a nice day.
OP is not exactly coming up with good examples, but I think the point is you can analyse anything and claim that there is some hidden political message, even if it was not intended by the developers. Even Gilgamesh, one of the oldest text ever found, has scholars discussing gender and sexuality. I don’t think Gilgamesh and Enkidus relationship was considered political at the time the story was written down, but in a new context and a new political landscape it can suddenly be political.
Oh you didn't perceive the irony, didn't you?
The article is not about how the game shouldn't be political (because this notion is absurd). It's about how idiotic the treatment of the writer's views is, to the point it feels like a parody of the statement they wanted to make.
Indeed, I still get someone giving me names of nonpolitical games.
What about pong?
Tennis again?
Joke aside, pure competitive games are indeed just pure competitive games with no context at all. But competition in itself is ideological and political (the need to make the opponent lose) so Pong is too.
It's a point of view on multiplayer gaming. In Pong there is always a loser and a winner, never two winners, never two losers (can we even make a draw in original Pong? I don't know).
Pong is also a game that opposed human versus computer, it can be view as pure skill exercise to be a 'better' human or it can be literally a fight against the machine like playing chess against a computer. Both makes me want to ask what is the point to do this ? I think answers at this questions are political indeed.
Super mario bros was clearly about promoting poligamy.
Super Mario make a twist on the trope of the knight saving the princess. The knight is just a plumber and it is said to him that the 'princess is an another castle'. But at the end the right order of the world is restaured when Mario finally frees the princess from the evil Bowser.
So from a political standpoint Super Mario is a product believing strongly in individualism and in the self made man ideology. The twist shows only that even a plumber can save the princess if he works enough = liberal capitalism making us believed that we'll be all rock stars and billionaires when we're definitively not (and yes I'm quoting fight club here). All this is the consequence of the game focussing more on gameplay than it's narration, therefore it leans towards what was the common thinking of the time.
Polygamy (relationship between Peach, Mario and Luigi, if that's what you are referring to) is much to me a side effect of the 2 players gameplay possibility, but it is still indeed pretty interesting in itself yeah.
You probably meant it as a joke, but too bad you get a real answer :)