So, I’ve been playing cyberpunk 2077 and terra Invicta recently and there’s just a couple things that consistently bug me. Now look, I’m not expecting them to be fair to China and the DPRK and Cuba and what not. If I did then I wouldn’t be able to enjoy anything ever in this world. But then there’s other things that just make me believe that Johne Locke rose from his grave to write some code for these games.
For cyberpunk 2077, it’s the police. Apparently, literally 9/10 cops you meet are “the last honest cop in Night city.” After the fifth time hearing this exact line I almost think there’s some inside joke I’m not getting. Sure youre told the ncpd is corrupt sometimes (maybe), and in their little “safe and sound” show, the ncpd says cops may ask for bribes and that you should give them bribes. But like, that’s never shown. The cops you do see are
Detective who wants to get to the bottom of hard cases the brass doesn’t want solved, and to save his nephew from a serial killer
Two police officers who are definitely good and who just want to help their friend Barry, who’s sad his turtle died and who is angry at the brass for covering things up
Cop who sacrifices his life in order to steal life saving medical equipment from arasaka, who only procures stolen cars for the corrupt brass
Cop who does what the brass tells him to do in order to protect himself and his daughter
[Edit was wrong on this one, didnt know there were different choices for this mission and that hes actually not a good cop. My bad.] Detective who hires you to steal bd scrolls so he doesn’t have to go through the trouble of getting warrants
cop who beats you for stealing a car from a corpo, but disobeys orders from said corpo and spares you from death
You get the point. It’s classic COD levels of writing for these guys. “All the problems are caused by the corrupt management and bureaucracy all the cops are really good guys at heart.” Have you ever met cops? Like sure, I’m not saying literally 100% of them are sociopathic serial killers(although i think you have to be a little fucked in the head to do what they do), but the police department doesn’t attract the type of people who want to help the community. It’s literally almost as bad (or hell, I’d say maybe worse in some respects) than literal Dick Wolfe tier cop shows. And it doesn’t help that the game is constantly telling you “man the ncpd are some bad guys. The ncpd are just another gang. The ncpd work with Tyger claws” etc. I wouldn’t be as critical if my ears weren’t hearing one thing and my eyes were seeing another. (Note:To be…too fair, there are essentially corpo cops who do actually get the treatment they deserve. People like Reed and Takemura aren’t bad people on a personal level, but they’re beholden to the interests of their capitalists and so you end up at odds with them because they do their dirty work. I don’t think theres enough questioning of Reeds “for muh country” shit, but at the very least he’s not given a free pass like the ncpd is. Same with Takemura, although it’s never really shown how bad he can be really, opposed to just not liking Yorinobu.)
Terra Invicta is comparably smaller, but I hate their democracy vs totalitarianism crap. Looking around at the starting scores it’s literally like those freedom institute maps.
Cuba, with direct democracy, free elections, accountable representatives, etc.
Grrr totalitarian nightmare
Thailand, the US, etc.
Aww, flawed democracies are still democracies
But then you look some more and it just has you asking if these people researched 5 minutes of political science before making some decisions. Like, really, south korea and Japan are “full democracies.” One is a corrupt hellhole ran by megacorps who can raid and persecute anyone deemed helping North korea, and the other literally has a system to make getting rid of their one party dominance near impossible. At least give them the flawed democracy tag if it’s so hard to understand anything else.
It’s like, I really do enjoy playing both of these games but those two things are just constantly in the back of my mind saying “these people aren’t as intelligent as you think”
I remember, knowing nothing else about the game, seeing Six Days in Fallujah and thinking “Oh? You get to play an Iraqi resistance fighter of some sort and snipe Americans? That could be interesting.”
bzzzzz Wrong!
It’s just War Crime Simulator 2023 from what I can tell. COD but without the thin veil of “this is just an entertaining story… look no further…”
I don’t know if this is the same type of thing, nor do I think it’s “socialist” to find it kinda gross to make such a game… from the perpetrator’s POV. It’s also just boring. It would’ve been some level of “brave” to make the game I thought it was at first glance.
New idea for President Xi. Pump funding into games where you fight Americans. They already made movies showing the “other side” of conflicts like on the Chinese/Korean border during the Korean War. It would be pretty fun to play as a Chinese soldier fighting to liberate Korea from the US military and fascist RoK forces. Maybe. I have conflicting ideas on the morals of making any of these games, but as long as the west pumps out propaganda supporting (or least glorifying those who did them, intentionally or not) war crimes, it seems worthwhile to pump out anti-Western viewpoints to counter it. I dunno.
It’s just so strange (well, not that strange, but, you know) how ‘neutral’ and ‘both-sidesy’ liberals are but they cannot seem to fathom the idea that America’s or Britain’s or whatever’s enemies wanted to bloody win. Talk about writing out the conflict.
The only people liberals seem really willing to ‘understand’ in entertainment media are racists and fascists—then it’s okay to humanise and imagine that not every Nazi thought exactly the same thing and maybe sometimes thought about having chicken for tea, going out for a dance, and winning the war as well as doing heinous Nazi shit. I suppose reactionaries will always look for the human in other brands of reactionary.